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Zuck Opens Up, Dems Whiff, and The Zaz Takes Hollywood

Good afternoon. Thanks as always for reading The Daily Courant, a private email featuring the latest and most noteworthy stories on Puck.

Today, Dylan Byers talks to Mark Zuckerberg as the Facebook C.E.O. unveils his new vision for the metaverse, reflects on the social media giant’s recent travails, and reveals the name of his new parent company.

You can also subscribe to Dylan’s personal newsletter, In The Room, taking you behind the scenes and into the C-suites of the biggest media, entertainment, and technology companies. You can add it to your weekly offering here.

Plus, below the fold, don’t miss William D. Cohan‘s bildungsroman of David Zaslav, whose tutelage under the late, great Jack Welch explains not only the history of cable, but also illuminates Zaz’s critical insights about the future of streaming.

“We’re Running Toward Something”: My Chat with Mark Zuckerberg

In the middle of perhaps the most consequential scandal of his career, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his new vision for the metaverse and revealed the name of his new parent company, Meta, which will comprise all of his social platforms, including Facebook. We chatted about all this, and what the internet will look like in a decade, among other things.

We’re moving towards a vision for the future,” Mark Zuckerberg told me on Tuesday afternoon, from his home in Palo Alto. It was weeks after the leaked documents by a former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, had manifested themselves into The Wall Street Journal’s epic, Pulitzer-hopeful series, The Facebook Files, accusing the social media giant of threatening democracy, endangering teen girls, and essentially laughing all the way to the bank as it ignored the societal ills left in its wake. And it was just days since a consortium of journalistic outlets had leveraged the remains of Haugen’s documents to publish a semi-coordinated series of articles, The Facebook Papers, castigating the company for not doing enough to rein in its platform.

Facebook’s stock had stumbled, and it faced one of the largest public outcries of its life as a public company—reminiscent of 2016, Cambridge Analytica, the Russian misinformation campaigns, and even the Myanmar crisis. And yet here was Zuckerberg, essentially floating above it all, articulating the course for his company’s future, coalescing around the next phase of the Internet: the post-web, post-mobile, virtual and augmented reality matrix known as the metaverse. “Facebook is going to continue to be the brand for what, I think, is the most-used app in the world, so that’s going to continue being an important brand for the company,” he said. “But for me on a personal level, this feels like we’re running toward something that we’re excited about.”

Facebook’s current scandal, which has triggered the outpouring of a long-held, wide-spread animosity toward the company, has led some to suspect that Zuckerberg, like Bill Gates a generation ago, would levitate out of the public eye toward a behind-the-scenes chairmanship. But as was evident during our conversation, Zuckerberg remains as in control of Facebook as ever, with no plans to change his title, and his control of its dual class stock ensures that he only has to listen to himself. And so amid the company’s latest crisis, he was very much focused on the future of Facebook rather than the past, or even the present.

During a keynote speech at Facebook’s annual AR/VR summit on Thursday, Zuckerberg presented his vision for that future—the metaverse, a world of shared virtual and augmented spaces that we will one day access through headsets and eyeglasses. The metaverse will be mainstream within a decade, he predicted. Zuckerberg wants to have a major stake in that future, and so he has rebranded his company as Meta and is devoting $10 billion a year toward writing this next chapter, potentially allowing the company to become the underlying operating system of this new generation of augmented reality innovation. (Facebook will now effectively be a portfolio company within Meta. In our interview, Zuckerberg likened it to how Larry Page and Sergey Brin had architected a similar corporate structure years ago when they moved Google, among their other businesses, underneath the umbrella of Alphabet.)

Zuckerberg unspooled this prophecy in an 80-minute video that showed him living in a virtual home, holding meetings with Facebook executives in virtual workspaces, and virtual foil-surfing with a virtual Kai Lenny, the big wave surfer and a personal friend. People were depicted in the video using virtual avatars to attend real concerts with real friends, and virtual after-parties with virtual friends; small business owners sold real and digital goods in virtual stores. The problems that beset Facebook in our world don’t appear to exist in this metaverse, though they were hinted at when Facebook global affairs chief Nick Clegg appeared in his very corporeal form, as though rousing Zuckerberg from a blissful dream, to talk about the importance of user safety and privacy. But nearly all 80 minutes of the video were dedicated to Zuckerberg’s vision. It was a powerful piece of theater that presaged a fascinating, tech-enabled future. It was also a not-so-subtle repositioning of the C.E.O. himself, from constant crisis-managing pariah to future-crafting visionary.

Speaking with Zuckerberg, it was clear that he prefers this tech-augmented version of reality to the more prosaic one in which he is condemned by lawmakers and critics, in which his nearly trillion-dollar social media behemoth is facing multiple government investigations. In the keynote, he was somewhere else, in the future, where social media had been replaced, or upgraded, by the metaverse. “While this may sound like science fiction, we’re starting to see a lot of these technologies coming together,” Zuckerberg says in the video. “In the next 5 or 10 years, a lot of this is going to be mainstream. And a lot of us will be creating or inhabiting worlds that are just as detailed and convincing as this one, on a daily basis.”

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