In what is looking to be a pivotal occurrence for the oversight of companies in our digital time, the umbrella company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Meta Platforms, this week stepped into a Washington, D.C. courtroom to respond to antitrust charges leveled against it by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC alleges that, far from being the forward-looking, innovative company it likes to portray itself as, Meta is a digital-age monopolist and has become so, in part, by buying up companies that might otherwise have posed serious competition to it.
Meta has faced no more serious legal challenge in its nearly two-decade history than the trial that commenced on April 14. Should the case brought by the Federal Trade Commission and its lawyers prove successful, it could compel Meta to divest two of its most significant recent acquisitions, Assets that have been crucial to its current business model.
FTC’s Core Argument: Innovation or Elimination?
At the start of the arguments, the FTC claimed that when Meta acquired other companies, it was not really trying to grow but was instead trying to kill off the threats that these companies posed to it. The FTC’s lead attorney, Daniel Matheson, told the judge that the question of whether or not Meta is innovative is not at issue here. What is at issue, according to Matheson and the FTC, is the apparently preferred path of acquiring innovation instead of competing and how that has allowed Meta to create and maintain its dominant position in the space where people socialize with each other using digital tools.
The government’s aim is not just to disassemble the company’s assets but to reach far beyond that to demand much more transparency and a far deeper level of oversight for Meta’s future purchases.
Meta’s Defense: Growth and Free Access
Meta’s legal team, helmed by attorney Mark Hansen, countered the monopoly claims, noting that both Instagram and WhatsApp have blossomed under Meta’s aegis. They argued that the FTC’s case lacks a legitimate basis, underscoring that the two services are free and continue to enhance their offerings. Hansen went further, stressing that the no-fee model in the context of the alleged monopoly is significant, and that using their impressive scale to enhance and spread the two platforms is, too.
According to Meta, its business model encourages innovation and does not suppress it. The company’s acquisitions, it argues, were in line with standard practice in the tech industry, and were part of a strategy that, too, is an industry standard: to integrate acquired companies into the larger business.
A Trial That Could Reshape Tech Regulation
The trial, expected to last several weeks, is under the direction of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg and features some high-profile testimony, including that of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg; former COO Sheryl Sandberg; and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom. This legal face-off is fueled by a lawsuit the FTC first lodged against Facebook in 2020, which got a new lease on life after the agency jury-rigged a couple of its own internal complaints to make them look more complaint-like.
The way this case turns out could change how U.S. authorities go after Big Tech for mergers. It could change the way they see those mergers in terms of antitrust laws. If the authorities view the mergers more aggressively than they have in the past, it could force Big Tech to operate more in line with those laws. This could set a new standard for antitrust enforcement.
According to an internal document obtained by a renowned media outlet, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, intends to fire some 3,600 workers who have been deemed low performers. The decision, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is an attempt to “raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster” as the business continues to develop immersive products and AI-powered services.
About 5% of Meta’s staff, which stood at 72,400 as of September, will be affected by the layoffs. According to an international news outlet, U.S. employees should receive status updates by February 10; notices for other countries will follow. Zuckerberg stated, “Meta wants to make sure that it has the best people on its team because this is going to be an intense year.”
Meta recently abandoned its US fact-checking program in favour of a brand-new community notes initiative. Similar to X’s community notes, this community-driven system seeks to enable users to report posts that may be deceptive and offer context by incorporating a range of viewpoints.
The Roadmap of Future Operations
Later this year, Meta also intends to bring on new personnel to fill the positions of exiting staff members, who Zuckerberg claims would receive “generous” severance money. Zuckerberg also mentioned that if there is hope for their future contributions, a small number of workers who did poorly in the previous era can be kept on board. Zuckerberg revealed on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience that Meta and other top tech companies are developing AI systems to tackle complicated coding chores that are typically performed by human programmers. He also mentioned ambitions to use artificial intelligence (AI) to replace mid-level software engineers by 2025 during the conversation.
Other Giants Joining the Job Cut Game
Meta is not alone, though, in indicating that AI developments are driving firm reorganisation. As part of a larger trend in the tech sector, industry heavyweights like Microsoft and Salesforce have also revealed plans to reduce their workforces. In a 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbing, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff disclosed that the SaaS giant’s 2025 business plan calls for a significant cutback in the hiring of software engineers for the upcoming year. Agentforce, the company’s proprietary AI platform, is anticipated to encourage a 30% adoption rate among engineering teams.
“We no longer need additional software engineers because our engineering productivity has grown by 30%,” Benioff said. He asserted that AI had radically altered the way brand operate. Benioff stated that Salesforce will now concentrate on growing its sales team by 1,000 to 2,000 individuals, even if the business intends to eliminate its support engineering positions. Benioff emphasised that Salesforce closed 200 sales in five days during the October-ending quarter after the debut of Agentforce. This quarter, the company now wants to close thousands of Agentforce sales.
On Tuesday, Meta Platforms (META.O) unveiled the most recent version of its Llama 3 AI models, which are primarily available for free. These models compete with paid models from competitors like OpenAI and offer superior multilingual skills and general performance metrics.
Announcing the release of the new Llama 3 model, the parent company of Facebook stated in blog posts and a research study that it can talk in eight languages, produce higher-quality computer code, and solve more complicated math problems than earlier versions.
Although it is still smaller than top models supplied by competitors, this new version outshines the previous one with 405 billion parameters, or variables, that the algorithm considers to produce answers to user questions.
During his extensive promotion of Llama 3, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated he expects that the future Llama models will surpass proprietary competition by the end of next year. He claimed that hundreds of millions of people were already using the Meta AI chatbot, which was driven by those models, and that it was on course to become the most popular AI assistant by the end of the year.
Competition Is Getting Stiffer
The release aligns with the ongoing competition among technology companies to demonstrate that their expanding portfolios of resource-intensive large language models can generate substantial improvements in well-established problem areas, such as advanced reasoning, to justify the substantial investments they have made in them.
According to Meta’s leading AI scientist, these models will eventually run into reasoning limitations, necessitating the development of new AI systems.
Amazon is reportedly working on a model with two trillion parameters, whereas OpenAI’s GPT-4 model reportedly has one trillion.
Meta announced that it is updating its flagship 405 billion parameter model as well as its 8 billion and 70 billion parameter Llama 3 models, which debuted in the spring but are reduced in weight, with new versions coming out soon.
Meta has announced that it will be releasing revised versions of its flagship 405 billion parameter model, as well as its 8 billion and 70 billion parameter Llama 3 models, which debuted in the spring. The models are lighter in weight.
With an expanded “context window,” the three new models can handle larger user requests and are multilingual.
Benefits Llama offers to its users
Meta makes its Llama models available to developers for little or no cost, an approach that Zuckerberg claims will lead to better products, less reliance on potential rivals, and higher engagement with the company’s primary social networks.
If developers choose the company’s free models over its paid ones, it would hurt its competitors’ business models and benefit the company too. Meta highlighted potential improvements in important mathematics and knowledge exams in its announcement, which may increase the attraction of that possibility.
The saying “Winners never quit, and quitters never win” is true, but it seems ironic in the case of entrepreneurs who have quit their academics to pursue their goals instead. Guess what, though? They have accomplished much more than getting good grades from school or university.
People continue to question the decisions that were made by dropouts, asking, “Will they thrive as successful contributors to society?” But trust me when I say that going from being a dropout student with nothing in their pocket to becoming one of the most successful millionaire entrepreneurs in the world has greatly increased respect for determination and commitment to one’s aims.
Dropping out of school or college is considered one of the biggest mistakes in one’s life. However, there are certain people who have proved this notion wrong by turning this mistake into huge achievements. The following is a list of the biggest entrepreneurs in the world, who dropped out of their education in the middle.
Bill Gates
Name
Bill Gates
Net Worth
$114 Billion (2022)
Source
Microsoft Corporation
Dropout From
Harvard University
Bill Gates
Bill Gates is known to be the inventor of the college-dropout billionaire trope in 1975 when he left Harvard to start his career in establishing Microsoft. At the age of 13, he wrote his first software program to get admission to a private Lakeside school, which revealed his affinity for programming.
Whilst at Lakeside school, Gates earned the title of National Merit Scholar, in which he scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT. To support his father’s dream of making him becoming a lawyer, he enrolled at Harvard as a pre-law student in 1973, and aced mathematics and computer science courses.
After dropping out of Harvard, in 1975 Gates founded ‘Microsoft’ with his friend Paul, and produced the first-of-its-kind programming language BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800 ‘Microcomputer,’ an early personal computer. He had chosen the path, which he is good at, not the path his parents wanted him to choose.
Mark Zuckerberg
Name
Mark Zuckerberg
Net Worth
$70 Billion (2022)
Source
Meta (formerly Facebook)
Dropout From
Harvard University
Mark Zuckerberg
One of the famous media magnates is the CEO of Meta Platforms- Mark Zuckerberg. He attended his schooling at Ardsley High school before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy. He started using computer and software programming in middle school, where he built a program that connected wireless communication between his and his father’s dental office.
In 2002, Mark got into Harvard to study Psychology and Computer Science and was already known as a ‘programming prodigy’. At that time, Mark came up with a new code for his new website- Facebook, however, faced a lot of problems in establishing it, so he decided to quit Harvard in 2005 to focus on building his dream, Facebook.
Henry Ford
Name
Henry Ford
Net Worth
$190 billion, (1947, adjusted for inflation)
Source
Ford Motor Company
Dropout From
High School
Henry Ford
The automobile ruler created a revolutionary movement in transportation and the automobile industry. Ford completed his eighth grade at a one-room school and instead of attending sophomore, he enrolled in a bookkeeping course at a commercial school.
Contradictory, Ford was much more interested in building something big than sitting at a desk & bookkeeping. When he was 12 years old, that was the first time he found a purpose in his life when he witnessed the operation of a Nichols and Shepard road engine from a watch gifted by his father. In 1882 Ford returned to his family farm after working as an apprentice machinist in Detroit.
While he was working on the family farm, he became adept at operating the Westinghouse portable steam engine, whereby he completed his first gasoline car powered by a two-cylinder, four-horsepower engine and eventually built three cars in his home workshops, which was a stepping stone to the development of the renowned brand ‘Ford’.
Steve Jobs, the innovation king, was also once a problematic child during his school times, where he played a lot of pranks on teachers and never showed a slight interest in studies.
He even skipped 5th Grade and transferred straight into 6th grade at Crittenden Middle school, where he became a victim of the bully. In fact, his family moved to Los Altos and joined Homestead High school for a better life, which was surrounded by an environment of engineering families.
In 1971, Steve Jobs decided to join the electronics club with his best friend Wozniak, who got into the University of California, Berkeley. At that time, Wozniak designed a low-cost digital ‘blue box’ to manipulate the telephone network, by allowing free long-distance calls.
In 1971, Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College after the very first semester, because he didn’t want to waste his parent’s money on an education that seemed meaningless to him and worked as a technician at Atari, Inc. in 1972. In 1976, Jobs, and fellow college dropout Steve Wozniak, built the Apple I in his parent’s garage.
