Original subtitles

Hey, everyone, we are live from my back yard

where I am smoking a brisket and some ribs.

Oh, hey, buddy. BABY GURGLES

Whoop!

Look, you're alive.

Yeah, you're pointing at all the people reacting.

DOG GROWLS Here you go.

Beaster! You wanna to say hi?

There he goes.

Oh, he's crazy.

Yeah, crazy Beast.

Mark Zuckerberg, when I look at his Facebook page,

I see the same person that I knew then

in the way that he lived his life.

It doesn't look contrived or contorted to me.

When I see his dog, Beast, and his wife, Priscilla,

and his kids, I see the same person that I always knew.

I see he cares about the people who are close to him.

Uh-oh, I have nowhere to go!

OK. Lunge!

His simplicity, which seems amazing for somebody who's created

such a big empire.

He's always been a very simple, easy-going person.

But there's some part of me that wonders, did Mark change?

Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company.

For most of our existence, we focused on all of the good

that connecting people can do.

I remember Mark confidently telling me Facebook

was a billion-dollar company.

He has that idealism from very early on.

Mark likes to portray himself as like a nerd

who just wanted everybody to connect.

Like, the reality is he has more power than most world leaders.

I did consider confronting Mark.

My manager talked me out of it, saying that it would be pretty

confrontational and it would probably get me fired!

Mark's idealism was unbuffered by any concern for the people

who might be harmed.

I hold him responsible for

some of the most horrific consequences of Facebook.

That's behaviour which is worthy of contempt.

Whoa!

That is some group of people. Thousands.

So nice. Thank you very much.

That's really nice. Thank you.

It's great to be at Trump Tower.

It's great to be in a wonderful city, New York.

And it's an honour to have everybody...

I can produce ads for Donald Trump in my sleep.

I know exactly what he's trying to say

and who he's trying to say it to.

My name is Bradley Parscale.

In Trump's 2016 campaign, I was the digital media director

and head of advertising.

We recognised that a large percentage of conservatives

who wanted to protect America's culture and America's history

and our America's future,

this was an untapped source of potential voters.

I pitched the idea of Facebook first to Jared Kushner

on the 26th floor of Trump Tower.

Unfortunately, candidate Trump

at that point never believed in what I did until after we won.

He didn't like it. He thought we should spend every dollar on TV.

He came in to me and got in my face, yelled and spit all over my face,

pointing at the TV and says, "That's how elections are won."

I said, "Sir, you're wrong, and you're going to find out on November 4th."

And I said, "We're going to win the election on Facebook."

I think Mark Zuckerberg controls a large amount of communication.

I think he's powerful.

I would say in some cases, Zuckerberg and many of the tech

titans from the other major companies are more powerful

than small countries.

I knew these voters.

I knew Facebook.

I knew the Trumps because of my years of working for them.

I was the exact right thing to set off this powder keg.

The fuse for this powder keg was lit 12 years earlier

in a suburb of San Francisco.

Mark Zuckerberg was just getting started in Silicon Valley,

the tech capital of the world, and the birthplace of companies

like Google, Apple and Yahoo!.

My name is Ezra Callahan and I was the sixth employee at Facebook.

I fell into Facebook very randomly.

I got an email from Sean Parker of Napster fame saying,

"Hey, do you want to come work at Facebook?"

And I said, "Sure, I've got six months to kill till law school.

"Might as well," and drove up to Palo Alto.

I get to the house they're living in, like 1:00 in the morning,

knock on the door, and Dustin Moskovitz answers the door and says,

"Who are you?"

And there I am, standing with all my stuff saying,

"I'm Ezra, I work for you."

Mark was there. I remember walking into the living room

and kind of get a little bit of a glance up of like, "Hey,"

back to the computer screen, you know?

So when I meet Mark Zuckerberg, he's 20 years old.

It was kids running a company.

Everybody lived together. Everyone hung out together.

This house is a total hovel.

There's coding books everywhere.

