A furious Mark Zuckerberg was so outraged by the Facebook information leaked to the media that he demanded the person responsible “resign.”
The Facebook co-founder and owner’s anger resurfaced in a confidential email he sent in 2010, which has already been viewed 3 million times, after one of his workers leaked information to the media.
The email to Facebook staff, posted over the weekend by a Twitter account known as Internal Tech Emails, called the leak of an internal meeting about the social network’s plans an “act of treason.”
Zuckerberg was upset by a TechCrunch story that the company is secretly creating software for a mobile phone and working with a third party to build the hardware, which he said was inaccurate.
Zuckerberg’s 2010 email, dated September 22, had “Please Resign” as the subject line and began with the line: “Confidential – Do Not Share.”
Mark Zuckerberg was upset by a TechCrunch story that the company is secretly creating software for a cell phone and working with a third party to build the hardware, which the company claimed was inaccurate.
Zuckerberg’s 2010 email, dated September 22, had “Please Resign” as the subject line and began with the line: “Confidential – Do Not Share.”
It says: ‘Many of you saw the TechCrunch story over the weekend claiming we’re building a mobile phone. We’re not building a phone and I spoke at length in the Q&A… about what we’re really doing: building ways to make all phones and apps more social.’
“This was an act of treason,” he continued. “So I ask whoever leaked this to resign immediately.”
Zuckerberg, who was 25 at the time, added: “If you ever think it’s appropriate to leak inside information, you should go.”
If he doesn’t resign, we’ll almost certainly find out who he is anyway.
Facebook, now branded as Meta, has laid off thousands of employees as part of what Zuckerberg has called the company’s “year of efficiency.”
In an email to employees earlier this month, Zuckerberg, 38, said Meta would shed 10,000 jobs in the coming months and another 5,000 positions would remain vacant.
Reflecting on the leak of information from his employees to the press in the 2010 email, Zuckerberg wrote: “It’s frustrating and destructive that someone here thought (sic) it was okay to tell this to someone outside the company.”
The fact that the story was inaccurate doesn’t make it any better.
Zuckerberg, who was 25 at the time, wrote in the email: “If you think it’s ever appropriate to leak inside information, you should go.”
Former journalist Michael Arrington wrote the TechCrunch article referenced in the email.
Arrington, co-founder of TechCrunch, went on to lead Arrington Capital, a Web3-focused venture capital firm.
Zuckerberg’s 2010 email stated: ‘Personally, I’ve had to spend a lot of time in the last few days… cleaning up the damage from this mess.
“Even now, we’re in a more precarious position with the companies in the mobile space that should be our partners because they now think we’re competitors.”
While pledging to work to prevent future leaks to the press, Zuckerberg said: “We are a company that promotes openness and transparency, both in the world at large and here internally at Facebook.”
‘But the cost of an open culture is that we all have to protect the sensitive information we share internally
‘If we don’t, we screw everyone who works hard to change the world.’
In 2016, a former Facebook employee, Antonio García Martínez, wrote a book in which he compared the company to a cult and said Zuckerberg’s leadership style was comparable to that of North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un.
Martinez also wrote in Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley that female workers at Facebook were told how to dress and to avoid wearing skirts that were considered too short lest they “distract” others.
Last week, Meta announced that it has launched a paid verification service in the United States, similar to the Twitter Blue service, for Instagram and Facebook.