Larry Ellison
Name
Larry Ellison
Net Worth
$91 Billion (2022)
Source
Oracle Corporation
Dropout From
University of Chicago
Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison was once a dropout student, but now he was listed as one of the wealthiest people on the planet by Bloomberg Billionaires Index in July 2022. Larry Ellison attended South Shore High school and later enrolled as a pre-med student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
At the University, he was rewarded and named ‘Science student of the year. Unexpectedly, he hadn’t appeared for his final exams as his adoptive mother passed away. In 1966, he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he learned computer design and technology, and later dropped out of it.
Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, found himself attracted to computers when he was 6 years old and even became the first kid in the rudimentary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor.
At the age of 12, he wanted to start a company by inventing new things and eventually developed an interest in technology and business. Larry Page was a radiant student in schooling as well as an undergrad. He did his schooling at Montessori Radmoor and East Lansing High School.
Page received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science from Stanford both in the field of computer science. After joining his: Ph.D. and he started his research in Computer Science at Stanford University and pursued his full-time interest in building the World Wide Web. However, in 1999 Larry couldn’t complete his Ph.D. degree and dropped out of college to focus more on his main aim.
Jan Koum
Name
Jan Koum
Net Worth
$13.3 Billion (2022)
Source
WhatsApp
Dropout From
San Jose University
Jan Koum
The co-founder of Whatsapp Jan Koum enrolled at San Jose State University because he was interested to learn to program. At the same time, he worked at Ernst & Young as a security tester. In 1997, He left his studies mid-way, because he was hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer.
Evan Williams
Name
Evan Williams
Net Worth
$1.8 Billion (2022)
Source
Twitter
Dropout From
University of Nebraska
Evan Williams
In Clarks, Nebraska, Evan Williams was raised on family property. Before quitting, he spent three semesters enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Williams worked as a contractor writing software for Hewlett-Packard and Intel and then also secured a position at Google. Later, he left his position at Google to start his entrepreneurial journey of establishing Twitter.
Jack Dorsey
Name
Jack Dorsey
Net Worth
$4.2 Billion (2022)
Source
Twitter
Dropout From
New York University
Jack Dorsey
A 1999 New York University dropout is the co-founder of Twitter and Square, two of the most talked-about firms in recent memory. Jack founded Twitter along with Ev Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass after briefly working as a masseur and a fashion designer. At this time, Dorsey is valued around $5.6 billion.
The above graph shows the percentage of Forbes Billionaires by their educational institute type. The graph is made as per the data shared by entrepreneur.com and the study conducted by Wai & Rindermann.
Amancio Ortega
Name
Amancio Ortega
Net Worth
$61.6 Billion (2022)
Source
Inditex
Dropout From
School
Amancio Ortega
Amancio Ortega, dropped out of school at the age of 14, because his father was a railway worker and couldn’t afford much to pay. So, Amancio Ortega joined a local shirtmaker named ‘Gala’, which actually taught him how to make clothes by hand and inspired him to build one of the largest clothing retailer companies, Inditex, known for its chain of Zara and Bershka.
Orji Uzor Kalu was 19 years old when he was dismissed from the Nigerian university after being found instigating a series of student riots. In order to start trading goods like rice, sugar, and palm oil, he requested $35 from his mother.
By diversifying his investments, he became a millionaire by the age of 20. He was ranked by Forbes as the 49th richest person in Africa in 2015. He originally established SLOK Holding, a West African company with profit shareholding in shipping, banking, manufacturing, etc.
Michael Dell
Name
Michael Dell
Net Worth
$56.1 Billion (2022)
Source
Dell Technologies
Dropout From
University of Texas
Michael Dell
In 1983, Michael Dell was a student at the University of Texas, although he occupied much of his energy in his college dorm room updating and hawking devices. Dell founded PCs Ltd. at the age of 19, which eventually grew into Dell Computer Corporation in 1987.
He then obtained a license from the State of Texas to submit bids for big contracts after starting to sell upgrade modules for personal computers from his hostel. At the age of 27, Michael Dell was the youngest CEO on the Fortune 500 list. He currently has a net worth of almost $20 billion.
John Mackey
Name
John Mackey
Net Worth
$85 Million (2022)
Source
Whole Foods Market
Dropout From
Texas University
John Mackey
John Mackey studied Philosophy and Theology at Texas University, Austin in 1978. Renee Lawson Hardy and he first met when he enrolled in a vegetarian co-op at the university.
The couple dropped out of school and founded SaferWay, the first vegetarian supermarket in Austin. It ultimately paved the way for Whole Foods, the 30th leading retailer in the United States measured by revenues in 2014.
Azim Premji is another biggest entrepreneurs on the list of dropout entrepreneurs. is the son of a very famous businessman, who is also known as the Rice king of Burma, Mohamed Hashem Premji. Azim had to drop out of his education at Stanford because he had to take care of his family’s oil business after his father’s sudden demise.
Subsequently, Azim Premji became solely responsible to look after his father’s business in India. He completed his studies to get a Bachelor of science in electronic engineering degree from Stanford University after 30 years.
Kunal Shah
Name
Kunal Shah
Source
CRED
Net Worth
$809 Million (2022)
Dropout From
Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies
Kunal Shah
Kunal Shah graduated from Wilson College with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. He then enrolled at the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies for an MBA degree, which he ultimately left. His initial business was PaisaBack, which provided kickbacks from merchants. Among many of the top college dropout Indian entrepreneurs, Kunal Shah is one of the most well-known names.
He is a founding member of FreeCharge, a reputable internet recharge service. 2012 saw the launch of the business, which Snapdeal soon bought. With its first three recharges and matching-value incentives, FreeCharge completely changed the way that internet recharges work. He is currently known best for being the founder of one of India’s unicorn startups CRED.
Ritesh Agarwal
Name
Ritesh Agarwal
Net Worth
$1.1 Billion (2020)
Source
OYO Rooms
Dropout From
Indian School of Business & Finance, New Delhi
Ritesh Agarwal
One of the youngest Indian Billionaires, Ritesh Agarwal, the founder of OYO Rooms. He was from a middle-class family. He completed his higher schooling at St. John’s Senior Secondary School and moved to New Delhi for college in 2011.
But, shortly, he quit as his project idea of Oravel stays Pvt Ltd was selected by the Thiel Fellowship program in 2013, which granted 100,000 USD, with which he launched OYO rooms.
These are some of the most successful entrepreneurs who have found greatness despite not having the appropriate education. They serve as the best illustration that what you study doesn’t define you. It is your hard work and determination and passion that speaks for you.
FAQs
Who is the most successful dropout?
Bill Gates is the most successful dropout in terms of net worth. He possesses a net worth of $110.5 billion as of July 2022.
How many billionaires have no college degree?
As per the billionaire census by Wealth X (2015), about 3 out of the 10 billionaires have no proper college degree. Some of the most popular names who became successful without a proper college degree include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Amancio Ortega, and more.
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, may have made his money through social media and new technology. However, he still recognises the benefits that a good book can offer. As he set out on a goal to read two books a month for a year in 2015, he posted on Facebook, “I’ve found reading books quite intellectually gratifying. They offer an “engaging” experience”, he claims.
As a CEO of a significant technological business, Mark Zuckerberg did something uncommon in 2015, that is, he created a reading club!
About one book every two weeks, Zuckerberg recommended and discussed a few books with the club over that year. It was a fantastic collection of books, 15 of which are talked about in this article.
Therefore, we’ve put together a list of 15 books Mark Zuckerberg has read himself and would suggest to others to uncover what motivated one of the world’s wealthiest individuals to the height of financial achievement.
Author: Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace Goodreads Rating: 4.21
Creativity Inc. – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
The first ever all-access look inside Pixar Animation’s brain, Creativity, Inc. is a guide for anybody who aspires to create and takes readers into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the greatest movies ever produced were created. It is primarily a book on creativity, but it is also an expression of the ideals that will make the best in us attainable.
With such beloved movies as the Toy Story trilogy, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, WALL-E, and Inside Out, which went on to break box office records and win thirty Academy Awards, Pixar has dominated the animation industry for almost twenty years. In some respects, Pixar films serve as a case study for what true creativity looks like thanks to the joy with which they deliver their stories, their clever plotlines, and their emotional realism. Catmull discusses the principles and methods used by Pixar to achieve its success and widespread acclaim in this book.
Ed Catmull had an ambition when he was a young man: he wanted to create the first computer-animated film. He cultivated that goal while pursuing his doctorate at the University of Utah, where many pioneers of computer science began, and then formed a connection with George Lucas that, inadvertently, led to his co-founding Pixar in 1986. Toy Story was released nine years later, profoundly altering the animation industry. The unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues at Pixar created, based on leadership and management philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, was a crucial component in that film’s success—and in the thirteen films that followed. Examples of these philosophies include:
If you give a terrific concept to a subpar team, they will ruin it. A great team, however, will either improve a terrible concept or come up with a superior one if you give it to them.
You won’t be well-equipped to lead if you don’t make an effort to discover the unknown and comprehend its nature.
Preventing hazards is not the manager’s responsibility. It is the manager’s responsibility to ensure that others can take them safely.
The price of avoiding errors is frequently far higher than the price of correcting them.
The organisational structure of a corporation shouldn’t be reflected in its communication structure. Everyone ought to be able to communicate with anyone.
Sapiens
Author: Yuval Noah Harari Goodreads Rating: 4.38
Sapiens – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
A minimum of 6 distinct human species were present on Earth 100,000 years ago. Currently, there is only one, Us, humanity.
How did our species win the race for dominance? Why did our wandering nomads establish communities and empires? Why did we develop a belief in gods, nations, and civil rights, trust finance, books, and legislation; and be subject to bureaucracies, schedules, and consumer culture? What changes will our world experience in the coming aeons?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari explores every aspect of human history, from the planet’s earliest hominids through the groundbreaking – and frequently game-changing – intellectual, industrial, and cognitive discoveries.
He looks at how historical trends have shaped human civilizations, the creatures and plants that live nearby, and even our own mindsets. He makes use of ideas from palaeontology, anthropology, biology, and commerce. Have we been joyful as a result of history? Can we ever free ourselves from the influences of our ancestors? What can we do, if anything, to influence how the centuries will develop?
Sapiens challenge everything of our preconceived notions about what it means to be a person, including our ideas, actions, authority, and future. It is powerful, all-encompassing, and debatable.
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
Author: Matt Ridley Goodreads Rating: 3.98
The Rational Optimist – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
The quality of life is improving quickly. Globally, the availability of food, money, and life expectancy are all increasing, while sickness, infant mortality, and violence are all down. Even though the world is far from ideal, both essentials and pleasures are becoming more affordable, population growth is moderating, Africa is following Asia out of poverty, and the Internet, cell phones, and container shipping are enhancing people’s lives like never before. The critics who predominate in public debate maintain that we are rapidly approaching a tipping point and that things will begin to deteriorate. However, this has been the case for 200 years.
However, Matt Ridley goes beyond merely outlining the improvements. He justifies it. Everyone working for everyone else leads to prosperity. The practice of trade and specialisation, which dates back more than 100,000 years, has produced a collective intelligence that drives an upward trend in human living standards. Instead of leading to despair, the resulting mutual dependency, trust, and sharing inspire optimism.
From the Stone Age to the Internet, from the decline of the Ming dynasty to the development of the steam engine, from the population boom to the anticipated effects of climate change, this audacious book covers the entirety of human history.
