Ethics are essential in every decision, not because you can get in trouble legally, but because you are part of a society of people like you.
Timestamp 13:50: “If you’re a startup, and you want to get to a monopoly, start with a really small market and you take over that whole market and then you find ways to expand that market in concentric circles”
Last I checked Zuckerberg is doing precisely what Thiel taught him to and has done it with preternatural skill.
This is the standard for how you’re expected to act as a technology “leader” - which the majority of VC backed unicorn goal founders (like every FAANG founder) have been executing since day zero.
So let’s RICO them then I guess.
But once you have a monopoly, you're not allowed to do certain things like buying competitors for the purpose of crushing them.
I guess some people think all business is unethical, but for those people monopolies don't change the sign.
No, my point/thesis is that, whatever non-monopolies can be, a monopoly is de-facto unethical.
If there is a legitimate reason that there's a monopolistic control over something, it then _has to_ become a public service, in the general interest.
And there is no actual existing monopoly today that could serve as a counter-example to that thesis.
There kinda is. Capital is allocated to where it makes most profits, and most profits go to companies maximizing shareholder value. In aggregate this makes the profit maximizing companies more likely to survive.
Sure this can be perhaps mitigated by e.g. legislating other duties to companies, but I'd say it's very hard even in theory, let alone in practice, to have capitalism without lopsided profit maximization.
What _is_ good for the people? Canada?
Other Y=0 things are people giving their lives for the greater good and basic rights. Geneva convention. Rights for black people, rights for women.
Infact the world runs on Y=0 stuff.
We have worked ourselves into this frenzy over the past several hundred years, but especially over the past 25. We even describe it like you did, as an axiom or a law. But human action is people doing things, and modern economics masks unbridled greed as rules of 'science'.
It is enough to make a good living doing something worthwhile. There is no need to constantly seek highest returns. Nobility in action is possible. Capital does nothing, people do things with capital. Better choices are possible. All is not lost.
And of course, roughly 30% of all modern work-related activity is government. That part of our societal activity should be focused on creating guide rails to make sure that people do not pursue modern economic theory in the real world, but actually work to do good things.
That's a strange way to put it. As though it is the Right and Good way to run a company — and also as though the Board's/CEO's hands are somehow tied.
There's fiduciary "duty", but not law. Judge's apparently give wide berth to management to decide what, perhaps long term, is going to be profitable.
I’m not saying running a company is easy and I know that many gray areas exist in the decision making. I do think companies can exist, profit, and be a net good for the world. However, we need to remove the notion that the duty to shareholder profits is a moral duty. It’s a cowards way out of having to make actual difficult choices. It’s one of those things that sounds great exactly because it allows you do horrible things with no responsibility. It creates a system where you offload the effort and weight of your decisions. As long as you’re are acting in the interest of shareholders, you are in the clear. That’s a dangerous concept and the opposite of morality.
In a working system it should be the governments responsibility to limit what a company can do
In the first line of GP's reference in Wikipedia:
"The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits."
Disagree. Shareholders are not the all and everything of a company. Neither they, neither the company exist in a void.
> Of course, there's no reason that capitalism must to work this way, but
How is that not a contradiction with the above?
I agree with you. But what you or I think doesn't matter.
> This is how the whole system is supposed to work.
My point is that our current form of capitalism is designed to work this way, but there's no requirement that capitalism must work this way. This is just the toxic form of market economy that we ended up with.
1/ It does (because, it's false to say that "a CEO must do this or that" - or that's not a chief, a CEO, just an algorithm).
2/ it's less a matter of opinion than a matter of observing facts: shareholders are not the all and everything of a company. But my perspective may be that, being French, we have a history of having demonstrated the reality of this in actual actions, that USAmericans haven't yet.
But in fact, in USA there's even a SCOTUS ruling that says it is a bogus idea
OP doesn’t even claim this is the one true doctrine or anything of the sort.
To be fair, he is not the only one to think like that. Every "captain of industry" needs to be paranoid against competition. It is a basic survival instinct. Just look how much Steve Jobs freaked out about Android and Windows. Or how Alfred Sloan bought or merged every possible competitor. Or the history of Nabisco, the steel industry, Microsoft, AT&T, etc
But that only works if the competition can not be simply bought out which requires effective anti trust laws before they get so big that "nobody" can compete.
