Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to be losing control of the company behind the scenes, as leaked footage of a company meeting obtained by 404 Media appears to show him complaining — about leaks.
This comes as Zuckerberg has drawn heavy fire for his increasingly stark attempts to ingratiate himself to the Trump administration, from replacing Facebook's fact-checking system to arranging a $25 million settlement for a frivolous lawsuit Trump filed for Facebook suspending his accounts after the Jan. 6 attack — all of which appears calculated to get out from under years of antitrust investigation.
The meeting began with Zuckerberg explaining why he would not follow the company's usual practice of polling employees to decide what questions he would have to answer.
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“I want to be able to be able to talk about stuff openly, but I am also trying to like, well, we’re trying to build stuff and create value in the world, not destroy value by talking about stuff that inevitably leaks,” said Zuckerberg. “There are a bunch of things that I think are value-destroying for me to talk about, so I’m not going to talk about those. But I think it’ll be good. You all can give us feedback later. Maybe it’s just the nature of running a company at scale, but it’s a little bit of a bummer.”
During the meeting, the report continued, Zuckerberg "repeated many things he has said publicly, such as the possibility of replacing software engineers with AI, the fact that he thinks open source AI will soon overtake closed-source AI, and the fact that he believes the company can now work more easily with the Trump administration that he has changed his platforms to align with."
According to The New York Times' Sheera Frankel, as all this is happening, Meta "is renewing its threats against employees, telling them today that they will hunt for leakers and tolerate zero leaks."
"Want to know how that is going?" she added. "Three Meta employees who I’ve never spoken to before just cold messaged/emailed me offering me to be sources."