The book concludes with the bold claim that, despite inevitable setbacks along the road and despite humanity’s limitless ability for inventive change, the twenty-first century will see an increase in both human wealth and natural biodiversity. The Rational Optimist will improve your way of thinking about the world since it is acute, invigorating, and revelatory.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Author: Thomas S. Kuhn Goodreads Rating: 4.03
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
A great book actually becomes ingrained in our daily consciousness, permeating our thought processes to the point that we take it for granted and forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were and still are. A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness. Such a book is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It was a significant turning point in the history and philosophy of science when it was originally published in 1962. It still has a lot to teach 60 years later.
With The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn questioned long-held linear ideas of scientific progress. He claimed that revolutionary ideas don’t emerge from the routine, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation, but rather that the revolutions in science—those breakthrough moments that challenge conventional wisdom and offer unexpected ideas occur outside of what he called “normal science.” Even though Kuhn wrote during the era of physics dominance in the sciences, his theories on how scientific revolutions provide order to the anomalies that accumulate over time in research trials are still helpful in the biotech era.
An illuminating introduction by Ian Hacking, which defines words Kuhn popularised, such as paradigm and incommensurability, and relates Kuhn’s theories to contemporary science, is included in this new edition of Kuhn’s seminal book in the history of science. Hacking’s introduction, which is helpfully tied to the various sections of the book, gives significant prior knowledge and a contemporary perspective. This version, which has been newly created and has an extended index, will be eagerly awaited by readers in the following generation who want to comprehend the development of our viewpoints on science.
Why Nations Fail
Author: Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson Goodreads Rating: 4.08
Why Nations Fail – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
Why Nations Fail is a brilliant and readable solution to the age-old puzzle of why some countries are wealthy while others are impoverished, split by riches and poor, health and sickness, food and starvation.
Is it geography, climate, or both? Maybe a lack of knowledge about what the best practices are?
Just no. None of these variables is fixed or predetermined. If so, how can it be explained that while other African countries like the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe are wracked by poverty and conflict, Botswana has had among of the world’s highest growth rates?
Acemoglu and Robinson construct a new political economic theory with immense significance for the major issues of today based on fifteen years of original research and extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, mediaeval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa.
Your perspective on and comprehension of the world will alter after reading Why Nations Fail.
The End Of Power
Author: Moisés Naím Goodreads Rating: 3.63
The End of Power – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
We are aware that power is transferring from the West to the East and from the North to the South, from presidential mansions to public squares, from agile startups to once-dominant corporate behemoths, and slowly but surely, from males to women. However, power is not only distributed and shifted. It’s decomposing as well. The ability of those in power now is more limited, and they are more vulnerable to losing it than before.
Award-winning journalist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Nam shed light on the conflict between once dominating mega players and the emerging micro powers confronting them in all spheres of human endeavour in his book The End of Power. Nam demonstrates how the anti-establishment zeal of micro powers may topple rulers, overthrow monopolies, and create amazing new opportunities, but it can also result in chaos and paralysis by drawing on startling, innovative research. The tectonic changes happening in business, religion, education, among families, and in all war and peace-related issues are expertly covered by Nam.
Those in authority maintain it by creating strong barriers to keep potential rivals at bay. Today’s insurgency forces take down such barriers more swiftly and easily than ever, only to discover that doing so leaves them open to attack. Nam provides a groundbreaking look at the impending end of power—and how it will alter your world—in an approachable and engrossing way.
The New Jim Crow
Author: Michelle Alexander Goodreads Rating: 4.52
The New Jim Crow – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
The majority of young black males in major American cities are either in prison or have been given criminal status for life while the country celebrates the “triumph over race” with Barack Obama’s victory. Despite the repeal of Jim Crow legislation, a startling portion of the African American community still lives in a position of inferiority, much like their ancestors did.
Michelle Alexander, a former litigator who is now a legal professor, makes the daring claim that racial caste in America has not been abolished but has instead been reconstructed in her sharp analysis. Alexander demonstrates how, although ostensibly adhering to the idea of colour blindness, the U.S. criminal justice system operates as a modern system of racial domination by focusing on black males and destroying communities of colour. The civil rights community, as well as all of us, are challenged by The New Jim Crow to put mass imprisonment at the forefront of a new campaign for racial justice in America.
The genome has been mapped. What does that signify, though? The book that explains everything, including what it is, how it operates, and what it means for the future, is called Genome by Matt Ridley.
The mapping of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome, arguably the most important scientific discovery of the twenty-first century, poses almost as many questions as it does answers. Questions will have a significant influence on how we see illness, ageing, and free choice. The remainder of your life will be impacted by these questions.
The book, Genome, provides exceptional insight into the implications of this amazing discovery. In his book, Matt Ridley tells the history of our species and its forebears from the beginning of existence to the frontier of future medicine by choosing one newly found gene from each pair of chromosomes and recounting its tale. Ridley explores the scientific, philosophical, and ethical challenges raised by the mapping of the human genome, covering everything from cancer to Huntington’s illness and from gene therapy’s uses to the horrors of eugenics. It will assist you in comprehending the implications of this scientific breakthrough for you, your children, and all of humanity.
Portfolios of the Poor
Author: Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, Orlanda Ruthven Goodreads Rating: 3.95
Portfolios of the Poor – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
Nearly 40% of the world’s population subsists on less than $2 per day on average. It is difficult to imagine if you have never had to make ends meet on a salary this low. How would you afford to feed your family, buy a house, and send your kids to school? How would you manage old age and emergencies? Over a billion people must respond to these questions every day across the whole planet. The first book to methodically show how the poor find answers to their regular financial issues is Portfolios of the Poor.
In Bangladesh, India, and South Africa, the authors conducted year-long interviews with poor peasants and slum residents to compile records that show penny-by-penny how particular households handle their finances. These families’ tales are frequently unexpected and motivating. The majority of impoverished households do not live in poverty, instead using their income to make ends meet. Instead, they use financial instruments, many of which are connected to unofficial networks and familial relationships. They encourage people to save money for reserves, extract cash from debtors when they can, operate complex savings clubs, and take advantage of microloans when they can. Their experiences provide new insights into how to combat poverty and how to imagine the “bottom billion” generation of banks.
Portfolios of the Poor is essential reading for anybody interested in development studies, economics, or microfinance as well as anyone who wants to learn more about poverty and what can be done to combat it.
Dealing With China
Author: Henry M. Paulson Goodreads Rating: 3.76
Dealing With China – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
The book Dealing With China takes the reader inside closed doors to see how China’s state-controlled capitalism was created and developed.
Dealing With China is destined to become the standard and ultimate analysis of dealing with an economic superpower. It is written in the same anecdote-rich, page-turning manner as Paulson’s popular book, On the Brink.
No other foreigner has dealt with China as Hank Paulson has. Paulson played a crucial part in China’s opening to the private industry while serving as the CEO of Goldman Sachs. After that, he established the Strategic Economic Dialogue with the current second-largest economy in the world while serving as Treasury secretary. He protected the fragile American financial system while negotiating economic changes with China. Paulson has collaborated with several prominent Chinese figures, including Xi Jinping, who is currently the country’s most influential person in decades. He now takes readers behind closed doors to see what China’s state-controlled capitalism will look like in the future in his book ‘Dealing With China.
The Varieties Of Religious Experience
Author: William James Goodreads Rating: 4.0
The Varieties of Religious Experience – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
In 1901, William James travelled to the University of Edinburgh to give a series of lectures on “natural religion,” during which he defined religion as “the sentiments, deeds, and experiences of individual individuals in their solitude, so far as they perceive themselves to stand in relation to whatsoever they may conceive the divine.” He began a project that, when finished, stands not only as one of the most significant texts on psychology ever written, not only as a vitally serious contemplation of spirituality but for many critics one of the best works of nonfiction written in the 20th century. He did this by considering religion, not as it is defined by—or takes place in—the churches, but as it is felt in everyday life.
It’s simple to understand the “why” of the situation, after reading The Varieties of Religious Experience. James develops a pluralistic framework in which “the divine can mean no single quality, it must imply a range of virtues, by becoming champions of which in alternation, various persons may all find meaningful missions” by applying his analytic insight to religious explanations from a number of sources. It is a genuine philosophical appeal for religious respect and tolerance, one whose vigour has not waned through the years.
The Better Angels of Our Nature
Author: Steven Pinker Goodreads Rating: 4.16
The Better Angels of Our Nature – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
Unbelievably, we could be experiencing the most tranquil period in the history of our species right now. In his compelling and contentious new book, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker demonstrates that, despite the constant news coverage of terrorism, crime, and war, violence has really been on the decline for significant periods of time. This ambitious book continues Pinker’s investigation into the fundamentals of human nature by dispelling myths about humankind’s inherently violent nature and the curse of modernity. By fusing psychology and history, it paints an amazing picture of a society that is becoming more and more enlightened.
Energy: A Beginner’s Guide
Author: Vaclav Smil Goodreads Rating: 3.97
Energy: A Beginner’s Guide – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
Einstein noted that all matter might be expressed as energy in his famous equation, E=MC^2. It permeates every single place and item. Vaclav Smil, a well-known author and scholar, introduces the expansive word and helps the reader better grasp energy’s role in both past and contemporary civilization in this fascinating book.
He begins by explaining the idea before moving on to more fascinating subjects like the inner workings of the human body and the search for cleaner, more efficient fuels. This book will help clarify the science underlying global warming, measures to stop it, and how our apparently inconsequential everyday actions impact energy usage as it becomes a major political concern.
Energy: A Beginner’s Guide will astonish and enlighten you, revealing the physics underlying one of the most significant ideas in our world, whether you’re looking for understanding or dinner table discussion.
Rational Ritual
Author: Michael Suk-Young Chwe Goodreads Rating: 3.34
Rational Ritual – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
Why does Super Bowl advertising mostly consist of the Internet, financial service, and beer commercials? How are political rituals supposed to build authority? Why do anthems and ritual speech tend to be repetitive? Why did the French Revolution select circular shapes for public celebrations? These inquiries are addressed in this book using just one idea: common knowledge.
Chwe makes a case for tight reciprocity between the viewpoints of rationality and culture by employing a rational-choice argument to explain many cultural activities. He demonstrates how game theory may be used to solve an unexpectedly wide range of issues while demonstrating in an impressively understandable manner what game theory can contain for social science and humanities students who are not yet familiar with it.
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
Author: Sudhir Venkatesh Goodreads Rating: 4.06
Gang Leader for a Day – Best Book Recommended by Mark Zuckerberg
When it was initially told in Freakonomics, the tale of the young sociologist who investigated a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captivated readers all over the world. The intriguing whole account of how Sudhir Venkatesh was able to join the gang, what he discovered, and how his approach transformed the academic establishment is told in Gang Leader for a Day.
In one of Chicago’s most notorious housing developments, Venkatesh entered an abandoned building to find participants for a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty. He became friends with JT, a gang boss, in his first year of graduate school, and spent the majority of the following ten years within the projects under JT’s protection, recording what he observed there.
Venkatesh watched JT and the other members of the gang over the course of the following seven years as they ran their crack distribution business, engaged in community PR, and moved up or down the gang’s intricate organisational ladder.
