Your Facebook Page Is Not Yours

History will judge whether Elon Musk is perhaps one of the greatest entrepreneurial visionaries of our time, however, there is at least one entrepreneurial eventuality that he failed to see – his Facebook page. He shouldn’t feel too bad as he shares that distinction with approximately 1.4 billion people. What he failed to assess was the risk/reward he was taking IF Facebook successfully executed its business-plan. Neither did governments. Call me a skeptic, but I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg is uncomfortable giving interviews.

My humble opinion: the reason he stayed relatively silent all these years was to avoid the inevitable questions he must answer, for as long as possible. Begging forgiveness from users in 2018 carries much more risk for the aforementioned than Mark Zuckerberg. A decade ago those tables were decidedly opposite.

Yes, a democracy built on capitalism is still the best imperfect political/economic system. And If Elon Musk is able to predict 20% of what the Founding Fathers did in 1776 (see post https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/go-patriots-mark-ulian/) he’ll be doing quite well.

So, Elon Musk took his Facebook pages down – end of story. Accept, in the last two years more data has been created than the entire history of the human race. And less than .5% of that data has yet to be analyzed. So, the data from those pages lives on, and on, and perhaps on in perpetuity.

Ten years ago, a friend of mine chirped “Mark, you don’t have a Facebook page? Everyone has a Facebook page”. My answer has been repeated to many others over the last ten years: “I’m on LinkedIn not Facebook”.

Which invariably elicits the response “That’s not the same thing – you have to have a Facebook page”. What are you going to do with your Facebook page?

Best,

Mark