Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during an Acquired podcast at the Chase Center in downtown San Francisco, said that he is done apologising. Shortly after stepping on stage, Zuckerberg quipped that he might have to book his next appearance to apologise for whatever he was about to say. After a brief pause, he clarified that he was joking and that his days of apologising were behind him.
This comes on the heels of Meta CEO sending a letter in August to House Republicans apologising for censoring misinformation around COVID-19 in 2020. He also apologised for bending to demands from the Joe Biden government. In the letter, he added that he regrets not being more outspoken about the pressure from the officials of the government at the time.
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Why Mark Zuckerberg Said He’s Done Apologising
Zuckerberg’s playful remark about apologising was a sarcastic dig at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who addressed a misunderstanding from his appearance on the Acquired podcast earlier this year. In a pre-recorded video shown to the audience, Huang explained that his original statement—he never would have started Nvidia if he knew what he did today—was taken out of context. He clarified that he absolutely would start Nvidia again, but his comment was about the naivety of startup founders.
Though Zuckerberg’s comment was a lighthearted dig at Huang, it reflected a shift in his own outlook on life and business. After years of apologizing for Facebook’s content moderation issues, Zuckerberg acknowledged that his biggest mistake was a “political miscalculation,” which he described as a “20-year mistake.” He explained that he had taken too much responsibility for problems that he believed were beyond Facebook’s control.
Zuckerberg said, “Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were. When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”
While talking about the pressure from the Biden government to curb misinformation, he said, in the future, he would “push back if something like this happens again.”