An intimate look at the ethically murky, highly complex, sometimes dishonest fight to live in an urban combat zone is provided by Gang Leader for a Day. It is also the tale of a complex friendship between two ambitious young men who are from very different worlds.
Conclusion
Mark Zuckerberg, the man known for co-founding and leading Facebook has been a great supporter of reading and to spread his love for reading among others, he started a book club. All the books mentioned above have been recommended by Mark and according to him, all these books are supposed to emphasise learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories, and technologies.
FAQs
Which books are recommended by Mark Zukerberg?
Mark Zuckerberg has recommended the following books:
Creativity Inc.
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Why Nations Fail
The End of Power
Genome
The New Jim Crow
Portfolios of the Poor
Does Mark Zuckerberg read books?
Mark Zuckerberg has been a great supporter of reading. Mark did something uncommon in 2015—that is, he created a reading club to spread his love for reading among others.
What is Mark Zuckerberg’s book club called?
Mark Zuckerberg’s book club is known as ‘A Year of Books’. Over the course of the year, Zuckerberg recommended and discussed a few books with the club about once every two weeks.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Facebook.
In the world of digitalisation, there are only a handful of people who are not on this social media platform, Facebook. Although the company, Facebook, began as a social network for particular college students, it has now evolved into an important tool for day-to-day socialising and business professionals.
As a small company owner, Facebook may be precisely what you need to find potential workers, get new clients, or see what your competitors are up to. And doing so – browsing content on Facebook– does not need creating your new Facebook profile.
Facebook is an American online social networking website owned by Meta Platforms. Mark Zuckerberg, along with other three Harvard University undergraduates, launched Facebook in 2004. Facebook is free to use, yet ads on the platform provider for the bulk of the gross profitability. Members may establish accounts, upload photos, join established communities, or start their own.
Facebook’s popularity stems in part from creator Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence from the beginning that members be truthful regarding who they really are, as phoney pages are just not permitted.
According to the company’s business, transparency is necessary for developing interpersonal relationships, exchanging information and recommendations, and strengthening society as a whole. It also noted that the bottom-up, peer-to-peer networking of Facebook users makes it easier for businesses to connect with customers about their services and goods.
Know more about the Meta-owned company, Facebook, and how it is helpful to us, its business model, startup story, and much more by reading this article further.
Facebook – Company Highlights
Startup Name
Facebook
Parent
Meta Platforms (formerly known as Facebook, Inc)
Headquarters
Menlo Park, CA
Industry
Social Media Platform
Founders
Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin.
Facebook, a US-based online social media and social networking website is owned by Meta Platforms. The site’s features include Timeline or wall, a section on the user’s homepage where users can post content and friends can send messages, Status, which allows users to notify friends of their current location or set of circumstances, and News Feed, which notifies users of changes to their friends’ statuses and profiles.
Through Facebook, the users can communicate with one another and send and receive messages. Besides, they can also signal their approval for posts and comments on Facebook using the Like button, which can also be seen on many other websites.
In 2006, Facebook allowed anybody above the age of 13 to join, expanding its enrolment beyond students. Advertisers were able to develop new and successful consumer connections, just as Zuckerberg expected.
In October 2021, Facebook announced that its parent business will be renamed Meta Platforms. The name change signalled a shift in focus to the “metaverse,” an augmented reality realm in which people would participate. The Meta Platform now includes Facebook, the social networking platform.
Facebook – Industry
Customers can engage, produce, and share material and information through the social media market, which is made up of sales by entities (organizations, single traders, or partnerships). Social media platform users can exchange photos, videos, and audio clips.
This market generates revenue from advertising sales and other services provided through social networks. Advertising on social media and social media subscriptions are two different segments of the social media business.
The worldwide social media industry is predicted to increase at an annual pace (CAGR) of 39.7% from $159.68 billion in 2021 to $223.11 billion in 2022.
Businesses are reforming their operations and recovering from the effects of COVID-19, which had previously culminated in restrictive measures such as social distancing, the closure of commercial firms, and remote work, all of which caused operational challenges. Growing at a CAGR of 39%, the market is estimated to reach $833.50 billion in 2026.
With 46% of the global social media market in 2020, Asia Pacific was the most important region. The 2nd-largest area, North America, accounted for 32% of the worldwide market. Africa was identified as the fastest-growing region in the social media market between 2020-2021.
Facebook – Name, Logo, and Tagline
Facebook Logo
According to David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect, the name Facebook was picked because every Harvard student was given one of these, which held images of their classmates and were referred to as Facebook.
A majority of the American university students received face book directories, which consisted of individuals’ names and photos and were distributed among the university students to help them know each other. This is where the name “Facebook” came from, the sole aim of which is to connect people with their friends and family via its social media platform. The small F sign on Facebook’s site is considered to represent the name Facebook.
Facebook’s tagline used to be, “It’s Free and Always Will be” which was changed to, “It’s Quick and Easy.” It was changed silently between 6th and 7th August 2019, and Facebook didn’t clarify the reason why.
Facebook – Founders and Team
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin.
Co-founder and current CEO of Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg is an American businessman, media personality, and philanthropist. He is best known as the co-founder of Meta Platforms, Inc. (previously called Facebook, Inc.), where he currently serves as chairman, CEO, and dominant shareholder. He is also a co-founder and board member of Breakthrough Starshot, a solar sail spacecraft development initiative.
Andrew McCollum
Andrew McCollum joined Philo, an entertainment-focused OTT streaming service, as CEO in 2014. Philo debuted countrywide in November 2017. Andrew was on Philo’s board of directors, supervised the company’s co-founders, and was one of the company’s early investors before becoming CEO.
Andrew was a member of the founding team of Facebook before joining Philo, and he has a long-standing interest in the social design of products. Following Facebook, Andrew worked as an Entrepreneur in Residence at New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Flybridge Partners, two of Philo’s investors. He is still an active angel investor and counsellor in the early stages of a company’s development.
Chris Hughes
Chris Hughes (November 26, 1983) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded and served as spokesperson for the online social networking and directory site Facebook with his Harvard companions. He was the editor-in-chief and publisher of The New Republic from 2012 until 2016. As of 2019, Hughes is a co-chair of the Economic Security Project.
Dustin Moskovitz
Dustin Moskovitz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Asana. He co-founded Good Ventures and the Open Philanthropy Project. He is also one of the co-founders of Facebook.
Eduardo Saverin
Eduardo Saverin is a B Capital Group co-founder and partner. Saverin is a co-founder of Facebook and the initial investor. Saverin is eager to put money into the next wave of technical developments. He has counselled and worked closely with an array of firms of different kinds and stages as a technology investor and supervisor, all of which share one consistent theme: a love for people-centric technology, as well as a mobile platform lean with pan-global ambitions.
The Facebook team last registered 71,970 full-time employees in December 2021.
Facebook – Startup Story
Facebook, a social networking website, was established on October 28, 2003, as “FaceMash” before rebranding as “The Facebook” on February 4, 2004. It was established by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard University classmates. The website’s designers initially limited membership to Harvard students.
Nonetheless, it was gradually expanded to include additional Boston-area colleges, the Ivy League, and finally most universities in the United States and Canada, businesses, and, by September 2006, everyone over the age of 13 with a valid email account.
In September 2004, the Wall was added to a Facebook user’s online profile. This widely used feature allowed a user’s friends to post information to their Facebook wall, and it rapidly became an important part of the social aspect of the network. Facebook had gained one million active members by the end of 2004. However, the firm was still lagging behind Myspace, the top online social network at that time, with five million users. Nevertheless, in the long run, MySpace failed to compete against Facebook.
2005 was a momentous occasion for the company. It was then that the idea of “tagging” people in photographs posted to the site was born. Tags were used to identify themselves and others in photos that were viewable to other Facebook friends. Facebook users can upload an unlimited amount of photos but the facial recognition feature of Facebook, which tagged the persons on the photograph earlier, is not there anymore now.
Outside of the United States, high school and university students were allowed to join the ‘Facebook army’ in 2005. By the end of that year, it had six million monthly active users.
Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
Based on the company’s social media service offerings, Facebook’s corporate vision statement is “People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, discover what’s going on in the world, and share and express what matters to them.”
This corporate vision demonstrates that the company is more than just an online social networking service. Rather, the firm aids in the gathering of information and meaningful dialogue among individual customers.
Facebook – Business Model and Revenue Model
Facebook makes money largely through showing commercials from businesses on its Facebook and Instagram apps. Ads contributed to 98% of Facebook’s $86 billion revenue in 2020. The remaining 2% of profits came mostly from Oculus and Portal device sales, as well as development payment fees.
Facebook’s business strategy is centred on providing its products and technologies to billions of users for free and then generating money by enabling businesses to show advertisements to Facebook’s consumers. Advertisers pay Facebook auction-based pricing depending on supply and demand.
This implies that the individuals who consume Facebook’s services (users) aren’t the people who are paying for them. Small companies who advertise on Facebook’s collection of applications are the real clients. With the launch of Facebook Shops, the initial iteration of Facebook’s e-commerce capabilities, the company’s focus on small companies became much more obvious.
Notwithstanding its history and present problems, Facebook is doing incredibly well. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, sales increased by 22% to $86 billion in 2020. It had a profit margin of 38% and a net income of $29 billion.
Facebook – Funding and Investors
Facebook raised a total of 16 funding rounds to date, as of July 12, 2022, which helped the organisation raise over $16 bn. Here’s a look at the Facebook funding table:
Date
Round
Amount
Lead Investors
Oct 20, 2014
Post-IPO-Equity
$13.8B
–
May 10, 2011
Secondary Market
–
–
Mar 4, 2011
Private Equity Round
–
–
Jan 21, 2011
Private Equity Round
$1.5B
DST Global, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners
Jan 1, 2011
Secondary Market
–
–
Jun 28, 2010
Secondary Market
$120M
Elevation Partners
May 26, 2009
Series D
$200M
DST Global
May 1, 2008
Debt Financing
$100M
TriplePoint Capital
Mar 27, 2008
Series C
$60M
Horizons Ventures
Jan 15, 2008
Series C
$15M
Global Founders Capital
The Facebook investors include Elevation Partners, DST Global, Horizons Ventures, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and more.
Facebook – Investments
Facebook has made 44+ investments in total to date, as of July 12, 2022. Here’s diving into the most recent Facebook investments:
Date
Organization Name
Round
Amount
May 27, 2022
OlaClick (YC W21)
Seed Round
$4.4M
May 4, 2022
Ami
Seed Round
$3M
April 6, 2022
VerSe Innovation
Series J
$805M
Jan 1, 2022
PlayCo
Corporate Round
$40M
Nov 8, 2021
Inworld AI
Seed Round
$7M
Oct 5, 2021
echo3D
Series A
$4M
Sep 30, 2021
Meesho
Series F
$570M
Aug 3, 2021
Formaloo
Grant
–
Jul 5, 2021
Helpmum
Grant
$55K
May 3, 2021
Obviously AI
Seed Round
$3.7M
Apr 5, 2021
Meesho
Series E
$300M
Jan 1, 2021
FEMCA Financial Services
Pre-Seed Round
–
Dec 24, 2020
ArtyOwl.com
Grant
₹100K
Dec 4, 2020
Com Olho
Grant
–
Facebook – Acquisitions
Facebook has acquired a total of 95+ companies to date. The last acquisition of Facebook is presize.ai, which the company acquired on April 14, 2022.