These guys were in there 24/7, cranking out, you know,

this incredibly fast growing website.

These were not guys who were capable of cooking for themselves.

I do remember the house having a very bad

and constant ant problem.

Back then, you know, I was very much a stoner.

In fact, most of the early Facebook employees would partake,

but not Mark Zuckerberg, because for him he had this weird connection

that weed made him think of drugs and drugs made him think of needles

and needles made him think of blood.

And he was deathly afraid of needles and blood.

And he would get light-headed just from seeing someone take a bong rip.

He just lived this completely Spartan lifestyle.

You would walk in his bedroom and you would just see a mattress

on the floor, just some random stuff scattered around the room.

And that was about it.

He was an awkward, engineering-focused kid.

Everything you've ever seen about him just reinforces your idea

of he is a small, brilliant, very cocky nerd

who knows what he believes in and is sticking to his guns.

Growing up in a village outside New York City,

Zuckerberg had a privileged childhood.

His father was a dentist, his mother, a psychologist.

And he had nothing but sisters,

and he went to a very elite prep school.

Mark had a prodigious aptitude for technology

and as a child built ZuckNet, a computer program

for his father's dental surgery, as he proudly explains.

Switch forward in time, in 1996,

and considering Mark was 12 at the time,

was a pretty dramatic thing that I can honestly say very few, if any,

of my competitors had.

They're reporting that there is an email from Harvard.

Is that correct?

By 17, Zuckerberg is looking at a bright future,

seeking to study computer science and psychology.

I got accepted. Are you serious?! Yeah.

So my reaction to Mark getting accepted into Harvard reminds me

of when I got accepted

in that my parents were a lot more excited than I was.

Just another kid happened to get into an Ivy League school.

All right!

My name is Divya Narendra.

I went to Harvard College with Mark.

College was when I came up with this concept

for what I think many people today consider social media.

My college roommates at the time were Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

We had come to Mark with a pre-existing set of code,

so we really asked him to take... Kind of bring it to the finish line.

Our first encounter with him was not a getting to know you over bagels.

I just thought he was either shy or poker faced.

Our emails to Mark were pretty much always of the following form.

"Mark, how is the code coming along?" You know?

"Are we close to deploying yet?" "Is it almost finished?"

We would get very short responses that were sort of to the effect of,

"Yeah, I'll get it done."

A month or two into it, I got the feeling that he wasn't going to be

our programming solution.

I think it was in the cafeteria of our dorm.

There was a student who had brought me an article

about this website, Facebook.

At the time it was actually called The Facebook.

We were pretty dismayed.

In our heads, he had launched the exact same concept, if you will,

that we were trying to build with him.

What happened to us at the time seemed, like, unconscionable.

Ultimately, we sued Mark and his co-founders and the company.

Zuckerberg denied stealing the idea, but settled the case in 2008,

paying out ¤65 million.

I mean, stealing ideas is kind of a common thing

just in Silicon Valley all together.

The truth is, who gets to market fastest,

that's how you win in Silicon Valley.

And so Mark was very similar to that.

There were a lot of people having the same idea around the same time

around social networking.

He just did it faster and was more aggressive than the others.

Zuckerberg returns to Harvard in 2017,

giving a more flattering version of Facebook's origin.

I am outside of my old dorm room, Kirkland House, H33.

And this is literally where I sat.

And I had my little laptop here,

and this is where I programmed Facebook.

It is my high honour to introduce Dr Mark Zuckerberg.

A rapturous crowd sees Zuckerberg given an honorary doctorate

from Harvard despite never graduating.

I remember that night, I launched Facebook from...

..that little dorm in Kirkland House.

CHEERS AND WHISTLES

I was excited to help connect the Harvard community,

but one day someone would connect the whole world.

You see, my hope was never to build a company.

I wanted to have an impact.

Mark likes to portray himself as like a nerd who just wanted

everybody to connect and bring the whole world together.

And it was like Kumbaya. And that's like his story, right?