I firmly believe that it's better to prevent a company from growing too big than breaking it up after the fact.
Almost everybody profits from smooth and constant enforcement.
Dumping. Operating on loss for years, just burning money to capture a market and then jack up prices and make competition unfeasible.
Which is illegal in most cases when it comes to physical goods. of course it depends on the region you're in - it is extremely illegal with sky high fines in my country for example.
Having the attitude to reach that goal is fine, but the goal itself(monopoly over segment of a market) should be impossible to reach. Whenever it happens markets get distorted to the detriment of all customers.
The whole point of capitalism is to put stress onto system for self-improvement - you need to produce better good, make it more efficient and cheaper, and find perfect balance between price and performance - to run economy as efficiently as possible while basically 'crowdsourcing' resource allocation computation over every market participant.
As soon as that stress is gone, you're back to Guilds system where nothing is dictated by market forces, just at whim of current entity in power.
It was incredibly blatant and I felt sorry for the poor guy that had been running the independent business.
It isn’t just jargon. They are building castles against perceived enemies and everyone is an enemy. They are striving to be the Normans taking England, embedding themselves in every realm, region, barony, and parish, rewriting the rules in the name of progress either by woo or by force, and eliminating the natives. Up go the walls, round go the moats, and out point the guns.
The last startup I worked at was primarily concerned with loyalty above most else. Loyalty to what?
...and the teachings from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs' mentorship.
> This is the standard for how you’re expected to act as a technology “leader” - which the majority of VC backed unicorn goal founders (like every FAANG founder) have been executing since day zero.
Except knowing how to deal with the time when anti-trust regulators are knocking on your door.
The stark difference between why Microsoft isn't being broken up vs Meta Platforms.
All of this so he and his other billionaire friends can turn society into “network states” (privatized entities/corporate towns).
But this isn't a good excuse. Players gonna play - we want them to play to win as hard as they can. But when we have safety guardrails and boundaries like antitrust, they're not supposed to just break through them.
Was he 'taught' by Thiel is that a thing that happened?
I look to individuals like Bill Joy, Linus Thorvalds and Theo de Raadt. People who roll up their sleeves and build amazing things.
Parasites like Zuckerberg and Thiel can go to hell for all I care.
https://futureofcoding.org/notes/alan-kay-lunch.html
In the piece the notion that what we need to solve our problems is more people like Joy, Torvalds and de Raadt and less people like Zuckerberg, Gates, and Bezos is gently alluded to, and I think it's a powerful point.
I'd nearly go on and suggest things like Tools for Conviviality, or some Cory Doctorow stuff. But in any case it's a lovely interview, maybe it's a good enough start.
The rest have not dealt with totally removing their cases entirely, so it makes sense for the FTC and the DOJ to target everyone else first before lastly bringing up a massive case against Microsoft.
Perhaps that is their strategy in all of this.
This analogy is apt in so many ways (in addition to the prevalence of MS software in the .gov setting)
Reducing competition is one of the goals of a monopolist and anti-trust laws applies to all, no exceptions.
Don't you think there are other companies competing against Microsoft for government contracts like Amazon, Google or even Palantir that includes software?
Also, Apple isn't some "upstart" either.
Yeah, there's a very simple reason: the FAANG acronym was coined around 2013 when Microsoft was still in a rut, Ballmer was still CEO, and their stock was still down from its dot-com bubble peak.
So this is specifically a Silicon Valley / Hacker News thing (notably relevant to lifestyle and employment issues).
The rest of the world has been using GAFAM instead, even before 2013. (I've also seen "the big 5" sometimes.)
That would be great if the law was functional. US antitrust law is a low-level IQ test, whose only function is to catch the occasional stray careless CEO admitting to the crime, ignoring corporate training 101. The article puts it well:
> It's damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company intended to crush competition, […] It's a lot easier to prove what a corporation did than it is to prove why they did it.
In other words, think happy thoughts when crushing the competition. Like when Bezos was feeling charitable selling baby products at a massive loss until diapers.com was starved to death[1], and then jacking up the prices.
> At this point, Zuck's CFO – one of the adults in the room, attempting to keep the boy king from tripping over his own dick – wrote to Zuck warning him that it was illegal to buy Insta in order to "neutralize a potential competitor."
