Facebook Shareholders' Biggest Enemy: Mark Zuckerberg

It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that Facebook Inc FB has become the most favoured stock on Wall Street off late. The way the company has transformed itself into an advertising profit machine is something that the Street has been applauding it for. However, all that can change and Facebook shareholders can perhaps soon have their biggest enemy in Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, himself.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Zuckerberg explained how the company is trying to connect the world along with why Facebook is not seeking only profits.

“It turns out that the biggest hurdle actually isn’t technical or affordability, it’s the social challenge where the majority of the people aren’t connected actually are within range of a network and can afford it, but they actually don’t know why they would want to use the internet and it kind of makes sense, if you think about it,” Zuckerberg said.

“If you grew up, you never had a computer and you have never used the internet and someone asked you whether you want to buy a data plan, your response too probably would be ‘what’s a data plan and why would I want to use it?’”

On profit motives, Zuckerberg said, “If we were primarily focussed on profits, the most reasonable thing for us to do would be to really just focus on the first billion people who are using our products. The world isn’t set up equally and the first billion people who are using Facebook have way more money than the rest of the world combined. So, from a business perspective it actually doesn’t make a huge amount of sense for us to put the emphasis in this that we are right now […]”

Perhaps in a sense of realization over what he just said given that Facebook is a public company, Zuckerberg added in the end, “Now, over the long term I do think it can be good for our company as well in a 10, 20, 30 year time horizon, because a lot of these countries and economies will develop and overtime they will be important”