Mark's Facebook page is really very curated.

He definitely is trying to humanise himself and project

this image of being likeable.

# Country roads, take me home... #

That video where he was surfing...

..and John Denver playing in the background.

# West Virginia... #

You just can't imagine, like, a marketing group sitting

and saying, "Oh, I think that's a really good idea."

Going to can give me a hug? Yay!

Zuckerberg's marketing also relies on his children

and wife, Priscilla Chan,

a paediatrician he's been with since Harvard.

All right, we good? Mm-hm.

The pregnancy has been really fun

and we're really looking forward to meeting her.

Mark is really looking forward to meeting her.

I mean, it's been 37 weeks,

so I think it's time for her to come out.

I would like...

It's my turn to hold her!

I think everything that Facebook does is a PR campaign.

Whether it's a scandal, it's a business announcement,

it's Mark Zuckerberg's personal Facebook page

and what he puts on it, it's PR, it's image shaping.

Like, the reality is that he is a ruthless businessman

and he has been aggressive and he has been strategic

the whole time.

The first time I met Mark, and if I was 24, he was probably 21.

He wasn't really Mark Zuckerberg yet.

I mean, a little bit. But still, I found him warm, kind, friendly.

I didn't necessarily know how extraordinary he was.

My name is Leah Pearlman.

I went to work at Facebook in about 2006.

And I invented the "awesome" button,

which later became the "like" button.

My memory of being at Facebook in the early days

is we were all a little bit awkward.

It was like an awkward group of people.

THEY COUNT: One, two, three, four,

five, six, seven, eight.

One thing I'm struck by when I watch that video is

it brought me right back to being there.

There's beer down there.

We were all young and optimistic.

I was in the same friend group as Mark.

He laughed a lot and was sometimes kind of arrogant.

I'll just do a little intro and kind of go into the interview.

Should I put the beer down?

No, no, actually, I'm going to mention the beer.

Just 21, a relaxed Mark Zuckerberg toasts the success of Facebook

by giving this interview, amid eager media attention.

I'm here in Palo Alto, California, chillin' with Mark Zuckerberg

of thefacebook.com.

And we're drinking out of a keg of Heineken because

- what are we celebrating, Mark? Just got three million users.

Three million users. Yeah.

And how long has Facebook been around? Not that long.

A little more than a year.

Mark's confidence comes from

his intellectual ability.

I think he is a very brilliant guy.

His brain works very quickly.

It's truly wired that way that those elite engineers are.

And one of the things that I really liked about Facebook

was that I could always move so quickly.

So, like, I wrote the original application and, like, nine days,

at the end of January and that was cool.

He thinks he's the smartest guy in the room,

but you'll never find a video of him anywhere where you're like,

"Oh, he's hilarious," or "He has so much energy."

I remember Mark confidently telling me

that this was a billion-dollar company.

He always liked to end meetings or speeches by saying "Domination"

until we had enough of a general counsel sway over him

to say stop saying that!

That is the fast track to an antitrust lawsuit,

is to say domination at the end of every company meeting.

So please stop saying it!

Mark Zuckerberg's bid for domination

comes during a boom time for Silicon Valley.

Every few years a company comes along

which tries to change the way we do things.

I'm thinking about Apple computers or Microsoft.

The noughties is the age of the internet, the iPod

and hysteria over the latest phone.

The tech giants are taking over the world.

Silicon Valley is a place filled with dreams.

Most of the dreams don't work out.

It's an intensely Darwinian environment,

and the kind of things that prosper here have a big idea

and the story to go with it that captures the imagination.

Facebook was founded in 2004.

I met Mark two years later.

I'm Roger McNamee. I was an adviser to Mark Zuckerberg.

I got an email from an executive at Facebook who said,

"My boss is facing a crisis and he needs to talk to someone

"who is really experienced and can keep their mouth shut."

So, like, three hours later, Mark Zuckerberg comes to my office

and he looks just like Mark Zuckerberg.

