Mark Zuckerberg says he enjoys 'being doubted'

• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he enjoys "being doubted" in an interview with The Verge.
• If too many people think what he's doing is "obviously going to happen," he said it gets too comfortable.

Mark Zuckerberg said he enjoys "being doubted" in a new interview with The Verge's Alex Heath.

The Meta CEO talked about where the company is now, and what's new for the metaverse, the big pivot he's currently leading his company through. Compared to building Facebook from the ground up, which he noted reached a billion users 10 years ago, growing the metaverse on top of an already built platform is "a lot easier."

"I enjoy being doubted," Zuckerberg said, talking about building something over time.

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When Heath asked Zuckerberg how he still enjoys being doubted and why, Zuckerberg said he thinks "it gets a little comfortable" if "too many people get or think what you're doing is obviously going to happen."

Zuckerberg said getting hate is different from being doubted, and that one of the difficult things about running his company and being a public person on the internet is separating constructive criticism and "people who are just haters."

But, he said, listening to criticism can be useful.

"If you tune out everyone who thinks that you're not doing something right, then you're going to miss a lot of really valuable signals to do stuff better than you're doing it today," Zuckerberg said. "So you want to not ignore critique, but at the same time, I just think that there are a lot of people who actually aren't trying to help and aren't trying to make things better."

Zuckerberg, now one of the wealthiest people in the world, has long experienced criticism, including from other big names like Elon Musk.

More recently, however, he was recently criticized by people on social media after he posted a photo of his metaverse avatar on Instagram. His avatar, which was posed in front of the Eiffel Tower, was compared to 1990s video game graphics. Later that week, Zuckerberg posted another, more detailed avatar, admitting that the first image was "basic."

After the backlash, Zuckerberg wrote in his new Instagram post, "The graphics in Horizon are capable of much more — even on headsets — and Horizon is improving very quickly."

Zuckerberg told Heath getting more people onboard with his vision for the metaverse will "start slow" then "get faster and faster and faster."