Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the public a rare glimpse into the company’s internal workings Thursday by livestreaming a Q&A session with employees. The move came after audio from a prior internal Q&A was leaked.
The livestream lasted for just over an hour. During the video, Zuckerberg said they do the Q&A sessions almost every week and have been for the last 10 years. More relaxed than normally seen, he encouraged his employees to be authentic and continue to ask hard questions despite the livestream.
“Hopefully the unfiltered version is a little bit more interesting for people externally,” Zuckerberg said. “If this ends up being useful maybe I’ll try to carry this forward into some other communications … At this point it’s like I do such a bad job at interviews that it’s like what do we have to lose,” Zuckerberg said to his employee’s laughter.
In the leaked Q&A, Zuckerberg talked about a variety of topics including his intent to sue the government if Elizabeth Warren is elected president and tries to break up his company, The Verge reported.
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“You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies … if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. Does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. That’s not the position you want to be in … We care about our country. We want to work with our government to do good things … But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg also touched on his competitors like Twitter’s inability to do as good a job as them; their controversial cryptocurrency, Libra, his refusal to testify at government hearings in other countries, the company’s contracts with 30,000 content moderators and more.
Despite not wanting to “antagonize” Warren any further, Zuckerberg said he stands by all his comments in the leaked Q&A.
“All the content that’s in there we stand behind. … Maybe I said it in a little bit more unfiltered of a way than I would externally, but fundamentally it’s like we believe everything that we said,” Zuckerberg said.
Warren, however, was not moved by Zuckerberg’s words. She responded with a Twitter feed reinforcing why companies like Facebook need to be dismantled.
Zuckerberg said he followed up with the livestream because he felt “it would be good to show everyone what these Q&As are like.”
