An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination [calibre 4.99.5]

The conference room where the M-Team met that July 2018 morning was called “the Son of Ping and Pong,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to a conference room in the original office that was located near the Ping-Pong tables. The group, which comprised more than twenty top executives and managers, strained to appear upbeat. They had endured eighteen months of one bad news cycle after another. They had been forced to defend Facebook to their friends, family, and angry employees. Most of them had had little to do with the controversies over election disinformation and Cambridge Analytica, and several of them were struggling with their private frustrations with Zuckerberg and Sandberg.

Held two or three times a year, M-Team gatherings were times of bonding. Zuckerberg would kick things off with a boozy dinner catered by one of his favorite Palo Alto restaurants. At the daytime sessions, executives gave exuberant presentations, with charts showing hockey stick growth in revenue and users. They showcased audacious plans for products in artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, and blockchain currency. The group hashed out the biggest problems facing Facebook and discussed ways to beat back competition.

The forty or so executives had gotten to know one another well over the years, working through Facebook’s painful transition to mobile, its rocky IPO, and its race for the first billion and then the second billion users. They often veered off the topic of business to share stories of marriage, divorce, new babies, or unexpected deaths in the family. Zuckerberg would cap off the two-day meeting with a rallying motivational speech before sending them back to lead their fiefdoms of engineering, sales, products, advertising, policy, and communications.

Zuckerberg held court, as always, at the center seat of a large U-shaped table. Boz gave a rousing presentation on plans for a video-calling device called “Portal,” Facebook’s attempt to compete with home devices like Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home Hub. Another executive presented an update for Oculus, the company’s VR headset. Zuckerberg’s face brightened. The product unveilings were his favorite part of the M-Team meetings. They showed that rather than resting on his laurels, Zuckerberg was still pushing his company to innovate.

Sandberg spoke next. The company was getting back on track, she told the group. The scandals of the past year were behind them; Zuckerberg’s performance at the congressional hearings had been a triumph. She reminded everyone of the company’s mission statement, which Facebook had officially debuted the previous year: “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”1

“We’re putting the wheels back on the bus,” she concluded.

But the moment of optimism was fleeting. During their presentations, several executives expressed concern for employees. Internal surveys showed that workers felt demoralized by Facebook’s role in election interference and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Turnover was high, and recruiters struggled to attract new engineers. Recent college graduates said the idea of working at Facebook, once the hottest place to work in Silicon Valley, had lost its appeal. In the intense competition for engineering talent, employee satisfaction was a priority.

Zuckerberg listened to his deputies with his famously unnerving stare. In one-on-one conversations, he could hold an unwavering gaze for minutes. This created painful stretches of dead air. Longtime executives charitably described the quirk as Zuckerberg’s mind consuming and processing information like a computer.

When his turn came, Zuckerberg drew a long pause. Then, in a surprising change of topic, he began to talk about his philosophy of leadership. Facebook had evolved, he said. It was now a sprawling enterprise with more than thirty-five thousand employees, seventy offices in thirty-five countries, more than a dozen products, and fifteen multibillion-dollar data centers around the world. Up until this point, the social network had faced obstacles with competition but had enjoyed a clear runway of growth and goodwill from the public, buoyed by the techno-optimism of the past two decades. But that period was over. Consumers, lawmakers, and public advocates had turned on Facebook, blaming it for addicting society to their smartphones and for poisoning public discourse. The business had become the poster child for irresponsible, at-all-costs growth. It faced multiple investigations by regulators around the world. Shareholders, users, and consumer activists were pursuing lawsuits in court. “Up until now, I’ve been a peacetime leader,” Zuckerberg declared. “That’s going to change.”