Here’s a look at some of the recently acquired companies of Facebook:
Acquiree Name
About Acquiree
Date
Amount
presize.ai
Presize is a Germany-based company that is fuelled by the Computer Vision and Deep Learning technologies to develop the most accurate body scanning software
Apr 14, 2022
–
ImagineOptix
ImagineOptix is a US-based company that manufactures optical thin films to help the production of small, affordable, battery-efficient video projectors
Dec 21, 2021
–
Within (VR/AR)
Within is a virtual reality and augmented reality media and technology company.
Oct 29, 2021
–
AI.Reverie
A leading provider of synthetic data to train machine learning algorithms.
Oct 12, 2021
–
Unit 2 Games
Unit 2 Games is a game creation and sharing platform designed to develop video games
Jun 4, 2021
–
Kustomer
Kustomer is an omnichannel Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) CRM platform specializing in customer service
Nov 30, 2020
$1B
Lemnis Technologies
We set a new standard for visual fidelity in VR/AR head-mounted displays, opening new opportunities for professional users.
Sep 22, 2020
–
Mapillary
Mapillary has built a street-level imagery platform that uses photos which have been uploaded by members of the public.
Jun 18, 2020
–
Giphy
Giphy is an online database and search engine that allows users to search, share, and discover GIFs.
May 15, 2020
$400M
Sanzaru Games
Sanzaru Games is an independent console video game development studio.
Feb 25, 2020
–
Scape Technologies
Scape is a computer vision startup, building the localization engine for city-scale augmented reality.
Feb 9, 2020
–
Packagd
Packagd is a series of app that offers new mobile shopping experience.
Dec 20, 2019
–
Facebook – Growth
Facebook is the most popular social media network in the world, with 2.91 billion active monthly users as of the fourth quarter of 2021, which went up to become 2.93 bn in Q1 of FY22. Here’s a look at the rise of Facebook’s monthly active users.
Facebook’s Growth of Monthly Active Users
The number of registered Facebook members topped 1 billion in the third quarter of 2012, making it the first social networking service to accomplish so. In the first quarter of 2021, the company said that 3.51 billion people used at least one of its key platforms on a monthly basis (Facebook, Whatsapp, Messenger, or Instagram).
Facebook initially began with only 150 people working with the same firm back in 2006. This rose and rose over the years, and was last registered with 71,970 full-time employees in December 2021.
What’s Facebook Changing to Ramp up Growth?
Facebook and Instagram both will see some changes, and many of these changes will be inclined towards altering the process of how Facebook and Instagram users share posts and videos. On this, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the platforms will make it easier for the users to control what they “see and discover on Facebook.” Here are some of the proposed changes that will take place:
Feeds will be introduced as a new tab. This will help the users see the most recent posts from their friends, groups, and Pages.
A Favourites list can be curated of the friends and Pages the users care about.
The first thing that the users will now see is Home.
According to Bloomberg, Facebook is on a mission to change the way it shows its users’ posts and videos in order to enable the users to watch content from accounts that they don’t already follow. This will, thus, help the Meta flagship product, Facebook to better compete with viral video app TikTok.
Facebook’s Annual Revenue :
Year
Revenue
2010
$1.97 billion
2011
$3.71 billion
2012
$5.08 billion
2013
$7.87 billion
2014
$12.4 billion
2015
$17.9 billion
2016
$27.6 billion
2017
$40.6 billion
2018
$55.8 billion
2019
$70.6 billion
2020
$85.9 billion
The revenue of Fb in Q3 2021 was registered at $29.01 bn, which included $28.27 bn in ad revenues and $734 mn worth of other revenue.
Facebook Begins Testing Ethereum and Polygon NFTs on Profiles
Facebook announced that it has already started rolling out NFTs for some of the American creators in a report dated July 1, 2022. A spokesperson of the social media giant mentioned that the platform has started initially with NFTs on Ethereum and Polygon and will eventually add support for NFTs on Solana and Flow as well.
According to a post by Meta Product Manager Navdeep Singh, the users’ Facebook profiles will have a “digital collectibles area”, where they can display their NFTs, which are special blockchain tokens representing ownership. Singh also mentioned that the users will also be able to link their Facebook profiles to their bitcoin wallets. Also, they will have the option to convert their NFTs into Facebook posts that may then be shared, liked, commented on, and responded to, just like any other Facebook post.
Here’s the first look shared by Navdeep:
Facebook NFTs
Face Recognition Shutdown
Face recognition will be phased out of Facebook’s social network, as announced by the company in November 2021. Its use will be limited across all products, and over a billion saved faces will be deleted, according to Meta, Facebook’s newly formed parent company.
According to a blog post by Meta’s VP of artificial intelligence, Jerome Pesenti, the action will destroy over a billion saved faces in the following weeks. The removal of such a large database signal that Meta would limit the use of facial recognition in its planned “metaverse” projects, which will involve actual people interacting in vast virtual settings, including game environments, at least initially.
“The many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole,” wrote Pesenti. “There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use,” he said. “Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”
Facebook – Competitors
The top competitors of Facebook are technology giants like:
The prominence and magnitude of Facebook have prompted condemnation from a variety of quarters. Internet privacy, its face recognition software, excessive data retention, DeepFace’s addictive nature, and its function in the workplace, including access to employee accounts by employers, are all challenges.
Facebook has been chastised for its consumption of electricity, tax evasion, real-name user verification regulations, censorship, and participation in the US PRISM surveillance program.
Users of Facebook are said to have negative psychological impacts such as jealousy and tension, a lack of focus, and social media addiction. Facebook has been slammed for enabling users to post obscene or illegal content. Copyright and intellectual property infringement, hate speech, rape, terrorist incitement, fake news, crimes, murders, and live-streaming violent situations are among the specifics.
Sri Lanka suspended both WhatsApp and Facebook in May 2019 as a temporary fix to restore peace following anti-Muslim violence, the worst in the country since the Easter Sunday attack the preceding year. Between the fourth quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019, Facebook removed 3 billion fake accounts, bringing the total number of monthly active users to 2.39 billion.
The company said in late July 2019 that the Federal Trade Commission was investigating it for antitrust breaches.
Facebook Layoffs
Facebook is looking to lay off employees and has already asked the process managers to identify the low-performing employees and move them to exit, as per reports dated July 15, 2022. The company has been reportedly struggling with macroeconomic pressures and incurred hits to its advertising business.
Facebook Parent Meta Faces Trademark Lawsuit
Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook has been hit by a trademark lawsuit filed by Meta X LLC., a virtual reality-based company, in Manhattan federal court, as of the reports dated July 26, 2022. MetaX alleged that the Facebook owner (earlier Facebook, Inc.), which is now renamed Meta Platforms Inc., has stolen its name since its pivot to metaverse. MetaX also reported that Meta has infringed its federal “Meta” trademarks.
Following the renaming of Facebook as ‘Meta,’ the firm will be “metaverse first,” according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which means you won’t need a Facebook account to access other Meta products in the future.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about our identity as we begin this next chapter,” he said. “Facebook is an iconic social media brand, but it just doesn’t encompass everything that we do.”
It also suggests that the company would divide its activities into two segments: one for its future platform efforts (Reality Labs is going to be the tag for that segment) and another for its app family.
Whilst expanding their social networking applications will remain a priority, he believes that the company’s identity will become less tied to a single product/ service over time.
In short, the metaverse will be an embodiment of the internet, according to Zuckerberg, who believes it will be the next integrated virtual media to emerge after video (which evolved from photos and texts).
Rather than staring at a screen, you’ll be able to immerse yourself in these activities. That’s most probably to be accomplished through instilling a strong sense of presence in a shared environment, which would be the metaverse’s distinguishing characteristic. This will demand hardware from the firm, such as the Oculus Quest 2 or others.
The firm is thinking about offering incentives to developers and new users to join. To boost adoption, these alternatives include cutting costs, subsidizing gadgets, or selling them at a loss.
It’s crucial to stress, though, that the metaverse of Zuckerberg’s visions is far from complete. Currently, just the fundamental building pieces work, according to Zuckerberg. In the end, technological obstacles remain—compressing augmented reality technology and sophisticated computers into a pair of spectacles, for example, is a difficult task.
Although Zuckerberg vows to encourage security and privacy on this new “social technology” network in a founder’s letter, it remains to be seen if he can persuade people to use it, particularly younger generations who have been abandoning Facebook. Many people question if a new interface would simply reintroduce the same old issues.
FAQs
What does Facebook do?
Facebook is an American online social networking website owned by Meta Platforms.
Who founded Facebook?
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin.
When was Facebook founded?
Facebook was founded in the year 2004.
How does Facebook make money?
Facebook makes money primarily by showing advertisements from businesses on its Instagram and Facebook apps.
Which companies do Facebook compete with?
The top 10 competitors in Facebook’s competitive set are:
CEO or the Chief Executive Officer holds the highest ranking in any kind of company. To be able to hold this position is a very big thing, one has to be extremely responsible and hardworking because the entire company depends on them.
A CEO’s main responsibility includes expanding the business, doing finance-related work, and making all other important decision that is necessary for a company to flourish. All the major decision needs approval from the CEO, and then only they can be established. A CEO also needs to coordinate with their employees with patience; this will result in a proper workflow.
People might think being a CEO of a company means earning a lot of money in terms of their salary but there is a trend that is emerging in the new world and some CEOs are following it ardently. It may sound unbelievable but there are some CEOs who take $1 for their salary. Yes, you read it right, just $1.
Some well-known CEOs are already a member of this trend. In this article, we will discuss, why some CEOs take just $1 as their salary and what are its benefits. So, let’s get started.
“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” -Jack Welch
One dollar salary is all about when some of the world’s top chief executives take just $1 in the name of salary from their company. Here, they decide to work without taking direct compensation but there is a rule where they have to take a minimal amount for the sake of some legal reasons, so to follow that, they just take $1. This way the CEOs are considered volunteers by taking the minimal amount as their salary.
History of $1 Salary
Lee Lacocca – the CEO of Chrysler Corporation
This thing started in the early 1900s when the entire world was in a war-torn zone. During World War II, some of the top business leaders willing decided to offer their services for free to the Government. As there was a law, that doesn’t allow the President to accept free service from the businessmen, the concept of a One-dollar salary was born.
The year 1978 also saw Lee Iacocca, the CEO of Chrysler Corporation adopting this procedure to improve the state of his company after the oil crisis. He asked the Government for their help.
In the 21st century, there are many wealthy CEOs who are following this ardently, but now the reason is not that they want to offer free services but because it is all about earning huge amounts of money smartly.
Perks of Taking 1 Dollar Salary
The fact of taking just $1 may seem very simple but in reality, it is far more compatible and this mode provides a lot of benefits to the CEOs than a regular salary. Some of the benefits are:
This improves the image of the CEO in front of the public and people start considering that person highly as it seems they are serving their country for almost free.
It gives the investors confidence that the CEO will perform better to receive their compensation, thus leaving them no choice but to invest in the company. In the end, this results in getting investments.
How CEOs Live With Just $1 Salary?
It is not like the CEO only gets to have one dollar as their salary, apart from that they take compensation from the company in the form of stock or equity, as they are taxed at a much lower rate than regular income.
