Mark Zuckerberg's displays of normalcy are as unwavering as his Caesar cut, but changes are afoot in the Facebook empire
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Alexei Oreskovic
May 20, 2020, 22:00 IST
Samantha Lee/Business Insider
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This week: Zuck's perpetual Caesar haircut belies changes to the Facebook empire
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Mark Zuckerberg spent his Friday evening engaged in a ritual that's become familiar to people in all tax brackets: he draped a towel over his neck and sat still while his spouse gave him a quarantine haircut.
The Facebook CEO's trademark Caesar cut (as documented on his Facebook page) looks pretty much the same as his last one, a result that speaks not only to Priscilla Chan's scissors skills but to the sense of continuity that Zuck — who turned 36 years old last Thursday — is keen to project about himself and his formidable empire of apps.
It's understandable that Zuckerberg and Facebook want to project calm and normalcy. After all, with so much uncertainty in the world right now, and with most of Facebook's 48,000 employees scattered across their homes instead of toiling from centralized offices, continual reassurance is vital.
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But it's not really business as usual at Facebook, and not just because we're living through a pandemic.
A couple of other recent Facebook headlines make this clear.
It's hard to imagine a more damaging look for a consumer product than the notion that, with the safety filter removed, it brims with material so toxic that it can cause deep psychological damage.
This is also a weak spot in Zuckerberg's recent video interviews with health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci. It's great that Zuckerberg is doing these videos, but there's an inherent suggestion — to a cynical eye at least — that the typical COVID-19 information available on Facebook is so untrustworthy that the company CEO himself must go on-air to give users the facts.
Facebook has unsuccessfully tried to make ecommerce work a gazillion times before. But this time Facebook is offering small businesses something they need — a lifeline to sell goods online while their brick-and-mortar storefronts are boarded up by the pandemic.
And thanks to the AI prowess Facebook has developed over the years, the company now has the technology to create a special shopping experience.
The close timing of these two developments is coincidental, but they reflect a reality that Facebook is trying to change. Three years after the US election exposed the dark side of Facebook, it's now struggling to blunt misinformation involving another presidential election, plus a pandemic.
With all the headaches and problems that surely now come with moderating fake news, propaganda, and conspiracy theories, the grass growing on ecommerce platforms has got to look pretty green and comfortable. There are no PTSD lawsuits when you're helping people sell phone cases and T-shirts.
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I doubt Facebook expects, or even wants, its newsfeed to ever completely shed its media and news-sharing nature. But Facebook is clearly eager to upgrade its look, no matter what Zuckerberg's neatly trimmed hairline suggests.
Sound bite of the week:
"Our balance sheet is strong, Eats is doing great, Rides looks a little better, maybe we can wait this damn virus out...I wanted there to be a different answer. Let me talk to a few more CEOs...maybe one of them will tell me some good news, but there simply was no good news to hear."
Jeff Bezos relies on 23 lieutenants to help him run Amazon. And these days, with the company under immense pressure from the pandemic, the team is incredibly busy. As Eugene Kim writes in this look at the Amazon S-Team (S stands for Senior, by the way), many of Bezos' chosen ones are now holding daily meetings in addition to the usual weekly S-Team meetings.
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So who are the members of Amazon's elite team? Well, 20 of them are men, and only three are women. And almost all of them are Amazon lifers.
Check out Eugene's story to see the full list of the 23 Amazon S-Team members and learn more about them:
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