Was Zuckerberg really “grilled?”
Most of us by now have been following or at least know that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg faced off against Congress this week in the country’s capital regarding news that political firm Cambridge Analytica obtained account information of around 87 million users, including the founder himself. While many report his “grilling” and updates about the ten-hour questioning as if Zuckerberg was under a hammer the whole time, I find the assessment inaccurate and misrepresentative. If anything, I gained two points after simply watching highlights and parts of his questioning: many congressmen and women appear to not really know what Facebook is or how it works and Zuckerberg’s poise helped him stay in control.
Personally, I found a number of questions to be quite embarrassing for lawmakers. One Senator asked the founder how he operates with “a business model in which users don’t pay for [his] service,” clearly uninformed about Facebook’s advertisement model. Though most questions throughout the three-day period focused on what the social media giant is and isn’t, questions about the business model, including another about whether or not Zuckerberg was willing to change the model for user safety, in my opinion, showed a clear misinforming or lack of knowledge by the lawmakers.
Since the interrogation, Facebook’s stocks have risen almost 5% in the past three days resulting in a $21 billion increase in market value. This pushes the platform’s value ever closer to half a trillion dollars and the founder’s net worth upwards of $3 billion since the beginning of the week.
I believe that according to the numbers, clearly many thought Zuckerberg performed better than expected and faced off well against the country’s most powerful politicians. I think the man in charge of arguably the most influential platform in the world next to Google, and certainly, the largest news distributor, was the one in charge this week.
Alexander Mo
EEVM | IQ Associate