I said, "Mark, I don't know why you're here,

"but I have a very strong view about Facebook.

"If it has not already happened,

"either Microsoft or Yahoo is going to offer ¤1 billion

"to buy Facebook and everybody you know will say,

"'Take the money.'

"I'm here to tell you, Mark, I am certain

"that if you sell the company,

"whoever buys it - doesn't matter who it is - will mess it up.

"If you believe in the vision that you had to create this company,

"you need to see it through."

What followed was the most painful five minutes

of my professional life.

Mark doesn't say a word.

So first...

..then...

At the one minute mark, I'm going,

"Wow, he's really thinking hard about this."

The two minute mark, I'm getting really uncomfortable

because two minutes of silence in that context is painful.

The three minute mark, I'm beginning to dig trenches

in the upholstery of the couch I'm sitting in.

All I could do not to scream.

And sometime around the five minute mark, he finally goes,

"Roger, you're not even going to believe this.

"That's why I'm here. Yahoo, ¤1 billion.

"Everybody's telling me to sell." He said, "How did you know?"

I said, "The really important question is,

"do you want to sell the business?"

He goes, "No, but I don't want to disappoint everybody."

I go, "Whoa, hang on just a second.

"If you don't want to sell it, then we should just figure out

"how to keep it from being sold."

He was precocious.

At 20 years old, he had already many of the characteristics

in terms of focus, intensity, self discipline

that I associated with successful entrepreneurs.

Zuckerberg's precociousness can be seen in this interview

as he heralds a new age of the 20-something tech titan.

I mean, you can hire someone who's a software engineer

and has been doing it for ten years,

and if they're doing it for ten years, and that's probably

what they're doing for their life, you know? And I mean, that's cool.

But there's some things that that person can do

and they're definitely useful within an organisation

and can do a lot of stuff.

But if you find someone whose raw intelligence

exceeds theirs but has ten years less of experience,

then they can probably adapt and learn way quicker.

By 2006, Zuckerberg has grown the company to 12 million users.

I watched him taking on kind of a global responsibility.

He has really changed the world in some meaningful ways

because everything that came after was built on the fact

that Facebook existed. I mean, it innovated a whole frontier.

Mark Zuckerberg is an interesting leader

because everyone knows he's the guy.

I don't think there has ever in the history of the company

been a time where anyone inside the company questioned

whether decisions were coming from someone else or not.

It is very much a top down organisation.

So the toughest times at the company

were the times where Mark did do the wrong thing.

In 2006, Zuckerberg launches News Feed.

For the first time, users' posts are automatically shared

with their Facebook friends.

And all through testing everyone warned

this is going to feel like an overload.

People are going to feel like you violated their privacy

because you were just bombarding people with more information at once

than they have ever seen in their life.

And he decides to proceed. You know, "We're just launching it."

And it is just a disaster.

There was an immediate backlash

when users complained that it invaded their privacy.

This thing is universally hated.

There's users protesting outside our office and we all said,

we told you this was going to happen.

But with most missteps, even the ones that triggered these huge

firestorms within the company, it's rare that you see Mark

acknowledge the idea was wrong.

He does not think that he is wrong at a fundamental level.

The defining thing for Facebook is that we're always pushing

to build products that help people share more information

that wasn't available previously

and make the world more open and transparent.

You can tie a lot of Facebook's problems today in terms

of the product's influence on the world, where there's reason

to be concerned that the influence is not a positive one

and maybe a very negative one.

I do think you can tie a lot of that back to the early days.

Despite the uproar, Zuckerberg kept News Feed

with minor adjustments to users' privacy settings.

Mark learned from that a very important lesson,

which is if they ignore criticism, the criticism will go away,

which it did.

I mean, News Feed became the core of the entire product.

He got in big trouble and he talked his way out of it.

Which set a pattern -

both the thing he did wrong and the way he got out of it

were essentially identical to what he's done ever since.