> Zuck replied that he was, indeed, solely contemplating buying Insta in order to neutralize a potential competitor. It's like this guy kept picking up his dictaphone, hitting "record," and barking, "Hey Bob, I am in receipt of your memo of the 25th, regarding the potential killing of Fred. You raise some interesting points, but I wanted to reiterate that this killing is to be a murder, and it must be as premeditated as possible. Yours very truly, Zuck."
I think he included, or linked to, enough direct quotes and references to allow him to editorialize as well, and get across his disdain (that many other share no doubt).
This is the man who coined the term "enshittification" after all.
The whole premise seems to be that writing down your thoughts, asking questions, or being transparent in internal emails is somehow a huge self-own. But that’s just how people work—especially when you’re running a massive company and making fast, complex decisions. You write things down, explore ideas, get feedback. Acting like that’s a confession is lazy analysis.
The real problem here is that the author treats normal business strategy—like acquiring a rising competitor—as some kind of criminal mastermind move. Whether or not that should be legal is one debate. But pretending it’s shocking that a company would consider eliminating competitive risk? Come on. That’s what businesses do. If you want to critique the system, critique the system—not the fact that someone used it.
Also, the smug “ha ha, he wrote it down!” attitude is incredibly counterproductive. All it does is teach executives to stop documenting anything real. It punishes transparency and rewards corporate vagueness and CYA behavior. If that’s what we want more of, congrats—we’re on track.
The piece doesn’t offer any actual insight into how companies operate or how antitrust should evolve—it just ridicules someone for not being lawyerly enough in private. That’s not analysis, it’s court fan fiction.
> Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?
"Normal CEO things" don't include committing crimes, and they are only a "huge self-own" when they document those crimes.
I'm less interested in some of the political hatchet jobs people do against his company (namely Facebook) but his product sucks and it's been unusable for years
It's really terrible to have somebody like him as the head of a powerful corporation that almost controls our minds.
I find this line of thinking disingenuous. No one is forcing anyone to participate in social media. At the same time, no one is responsible for others participating in social media. So what makes the CEO of Facebook so evil?
My theory is that he's dislikeable as a person, regardless of what his company is making money from.
I don't get this bit. That seems to be supporting exactly the opposite of the author's thesis. If the acquisition had existed only for "neutralizing a competitor", they would have continued work on their existing products in this space, no? Canceling their existing product and keeping the acquisition is more in line with them realizing Instagram was a service they couldn't hope to catch up with. It'd also be consistent with them wanting to carve out a larger niche for Instagram, by reducing the overlap between the two on Facebook's side.
>they appear to be reaching critical mass as a place you go to share photos
>[Instagram could] copy what we’re doing now … I view this as a big strategic risk for us if we don’t completely own the photos space.
In a way, this is effectively saying that Instagram could itself become a monopoly (or put differently, come to monopolize). Right? Isn't that what Meta fears?
It makes me wonder if, at least in the case of social networks, there's a natural tendency toward monopolization. In other words, is there not LESS utility to the consumer if we have a bunch of small, competitive social networks duking it out?
I'm not here to excuse Meta and certainly this is the case for federation. I guess I'm left wondering, what exactly was Meta supposed to do?
Likewise, platforms are evil, and social network platforms in particular probably shouldn't be allowed to exist. Protocols don't have this fragmentation issue that I guess you are aiming at but never stating directly.
Facebook shouldn't have engaged in anticompetitive practices.
Zuck replied that he was, indeed, solely contemplating buying Insta in order to neutralize a potential competitor. It's like this guy kept picking up his dictaphone, hitting "record," and barking, "Hey Bob, I am in receipt of your memo of the 25th, regarding the potential killing of Fred. You raise some interesting points, but I wanted to reiterate that this killing is to be a murder, and it must be as premeditated as possible. Yours very truly, Zuck...."
Any similarity with other "tech CEOs" seems inculpatory more than exculpatory.
fifticon•9mo ago
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diego_moita•9mo ago
Famously, when Zucka was desperate to enter the China market he met with Xi Jiping at a dinner and asked him to chose a name for his child. In Chinese tradition that is a great honor reserved only for grandparents.
Xi famously declined and Facebook never set foot in China.
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