When the company performs well, the worth of the shares increase and the CEO’s different forms of income also increases. All of these stocks, bonus packages that are offered to them apart from the one-dollar make up for their ‘sacrifice’ quite well and in fact sometimes even exceed their income.
Members of $1 Salary Club
Some of the most renowned CEOs who are the member of this club and ardently follow the trend are:
Being a CEO of a company comes with lots of perks but with also a lot of responsibilities. A CEO needs to take some of the most important decision of the business, there are some CEOs who take hefty sums and there are some who takes just $1 dollar but that doesn’t mean that they are providing their service for free, they are actually earning a lot by their smartness.
FAQs
Why do CEOs make $1?
The CEOs can afford to earn $1 as they make money through other ways like stocks and equity. This also helps them in avoiding taxes.
What is the minimum salary of a CEO?
An early career Chief Executive Officer (CEO) with 1-4 years of experience earns an average of ₹983,641.
Who are the CEOs in the $1 salary club?
Some of the CEOs who take a $1 dollar salary are:
Elon Musk
Mark Zuckerberg
Meg Whitman
Larry Page
Sergey Brin
What is the benefit of taking 1 dollar salary?
Many CEOs like Elon Musk & Mark Zuckerberg take 1 dollar salaries to maximize the profits of the company and avoid paying huge taxes to the government.
Who is the first CEO to start taking 1 dollar salary?
Lee Iacocca, the CEO of Chrysler Corporation reduced his salary to $1 to save the company from bankruptcy.
We are almost on the brink of wiping out all gender bias in workplaces. Women now are getting employed, and a considerable number of women are rising to distinguished leadership positions and are managing companies almost as dextrously as their male counterparts if not more. Women, today, are also advocating crucial decisions of the companies, thereby standing as the face of today’s organizations.
Meta (formerly Facebook) too had its iron lady, who goes by the name Sheryl Sandberg. After Mark Zuckerberg, the 2nd most iconic face of Facebook was Sheryl Sandberg, who served as the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, joining way back in 2008. During all these years, Sandberg has grown to become quite synonymous with Facebook as is the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
After 14 long years of serving as the COO of the company, Sandberg resigned from the post, which she announced on her own Facebook page on June 1, 2022.
Sheryl Sandberg has been hailed on successive occasions by Fortune as one the World’s Most Powerful Women, and with her numerous other honors and philanthropic initiatives along with how she headed the Mark Zuckerberg-led company, Sheryl Sandberg is not only an inspirational woman entrepreneur but a towering figure in the world of startups and businesses for all globally.
If you are curious to learn more about this successful businesswoman, then check out this article ahead, which covers the story of Sheryl Sandberg, her educational background, career, role at Facebook, books authored, Sheryl Sandberg’s net worth, and more.
Sheryl Sandberg – Biography
Name
Sheryl Sandberg
Born
August 28, 1969, Washington, D.C., U.S.
Citizenship
American
Education
Harvard University (AB, MBA)
Title
COO of Facebook (2008–2022), Founder of LeanIn.Org
Board member of
Meta Platforms, Women for Women International, Center for Global Development, SurveyMonkey
Net worth
US$1.5 billion (December 2022)
Husband/Partner
Brian Kraff (m. 1993; div. 1994); Dave Goldberg (m. 2004; died 2015) Tom Bernthal (married 2022)
Born in a Jewish family of Joel and Adele Sandberg in Washington D.C., Sandberg was the oldest of three children. Her father was an ophthalmologist while her mother was a teacher of the French language. As her family went to North Miami Beach, Florida when she was just a toddler, Sandberg was admitted to North Miami Beach High School from where she graduated in 1987 and ranked 9th in her class. Sandberg was the sophomore class president, who eventually became a member of the National Honor Society. Sandberg was also on the senior class executive board. When she was in High School, Sheryl also taught aerobics.
Sheryl Sandberg’s education resume is nothing short of brilliant. She was always excellent in academics and eventually was admitted to Harvard College. Sandberg graduated in 1991, summa cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa, with a BA with a major in Economics. Sandberg also received the John H. Williams Prize, as the top graduating student from the college in Economics.
Sheryl Sandberg founded the organization, “Women in Economics and Government” while she was still in college. It was at Harvard too that she met Lawrence Summers, who later became her mentor and thesis advisor. Sandberg soon also became a research assistant of Summers at the World Bank. From where her career started. At World Bank, Sandberg was associated with health projects in India that dealt with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness.
Sheryl Sandberg then pursued her MBA at Harvard Business School in 1995 with the highest distinction. She earned her fellowship right in the first year of business school.
Sheryl Sandberg – Career
A Brief Career in McKinsey & Company
Sheryl Sandberg’s career started anew after she completed her MBA. Sandberg first joined McKinsey & Company as a Management Consultant, a role which she served for a year. After leaving McKinsey, Sandberg again worked under Lawrence Summers, who was then the United States Secretary of the Treasury working under President Bill Clinton. The Treasury was then working actively on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis, which she assisted.
A Major Role in Google as the Vice President of Global Sales and Operations
After 5 years of work for Treasury, Sandberg joined Google in 2001, 3 years after the search engine giant was founded, and rose to the rank of the Vice President of Global Sales and Operations. Furthermore, she was also involved in the philanthropic arm of Google, Google.org.
At Google, Sandberg was responsible for the online sales of advertising and publishing products of Google. She also handled the sales operations of Google’s consumer products and Google Book Search. As Sandberg joined Google quite early in her career, when the search engine giant was far from what Google is now, her role was pivotal in Google. Sandberg in Google, helped the search engine grow the ad and sales team from 4 to 4,000.
Sheryl Sandberg’s Meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and Her Joining Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg met with Mark Zuckerberg in late 2007. It was a Christmas party held by Dan Rosensweig when Sheryl met Mark, the young founder of Facebook. Though Zuckerberg didn’t have a COO position in mind and neither did he look for the same, Sheryl was still deemed as a perfect fit for this role. This is why Sandberg was offered the position of COO by Facebook in 2008.
Sheryl Sandberg’s Illustrative Career as the COO of Facebook
After her major work with Google, where she has often been described as a “valued member of the Google team“, and a “well-regarded Google executive“, she left the search engine giant to join the social media giant, which was just 4 years old back when she joined in 2008.
Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook as the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, the no. 2 leader of the Mark Zuckerberg-founded organization.
Sandberg had a hefty portfolio. Apart from that, she had a fluid and trustworthy relationship with Mark Zuckerberg. Sandberg did all the things Mark hated to do and hence, Mark could focus on what he liked: engineering. Well, it was due to her efforts that he had given her space to be the public face of the company in many areas.
Soon after she joined Facebook, Sandberg quickly figured out smart ways to make the company profitable. Until then Facebook strived to emerge as a cool site without any major revenue model as such, thereby, it lacked profits or a way to make them.
Facebook believed that coolness should be there and profits shall eventually follow. With Sheryl Sandberg in its arsenal, Facebook soon started to rely on advertising and began to present advertisements discreetly, and it was in 2010 that Facebook finally became profitable.
Back then, Sandberg used to oversee almost all the major departments of the social media company Facebook (Meta) including sales, business development, marketing, communications, public policy, and more.
Sandberg had set her sights on the problem of mobile advertising. As Mark had reassigned his engineers to prioritize the mobile applications over the website, Sandberg had controlled the business side of Facebook. She had pushed to simplify the ad formats and had convened biweekly meetings with ad and product executives to balance the user experience with the needs of the marketers.
She gave away the stories of conversations she had with the top executives of various companies to push more into what the situation demanded. The result of Sandberg’s efforts speaks for itself. The shares, which tanked after Facebook’s botched IPO in May 2012 scaled up by 140% to around $50 in recent years. The mobile ads accounted for 41% of Facebook’s $1.6 billion in ad revenue in one of its recent quarters.
The CEO of the company Mark had predicted that the mobile revenue will comprise the majority of Facebook’s business. Therefore, Sandberg had been well rewarded for her contributions. She earned around $26 million in cash and stock in 2012. Sandberg’s Facebook shares and options were about $704 million. Apart from that, she also received an additional $277 million as unvested shares and options.
Sandberg joined the Board of Directors of Facebook in 2012 when she emerged as the first woman to join the Facebook Board of Directors. Though Sandberg held some stakes in the company, it was revealed that she had sold over half of her stocks since the company went public on May 18, 2012.
The Facebook IPO was humongous indeed with a market capitalization of over $104 billion. Facebook’s IPO is still regarded as the biggest among the technology companies and one of the biggest in the history of the internet. Sandberg, who was left with 41 million shares in the company during the time of the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Facebook, was left with 17.2 million shares after some rounds of sales, which amounted to 0.5% stakes in Facebook then, and worth close to $1 bn.
A few years ago, Facebook landed itself in a tricky business partnership with PayPal. Therefore, whenever the teams were in a tussle, Sandberg would personally reach out to John Donahoe, the CEO of eBay, which owns PayPal. The high-level involvement had removed the differences over time. This resulted in eBay spending far more on Facebook ads.
According to some Facebook executives, even though Sandberg can’t be cloned, she can be emulated. With Sandberg’s efforts, Facebook has turned into a giant in the social media industry and a role model for many other companies, startups, business professionals, CEOs, and other individuals, which was just a young and growing company when she vowed to stay with the team.
Sheryl Sandberg’s leadership style is transformational as she believes in celebrating her employees’ successes and also encourages people to do better work.
Along with Facebook, Sheryl is also known for many other initiatives including Lean In. Sandberg had been serving actively as the COO of Facebook, she had also extended her valuable contributions to the social media giant even after Facebook termed itself, Meta, on October 28, 2021, before she announced her resignation from the post of COO on June 1, 2022.
Sandberg mentioned that the reason is her wish to write the next chapter of her life. She resigned in the fall of 2022. According to Forbes richest list, Sheryl Sandberg is presently worth around $1.5 bn, as of December 2022.
Sheryl Sandberg- Success Story
Sheryl Sandberg and LeanIn.Org
The first Sheryl Sandberg book Lean In has been widely successful. The publication of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, which was focused on business leadership and development and stressed the issues of the lack of women in government and business leadership positions and feminism, ignited an international movement that made feminism mainstream again.
This made her a champion of women’s rights, who advocated gender equality and the name of Sheryl Sandberg soon began to be taken in the same breath as other celebrities like Oprah, Bono, and Michel Bloomberg.
The book, Lean In, has heightened expectations about Sandberg’s post-Facebook life. This book which dealt with the lack of women in businesses and all the challenges they had to face, is truly revolutionary in its own right.
According to Mark, Lean In has done a lot more for the advancement of Facebook than Facebook has done for Lean In. As a result of which while, Mark is a celebrity in his own right and the anti-hero of an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie.
Lean In Foundation or LeanIn.org was founded by Sheryl Sandberg in 2013, as a nonprofit organization. This organization has been founded by the then Meta COO to offer women “ongoing inspiration and support to help them achieve their goals.”
The Lean In organization aims to support women in 3 main ways:
Community
Education
Circles or small and connected peer groups
Lean In has seen the joining of over 380,000+ women and men to its Lean In community and has successfully created 34,000+ Lean In Circles in over 157 countries to date.