At just 23, Zuckerberg is leading a company worth ¤15 billion

and operating in dozens of countries worldwide.

He got really hung up on the notion of reaching a billion users.

It's like, Mark, stop.

There are seven billion people in the world.

So you're talking about 15% of the population.

Facebook's rise is pretty unprecedented.

It was clear Mark was going to be a very important person

in the world and a very powerful person.

Even seasoned interviewers are buying into this nascent power.

Like the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin,

Mark Zuckerberg is looked up to in Silicon Valley

as a visionary.

You seem to be replacing Larry and Sergey as the people out here

who everyone's talking about.

You're just staring at me. Is that a question?

Everyone was talking about him.

He's even imitated in wooden satire on Saturday Night Live.

Whoa. Mark... Mark Zuckerberg. Hey, how are you?

Oh, how am I? I'm bad. OK.

You got nominated for an Academy Award for playing me.

Why can't I go in there? I'm the real Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah, and I'm pretty sure at least one of those guys

is the real Mark Zuckerberg. No, I am.

That guy's like my evil twin, and that's just Andy Samberg.

Those guys are such nerds.

Even world leaders rub shoulders with the young billionaire,

however awkwardly.

My name is Barack Obama,

and I'm the guy who got Mark to wear a jacket and tie.

Zuckerberg is unstoppable.

Thank you.

Facebook has just grown to sort of enormous proportions.

It's bought Instagram, it's bought WhatsApp,

adding on lots of different areas, like messaging, like photo sharing.

Mark has previously said that he idolises the Roman emperors.

Zuckerberg himself strives also for dominance

and to be this canny operator with himself at the helm.

Mark has this unwavering belief in his own greatness.

He recognises his business is as influential

as the sum of Christianity and Islam.

I think Mark Zuckerberg believes that Facebook is sovereign,

like a country, and that he deserves to be treated as a sovereign.

He's been told his whole life

that he can accomplish anything he puts his mind to.

He's been told that there are no rules.

One set of rules for the rich and powerful

and another set of rules for everybody else.

And he's rich and powerful, and so no-one ever tells him no.

The trick is, do those people have some way of telling

the difference between right and wrong

and the discipline to stop before they do something harmful?

I never wanted to become a public figure.

I don't know what anyone would want to do with this.

I wanted to stay home and pet my cats.

But we can't have everything we want in life.

I found myself in a position of social responsibility by accident.

Certainly, someone else would be better suited for it.

If I had been born with a silver tongue,

perhaps I could have fixed everything within the system.

Perhaps I could have persuaded Mark

and everything would have been gravy and rainbows.

My name is Sophie Zhang. At Facebook, I was a data scientist.

Mark was widely respected within the company.

I would describe him as fairly visionary.

Facebook does serve an important purpose for many people

throughout the world.

CHANTING

The Arab Spring is a very well-known example

of the ability of Facebook to connect activists,

but it's certainly not the only example.

In 2022, the platform is Ukraine's President Zelensky's

weapon of choice in his information war with Russia.

That's why Russia saw fit to ban Facebook

as soon as it started waging this war in Ukraine.

But adoring fans see Zuckerberg celebrate Facebook's

positive influence in the world.

It's not enough to just build powerful tools.

We need to make sure that they're used for good. And we will.

You know, we've seen the #MeToo movement and the March for Our Lives

organised, at least in part, on Facebook.

But we also need to keep building

and bringing the world closer together.

Years earlier, and Facebook is emerging as a key source of news

for Americans deciding between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Well, at least I have a plan to fight Isis... No, no.

You're telling the enemy everything you want to do.

No, we're not. See, you're telling the enemy everything you want to do.

I hope the fact checkers are...turning up the volume

and really working hard.

I think it really changed with the Trump election,

when people realised, "Oh, this platform is not just a nice place

"for Grandmother to share pictures of her bunny.

"It's actually a place that can be abused

"and can change the political winds."