Furthermore, Lean In is also responsible for annual national campaigns like #BanBossy and #LeanInTogether. These initiatives were organized to help Lean In accomplish its goals and establish partnerships.
The Lean In Foundation has been renamed to the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, which was kept after the name of Sheryl and her late husband. Sandberg has also reportedly transferred around $100 mn in Facebook stock to fund the organization and other charitable endeavors of Sandberg. It now serves as an umbrella for LeanIn.org and as a new organization around her book Option B.
While some Facebook executives say Sandberg has not missed an opportunity to contribute others say that Lean In was distracting and took much of her time. But, according to them, it was only for a brief period. The book has turned Sandberg into an international sensation. It has truly helped with recruiting and retention of women engineers and executives, which is a major revolution witnessed in recent times.
Presently, women executives also lead the company’s global sales, public policy, mobile engineering, European operations, and many important groups. However, only one of Sandberg’s five direct reports was reported to be female and except for Sandberg, all of Mark’s six direct reports are male. It seems that women still need to draw inspiration from Sandberg!
Sheryl Sandberg as an Author and Speaker
Sheryl Sandberg wrote an article in 2008 in the support of her mentor Lawrence Summers, which was published by The Huffington Post. She was a keynote speaker at the Jewish Community Federation’s Business Leadership Council in 2010.
It was in the month of December, of the same year that Sandberg went ahead for her first TED speech, which focused on empowering women and elevating them as leaders, titled “Why we have too few women leaders“.
Sandberg was also chosen the very next year as the speaker of the Commencement Address of the Barnard College graduation ceremony. She was a keynote on many occasions that followed and delivered the commencement address on several occasions too, including:
The Class Day ceremony at the Harvard Business School in May 2012
The second annual Entrepreneur Weekend at Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York
Berkeley graduation ceremony at the University of California
Virginia Tech’s Class of 2017
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA
Sheryl Sandberg released her first book called Lean In Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which was co-authored by Nell Scovell and published by Knopf on March 11, 2013. The book had sold more than 1 million copies and featured as one of the bestsellers since its launch, in the fall of 2013.
Lean In – Book by Sheryl Sandberg
Though the book has received mixed reviews from critics and others, Lean In has been a career-swirling attempt by Sheryl Sandberg that gave rise to LeanIn.org, which paved the entrepreneurial way for Sheryl Sandberg.
Option B, which was released in April 2017 and co-authored by Adam Grant, was another book written by Sandberg. This book dealt with how to handle loss after she lost her husband unexpectedly. It has also crossed the 2.75 million mark in terms of copies sold.
Option B – Book by Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg also was involved in the signing of an open letter which the ONE Campaign had been collecting signatures for in 2015.
Sheryl Sandberg is serving as a Board member in several reputed organizations including Meta.
Sandberg was named to the Board of The Walt Disney Company, Starbucks, and V-Day. She serves on the Boards as a member of Women for Women International, the Center for Global Development, and Brookings Institution, and Ad Council also had Sandberg on their Boards previously. Sandberg was also known as a member of the advisory board of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
She Helped co-found the on-campus group Women in Economics and Government.
Larry Summers, treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, the director of the National Economic Council for President Barack Obama, and the chief economist at the World Bank was her thesis advisor at Harvard.
She graduated with the highest distinction from Harvard Business School.
She worked at Google before Facebook.
Sheryl Sandberg and Zuckerberg met at a Christmas party.
She was the first woman to be appointed to Facebook’s board.
Sheryl is the author of 2 best-selling books.
Sheryl Sandberg’s house is in Menlo Park and costs over $11 million.
Sheryl Sandberg – Controversies
Sheryl Sandberg has seen her own share of controversies, which were primarily associated with Facebook and her work with the social media company.
Sandberg was a part of the coordinated campaign to restrain Daily Mail from publishing a story about a temporary restraining order that was announced for Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, by a former girlfriend, The Wall Street Journal reported on April 21, 2022.
It was also reported that when the order was announced, Kotick and Sandberg were dating. Both of them worked with a team including Facebook and Activision employees to forge a strategy that would help convince the Mail not to publish the article in 2016 and 2019, reports say. Facebook is currently reported to be reviewing if Sandberg actually violated any of the company’s rules during the same occasion.
Sandberg was the face of Facebook when the social media giant was tangled in numerous controversies, like the time following the 2016 US presidential election, when Sandberg faced blowback over issues including the Cambridge Analytica scandal. She was involved in the spread of misinformation, and Facebook’s failures of oversight with regard to everything.
Sheryl Sandberg – An Inspiration
Sheryl Sandberg Ted Talk
It is a no-brainer that Sandberg is an inspiration for everyone. Her entrepreneurial work has fueled the growth of the company and hence, as a result, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world. She has risen through the ranks and is one of the reasons why Facebook is still a big name across the world dominated by the internet.
Under Sandberg, the team has worked efficiently and had continued to do so, at least till the announcement of her resignation, post which she will continue to be there on the Facebook Board. TheSheryl Sandberg story doesn’t end here but awaits the new beginnings that Sheryl has hinted at while posting about her resignation.
The Sheryl Sandberg foundation known as Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation aims to build a more equal and resilient world. With the help of two key initiatives LeanIn.Org and OptionB.Org, they bring people together to support each other.
One of the top Sheryl Sandberg quotes is “Feeling confident — or pretending that you feel confident — is necessary to reach for opportunities. It’s a cliche, but opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized.”
Sheryl Sandberg is popularly known as the COO of Facebook and the author of 2 bestselling books.
What did Sheryl Sandberg study?
Sheryl Sandberg went to Harvard College and has an AB in economics. She is also the recipient of the John H. Williams Prize for a top graduating student in economics. Later on, she pursued her MBA at Harvard Business School in 1995 with the highest distinction.
What is Sheryl Sandberg’s net worth?
As of 2022, the net worth of Sheryl Sandberg is $1.6 billion.
What ethnicity is Sheryl Sandberg?
Sandberg was born to a Jewish family and is the oldest of three children.
What are the books by Sheryl Sandberg?
The 2 books Sheryl Sandberg wrote are Lean In and Option B. Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In has frequented the bestseller list.
What did Sandberg do for Facebook?
Since she became the COO at Facebook, she has helped to dramatically increase the social media firm’s revenue.
Who is Sheryl Sandberg’s Husband?
Sheryl Sandberg’s husband is Tom Bernthal.
How many kids does Sheryl Sandberg have?
Sheryl Sandberg has two kids.
What does a COO do?
The chief operating officer (COO) is considered second in the chain of command and is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day administrative and operational functions of a business.
Introduced by the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung, introversion is the state of being chiefly interested in one’s own mental and physical self. Introverts are perceived as the more reserved, secluded and reflective of all the personality types. Popular theories suggest introverts expend most of their energy in reflective thinking and often dwindle in interactions.
The general view of a business leader is of a dynamic and charismatic personality. Made popular through movies and tv shows, the image of a leader is seen as extroverted, powerful and compelling, able to bend corporations to their wills however this is nowhere close to reality. Studies show that more than 46 per cent of industry leaders have introverted personality traits. Let us go through some of the leaders of juggernauts who are actively changing the business landscape.
Here are listed, some of the most successful leaders in the world who are known to be introverts. They have set an example that introverted traits is not a challenge. Introverts too can be great business leaders.
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg – An Introvert Business Leader
Perhaps the most widely used social platform are Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram – Subsidiaries of Meta. The founder and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most well known introverted business leaders. Mark’s life is a source of inspiration and dreams for many upcoming entrepreneurs.
Born in White Plains, New York on May 14th 1984, Mark Elliot Zuckerkburge was the son of a psychiatrist and dentist.
Having excelled at his studies in Ardsley High School and later in the famous Phillips Exeter Academy, he won several awards in astronomy, classical studies, maths and physics.
His aptitude for building highly competent software began at an early age with his development of “ZuckNet”, which enabled different computers to communicate.
Zuckerberg originally wrote the code for what will later become Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard University. The site grew in popularity achieving nearly 500 million active users within six years of launch.
Through interviews and a Hollywood movie starring Jesse Eisenberg Mark’s often introverted and reserved personality has been highlighted.
Facebook’s rise to the top has not been smooth sailing facing several controversies and legal cases, culminating in Mark and several top tech CEO being summoned to testify before the US congress over the legal use of user data.
Despite the many challenges Zuckerberg has established himself and his company as an irreplaceable part of our lives.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk – An Introvert Business Leader
The face of modern-day industry revolution Elon Musk is a business magnate, CEO, and owner of several high profile companies such as SpaceX, Tesla Inc and The Boring Company,
Born on the 28th of June 1971 in South Africa, Musk’s mother was a model and a dietitian while his father was a South African sailor, property developer and electromechanical engineer.
Despite having a challenging childhood after his parent’s divorce, Musk developed an active interest in computing and video games. Being a self-taught programmer Elon sold his first code for approximately $500 at age of 12.
Elon graduated from the well known University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics and a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics, Elon quickly dropped out of his Doctorate program at Stanford to join the internet boom of the 1990s and dreamed of starting an internet startup.
After several failures, Musk founded X.com and PayPal which were some of the first federally insured online banks. These ventures proved to be highly successful before being acquired by eBay for $.5 billion in stock.
Musk went on to fund and take an active part in the development of SpaceX, a rocket-building company to build reusable rockets for interplanetary explorations.
Elon also invested $6.5 million in Tesla Motors in 2004 before assuming leadership as the company CEO and product architect in 2008. His goal with Tesla is to build electric vehicles that rely on sustainable energy for their fuel needs.
Some of the other famous investments of Musk include OpenAI that seeks to provide Artificial intelligence services and The Boring Company that focuses on the construction of tunnels.
Musk has faced more failures than success stories in his life. Many of his companies faced high profile misfires and revenue losses that almost forced them to shut down. Despite these obstacles, Elon has been actively pushing to expand the boundaries of what is possible.
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett – An Introvert Business Leader
One of the most respected and well-known investors Warren Buffett is well known for his business acumen. The current chairman and CEO of the multinational conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, Warren has a known net worth of more than $ 102 billion.
Hailing from a family of well-known congressman Warren Edward Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska. His father, Howard Buffett, was elected to US college for four terms from 1943 to 1953. Howard is preceded by Charles F McLaughlin and later succeeded by Eugene D. O’ Sullivan
Warren completed his schooling at Woodrow Wilson High School where he was touted to be a future stockbroker. Despite his interest to skip college and go directly into business Howard Buffett compelled his son to enrol in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. From Wharton, he completed his degree in business administration from Nebraska University.
One of Buffett’s first business ventures came in 1945, where he and his friend placed a used pinball machine in the local barbershop. The investment became so successful that they sold it to a war veteran for $1,200.
Buffett’s professional career started at the lowest level working in different roles from investment salesman to securities analyst before being appointed as the general partner and later Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc in 1970.
A skill of Warren Buffett is to turn an unfavourable situation into a favourable one. During the 2007-08 financial crisis, through careful and strategic moves, Buffett helped Dow Chemicals pay for its $18.8 billion takeovers of Rohm & Hass, which made the single largest shareholder in the Berkshire Hathway group providing $3 billion.