I started to notice Facebook groups that were notionally associated

with the Bernie Sanders campaign

spreading hate speech about Hillary Clinton,

and it was spreading in a way that suggested

that somebody was paying to boost the stuff.

So I'm going, "Wow.

"People are using Facebook's ad tools to spread hate speech,

"disinformation and conspiracy theories."

So I reached out to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg,

because I thought that there was something about Facebook

that was allowing bad actors to harm innocent people.

And they said, "Roger, thanks for reaching out.

"We disagree with you. We do not think there's a systemic problem."

And that was not a particularly surprising response from them.

Donald Trump won the campaign. Facebook was the rails he rode on.

He's still the train.

I believe Facebook 100% was the train tracks

Trump's train drove on Clinton.

..Clinton? No, Hillary failed. Her Russian reset...

In 2016, Brad Parscale is in charge of putting millions of adverts

promoting Trump on Facebook.

One of the ads we put out was Hillary Clinton was Pac-Man.

All the dots were emails.

The whole meme was her trying to eat up all the emails

before the FBI caught her.

I thought that was clever.

We got a cease and desist, obviously, for it.

You know, it was not easy.

In 2016, Facebook wanted clicks. They needed eyeballs.

Money comes from more eyeballs.

The more people click on stuff, the more money they make.

So if you made something that was that clever,

tens of millions of people would see that ad.

Facebook was, I think, very delighted that we were doing this

because millions of people started turning on Facebook every day

to watch President Trump - more hours of it,

more consumption, more talking.

I've always kind of took Zuckerberg as very agnostic to politics.

So one of the executives at Facebook took me to dinner,

and they're like, "Well, we want you to do this on Facebook."

I looked at them and I said, "I'm about to spend the most money

"in the history of digital advertising."

They said, "How much do you think you'll spend?" And I said,

"Upwards of ¤100 million on your platform."

Their mouth just dropped.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think Facebook danced to your tune

because you were paying them so much money?

I think a lot of people would be pretty excited to get ¤100 million.

Yeah. I think Facebook wanted that 100 million bucks.

Donald Trump will turn Washington upside down, day one...

The Trump campaign ended up spending under half that amount,

but still millions more than Clinton.

In response to Parscale's allegations, Facebook said,

"This accusation falsely implies that we offered special treatment

"to Trump's campaign when we didn't.

"We offered identical support to both campaigns,

"which spent a total of ¤81 million during that election."

The amount of data Facebook had

and understanding an ability to change history,

who gets elected, was amazing.

Brad Parscale is really clever.

He realises you could just target each ad itself

to the people who you need, right?

So you can just do people who are already

going to be susceptible to your message of outrage.

In 2016, that was revolutionary in politics.

Did I invent that idea? No.

But did I finally put it all together to change the course

of human history? Yes.

2016 was a turning point, I think, when we saw it happen.

That is when I think the world woke up to the power that Facebook had.

Mark Zuckerberg can pretty much do what he wants.

He's a capitalist and he is seeking to maximise profit,

and so he seeks out opportunities to make sure his company will succeed

and he pushes the boundaries.

By 2017, a quarter of the people on earth use Facebook.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg is just 33.

Zuckerberg's unique in his power,

in that he controls the company in a way that...

These other big tech platforms,

there's not a single individual that controls the company.

He has a unique class of shares and governance.

You know, some people have called him a dictator.

He controls the company.

The FBI later revealed that Russian troll farms spread misinformation

on Facebook in support of Trump.

Zuckerberg had suspected, but wouldn't admit it for eight months.

I eventually realised that you cannot trust these people,

and anyone who trusts them at this point is delusional.

I had a choice.

I could either resume my retirement

and leave it to somebody else to deal with it,

or I could take what I knew and see if I couldn't raise an alarm.

And I decided to do the latter.

By 2018, the US Senate is holding Zuckerberg to account

for Facebook's harms.

Today's hearing on Facebook's social media privacy

and the use and abuse of data.

Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company,

but it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools

from being used for harm as well.

And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections

and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.

And it was my mistake and I'm sorry.

When Mark Zuckerberg was called to Washington,

it was this incredible thing

that the CEO of one of the most powerful companies on the planet

is having to come testify.

Senators questioned Zuckerberg about mounting scandals,

such as British firm Cambridge Analytica's

illegal harvesting of 87 million Facebook users' data.

How can consumers trust your company

to be caretakers of their most personal information?

What is Facebook doing to prevent foreign actors

from interfering in US elections?

Thank you, Senator. This is...

One of my top priorities in 2018 is to get this right.

He, you know, clearly tried to answer questions

and then get out of town.

I've heard many times the idea that Facebook cares primarily

about American, about Western ideas.

Some countries are considered more important than others.

Facebook was my second job out of grad school.

I was on the fake engagement team, which was in Site Integrity,

which was essentially the spam team.

Whilst taking down spam, Sophie uncovered thousands of fake accounts

run by corrupt world leaders, including in Honduras.

It was very obvious that the president of Honduras

was behind this, that he was manipulating the Honduran people

on a grand scale.

I found a number of cases in many other countries,

but most notably in Azerbaijan.

It's so democratic that in 2013, they accidentally released

election results the day before the actual election.

The fake Facebook accounts belonged to a regime

accused of systematically murdering opponents.

I was very naive at the start.

I thought they would just... I had found this, that it was great.

I would hand it over to the right people, they would take care of it,

then I could go back to my life and petting my cats.

What I quickly found was that every time I submitted these

through the proper channels, they went into a black box shredder,

where they were promptly ignored.

I tried as best as I could to fix Facebook from within,

and every time it didn't work, I escalated one step further.

I talked to a team and it didn't work,

so I talked to the next team, the next team.

I did consider confronting Mark, asking him in front of

the entire company why we hadn't done anything about it.

My manager talked me out of it, saying that it would be

pretty confrontational and would probably get me fired.

I felt sometimes like the fate of a country was resting on my shoulders.

I never expected to have this much responsibility.

And I started losing sleep at night,

staying up until 5.00 in the morning,

wondering and crying and...

INTERVIEWER: Do you want to stop? No, I'm fine.

I was under...

I was under an extraordinary amount of pressure

within the company - with no training, with no expertise.

I was never...

I was never trained to make moral decisions of this sort.

One of Mark Zuckerberg's great skills

was convincing the people that his vision of a global network

was the most important thing anybody could do.

What I discovered was that Mark's idealism was...unbuffered

by any concern for the people who might be harmed along the way -

"It's OK to harm other people

"because our mission is that important" -

a dangerous form of libertarianism,

that each of us is entitled to do whatever we want

without being responsible for the consequences.

I feel like my life has had different chapters.

And so, the Silicon Valley chapter

was a lot about inventing things that had never been invented before.

When I think about Mark, he's laughing.

He's laughing so much, and...there is so much lightness to him.

I do remember having so much admiration

for the way he had a vision and he knew what he wanted to say.

But sometimes, I look at how big Facebook is.

I think it hurts because I don't really love the direction the company's gone.

Well, Mr Zuckerberg, you have a billion users

and almost 50,000 employees,

and so, you agree you have a responsibility to remove

harmful lies from your platform, correct?

The infrastructure...

In 2020, Zuckerberg again faces US lawmakers

amid accusations that Facebook profited

from COVID-19 misinformation.

Congressman, I think we have a responsibility to, er...

to limit the spread of content

that's going to be harmful for people.

And also, if...if...if...

I'd like to add that I do not believe

that we have any incentive to have this content on our service.

People don't like it.

Except that... With all due respect,

except that it is often the most engaging. It's the most...

It...it brings the most likes or it brings the most activity,

which, of course, produces great profits.

So you do have an incentive.

The CEOs of these large technology companies feel like

they can do whatever they want and are not accountable to anybody.