Larry Page
Larry Page – An Introvert Business Leader
An answer to most of today’s problems is Google. The company has become a dominant force in the business world but few people know about its founder. Larry Page is an entrepreneur and computer scientist who founded Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc with his research partner Sergey Brin.
Lawrence Page was born in Lansing, Michigan. His father Carl Victor Page, was a front runner in computer science and artificial intelligence. Larry’s parents were distinguished professors at Michigan State University.
An avid reader from his youth Page describes himself as “spending a huge amount of time pouring over books and magazines” This interest in learning combined with attentive parents went along in fostering his creativity and invention.
Larry and fellow student Sergey Brin developed an algorithm called BackRub that ranks web pages based on importance. BackRub laid the foundation for what will, later on, become the google web page. The pair tested and improved their page from parts salvaged from older computers in their dorm rooms.
Since the Incorporation of Google Inc in 1998, Larry acted as its first CEO while Brin was the company president. The company became infamous for its early management policy that sought to cut out the middle-level management and have the developers report directly to the vice president of engineering.
Despite being the leader of one of the largest corporations in the world, Larry Page often stayed out of the limelight preferring to focus on his personal and family life.
An inspiration for many young women around the world Marissa Ann Mayer is a famous businesswoman and investor. Mayer is well known for the years she severed as the president and chief executive officer of Yahoo, where she was instrumental in bringing many radical changes.
A painfully shy child Marissa was born in Wausau, Wisconsin. During her childhood, Mayer kept herself active with several after school activities such as piano and ballet lessons that enabled her to develop discipline, poise and confidence.
Marissa graduated from the world-famous Stanford University with a Bachelor of Science degree in symbolic systems in 1997 and a Master of Science degree in computer science in 1999.
Post-graduation Mayer joined Google as employee number 20. Following rapid growth in the company, she was instrumental in developing Google AdWord the program generated more than 96 per cent of the company revenue in 2011.
After her tenure at Google, Mayer was appointed as the CEO of Yahoo in 2012. At Yahoo, Marissa launched a new online program called PB&J that created a voting system for employees to vote on their problems. Mayer changed several of Yahoo’s maternity leave policies, including the provision of cash bonuses to parents.
The ambition and drive shown by Marissa, especially in the face of challenges, is a continued source of inspiration for all of us.
Wendy Kopp
Wendy Kopp – An Introvert Business Leader
Wendy Kopp is a true leader in every sense of the word. Through the non-profit organisation, Teach for All, Kopp has been actively reaching education to people around the world.
Born and raised in Texas, Wendy Sue Kopp was a young entrepreneur from the start. Educated in Highland Park high school, Kopp has a Graduate degree in International Affairs at Princeton University.
Wendy proposed the creation of Teach for America which aimed to bring a real difference in the world and that college students can get more lucrative opportunities. More than 500 college graduates joined the charter corps in 1990.
Kopp started Teach For All which is a group of non-profit organisations for other countries that are based on the model of Teach For America.
In 2015 Wendy resigned from her position as the organisation CEO and transferred the leadership to Elisa Villanueva Beard.
Being a prolific writer, she has written about her experiences in two seminal books.
One of the recognized names in the world, William Henry Gates the third, is an investor, author and co-founder of Microsoft. The face of the home computer revolution, Gates is often described as an introvert & reclusive, and prefers to work alone.
The son of William H. Gates and Mary Maxwell Gates, Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1995. William Gates was an influential lawyer while Mary was on the board of directors for United Way of America.
During his school years, Gates was bullied for his short stature and his parents were strict disciplinaries who encouraged a competitive spirit. Gates interest in computers began in the eighth grade he would often get in trouble for his eagerness to get more computing time.
Together with his childhood friend Allen and Gates demonstrated a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, which gained the interest of MITS. The duo went on to register their company under the name of Microsoft in 1976.
The company gained massive popularity with the release of Microsoft Windows in November of 1985 as a direct competitor to Apple Macintosh GUI. The operating system was lauded for its simplicity and ease of access and grew to be the dominate the home computing landscape.
Gates was responsible for the company product strategies until 2006. Gates was often notorious for his aloofness and his pragmatic approach brought him into conflict with several of his employees.
Since leaving from active managerial capacities, Gates focused his time and resources on philanthropy and other projects. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the largest charitable funds.
Gates has also been an active advocate of several burning issues such as climate change and the COVID 9 pandemic.
Conclusion
Introverts might not be the most stand out personalities in a room and are often underestimated. Where their social skills fade their intellect shines bright. People with introverted traits show tremendous grit and passion in following their dedication. There are always lessons that all of us can learn from people from all walks of life.
FAQs
Can introverts be business leaders?
Extroverts are more commonly found to be in leadership roles. But introverts with their unique qualities can also be highly successful in leading business.
Who are the Successful introverts business leaders?
Some of the successful entrepreneurs who were introverts are:
Mark Zuckerberg
Elon Musk
Warren Buffett
Larry Page
Marissa Mayer
Wendy Kopp
Bill Gates
Was Albert Einstein an introvert?
Albert Einstein was a known introvert who believed in himself and became a successful Physicist through his creativity.
Are billionaires introverts in nature?
Yes, Most of the billionaires are known to be introverts.
There are over 2775 billionaires present in the world and with a total net worth of $13.1 trillion. The country that tops the list of most number of billionaires is the United States of America. The number of billionaires may seem less in a world where billions of people exist but these few have created businesses that made them who they are today; It has also changed the outlook of all those industries from where they came from.
These people turned their ideas into successful businesses and are now earning billions of dollars. All these are not that easy, one needs to be the best in their field for that.
You may find billionaires in almost every industry, but there are some that have given the world a larger number of billionaires who are out there ruling it. What is intriguing is that even during the pandemic, the wealth of billionaires has increased over an average of 27% in many industries.
In this article, we will talk about the industries that have given the most number of billionaires to the world. So let’s get started.
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”
The top position is taken by the industry of technology in this. Some of the data suggest that 70% of the top 10 richest people belong from the technology industry. It is in the first position because of evident reasons.
Technology serves us with the solution for almost any kind of problems and has taken the responsibility to make our life easier. It is quite evident that with new innovation every day, the tech industry will provide the world with more billionaires in the future.
Top billionaires in the tech industry
Jeff Bezos (Amazon)
Elon Musk (Tesla, Space X)
Bill Gates (Microsoft)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
Healthcare
The pandemic was a severe boost to the healthcare sector and has worked as a boon for many healthcare companies. Vaccine producers, diagnostic test producers saw immaculate growth in their business. Since 2020, the healthcare industry is surging at a tremendous pace and with the current condition, it seems unlikely to stop.
The strike of Covid-19 proves how health is a prime factor in human lives and without it; everything will just become a façade. The global healthcare industry is ready to reach over $10 trillion by 2022.
Top billionaires in the Healthcare industry
Jiang Rensheng & family (Chongqing Zhifei Biological Products)
Li Xiting (Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics)
Zhong Huijuan (Hansoh Pharmaceutical)
Xu Hang (Mindray Medical)
Finance And Investments
There are reports that state that the most number of billionaires in modern times comes from the Finance and investment sector. The business of money has been quite a success in the recent era. The money made by the people even the billionaires are managed by financial institutions. Whenever people transact money they take help from these financial institutions, so it is quite probable that this sector comes in the list of the top 10.
The entire world economy depends on financial institutions. Fintech startups are taking the world in storms and these industries would use the opportunity to create more billionaires in the future as they are the root of the economy.
The production of goods with the help 0f machines, tools as well as labor from raw materials is one of the most important sectors, as almost every creation depends on this. It is said to be the driving force since forever.
The growth of a nation immensely depends on the manufacturing sector. The manufacturing sector has seen a huge surge even during the Covid-19, this sector has over 300 billionaires in the world.
Top billionaires in the Manufacturing industry
He Xiangjian (Midea Group)
Fashion and Retail
Clothes are another significant necessity in human life. The fashion and retail industry focuses on making clothes. It is a $2.5 trillion industry and deals with luxury apparel brands. Fashion startups are also making noise in this sector and are on the verge of producing more and more billionaires in the future. There are 273 billionaires in the world in this industry.
Top billionaires in the Fashion industry
Bernard Arnault (LVMH)
Amancio Ortega (Inditex)
Phil Knight (Nike)
François Pinault (Kering)
Food And Beverage
Over 7 billion people exist in this world, so naturally, food must be provided to all of them. The number is only going to increase in the future; therefore the growth of this industry is inevitable. This sector till now has successfully contributed in the list of industries that have given us the most number of billionaires.
All other things can wait but for the survival of a human being, food and beverages are the most significant things. The food and beverages industry has over 219 billionaires from all over the world and it is only going to increase in the future.
Top billionaires in the Food and Beverage industry
Zhong Shanshan (Nongfu Spring)
Giovanni Ferrero (The Ferrero Group)
Qin Yinglin & family (Muyuan Foodstuff Co.)
Jacqueline Mars (Mars Inc.)
Real Estate
It is said to be the oldest source of creation of wealth. It is also said to be an open industry where anyone can be a part of it who are interested to. People who are already billionaires and are wealthy also show their interest in investing in the real estate industry, as it is considered as one of the most profitable sectors. There are over 215 billionaires in this sector.
Top billionaires in the Real Estate industry
Lee Shau Kee (Henderson Land Development)
Hui Ka Yan (Evergrande Group)
Yang Huiyan & family (Country Garden Holdings)
Wu Yajun (Longfor Properties)
Hospitality Industry
It is another important form of industry that has given quite a number of wealthy people. Providing the guests with home-like services is one of the main factors of this industry. Food, comfort, entertainment, and lodging are all included in this sector. The global hospitality market is expected to reach $4132.5 billion by the end of 2021.
Top billionaires in the Hospitality industry
Sheldon Adelson (Sands Hotel)
Donald Trump
William Barron Hilton (Hilton Hotels & Resorts)
Phillip Ruffin (Ruffin’s hotel)
Renewable Energy
Climate change is a serious factor in the world, right now. Saving the world has become a necessity, thanks to this industry some of the billionaires are able to make tons of money and become a savior as well. The energy market is coming out slowly and is on verge of becoming one of the most important sectors in the near future. It has given the world over 180 billionaires.
Top billionaires in the Renewable Energy industry
Elon Musk
Robin Zeng (Amperex Technology)
Aloys Wobben (Enercon)
Li Zhenguo (LONGi Green Energy)
Entertainment and Media
The entertainment industry is a very big part of the world economy. Digital media technology has started helping people make big in this industry. There is a need for entertainment in life, especially during the Covid-19 lockdown, this sector helped people to avoid boredom. Dramas, films, music all these are the source of entertainment. This sector has 95 billionaires and more in the making.
Top billionaires in the Entertainment and Media industry
Being a billionaire is not an easy job, one needs to have patience, perseverance, and the will to do hard work. Some of the industries are recently on-trend and have provided the world with the most number of billionaires. It doesn’t mean that it is easy in these industries to make tons of money, in fact, it is quite hard and challenging.
FAQ
Which industry produces the most billionaires?
Technology industry is one industry that produces the most billionaires.
Which Industry creates the most millionaires?
The financial service sector has the most number of millionaires.
What jobs can make you a millionaire?
Professional athlete, Investment banker, Entrepreneur, and Real estate agent some of the industries that can make you a millionaire.