The conduct of Facebook has been,

of all these tech companies, the worst.

I hold him responsible for some of the most horrific consequences

that is driven by one objective -

amassing greater and greater wealth

and causing real harm to our democracy.

And so, I think that's behaviour which is both immoral

and disgraceful, and worthy of contempt.

Facebook has said that I was fired for underperforming.

I've heard people say that I was fired for retaliation.

On my final day at the company,

I stayed up all night writing my infamous memo.

It was intended to summarise the failure of Facebook

to address the harm associated with fake accounts.

They said that I had blood on my hands.

They agreed it was terrible, but they didn't think it was

necessarily worth Facebook's time or investment to do anything about it?

That is the way I would personally describe it...

I have testified before the European Parliament

and the British Parliament.

The US Congress hasn't yet asked me to testify,

though I'm sure they're very busy.

I haven't yet tried to get another job.

I spend most of my time at home petting my cats these days.

Facebook have previously declined to comment

on why Sophie Zhang was fired.

We sued Mark in 2004. It's been 20 years.

Yeah, there is a lot to be said for letting bygones be bygones.

It's very easy to hate on Mark Zuckerberg.

And it's very easy to write the guy off as a sociopathic robot.

But his wife had multiple miscarriages, he has two girls,

and he's been on the receiving end of massively negative press.

I think he's been humbled by that.

Why do you think so many people dislike you?

Some even hate you.

Well, I mean, it's not great, um...but...

HE LAUGHS ..but I...

I mean, look, if I wanted people to

think positively about me as a person, um...

I don't know, I'm not sure if you'd go build a company.

For my own psychology, the way that I try to manage this stuff is

I wake up in the morning and you get, like, whatever emails you have.

Often in there, there's a fair amount of bad news.

It's almost like getting punched.

When I see him vilified so one-sidedly, it hurts.

When people just say what he's done that's wrong,

they're missing...a human.

I don't think of Mark as perfect,

it's just his choices affect a lot more people

than most of our choices.

And so, the responsibility on him is great.

Zuckerberg has been working to improve his reputation

and secure his legacy.

We all want our children to live in a better world.

So we started asking,

can we cure all diseases in our children's lifetime?

We think so.

APPLAUSE

Zuckerberg is rebranding as a philanthropist,

and pledging to give away ¤45 billion

through his charitable foundation.

I love her.

AUDIENCE LAUGH

If you've studied people like Mark Zuckerberg

over the last few centuries, um...

at some point, philanthropy tries to rewrite their image

in death and legacy.

And, you know, Mark tried to, I think, shape his image early.

I don't think we know what his legacy will be at this point.

Today, we're going to talk about the metaverse.

I want to share what we imagine is possible.

The experiences you'll have, the creative economy we'll all build,

and the technology that needs to be invented.

Amid great fanfare,

2021 saw Zuckerberg stake Facebook's future

on an ambitious virtual-reality experience.

Whoa! We're floating in space?

A-huh. Who made this place? It's awesome!

Right? It's from a creator...

Zuckerberg's vision is that we're going to create

an entire ecosystem that people are going to live in

as an alternative to living in the real world.

I mean, that is an incredibly dystopian vision.

The problem we have with Facebook today

is that through the data they already have on you,

Facebook is able to manipulate your behaviour without your knowledge.

In the metaverse, they're going to control everything.

Monitor your pulse,

they're going to be able to monitor your reaction, every single thing.

And people should run, not walk, to get away from.

And people are running away.

In recent months, Facebook's stock price fell by nearly ¤700 billion,

and the company announced it's laying off 11,000 people.

But I think all in all, he's managed to build

an incredibly large global organisation

that has become sort of part of

the plumbing of how we communicate.

And no-one can take that away from him.

I mean, even if he quit, he said,

"I'm turning off Facebook today. I'm done. Everyone go home."

You know, he has changed the world.

And so, I think that's more meaningful to him than popularity.

My suspicion is that his biggest impact is still ahead of us.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media