Tech billionaires need a break from their reality-distortion fields

By Parmy Olson

Tech billionaires are so deep in their own reality-distortion fields that their perception of the world can get dangerously warped. That’s the conclusion I drew from reading Sarah Wynn-Williams’ astonishing memoir about her time running global policy at Meta Platforms Inc. The company has sought to block its publication, offering a case study in the Streisand effect and vaulting Careless People to the top of the charts on Amazon.com Inc.

The book chimed with what I previously heard from former Meta executives about the company’s hypocrisy, its obsessive drive for growth and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s fixation on developing a fanbase. But Wynn-Williams’ vantage point in his inner orbit and that of and former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, detailing the power they wielded, also highlighted a dire need for limits to some tech leadership tenures. Wynn-Williams doesn’t offer answers, but here’s one: No single person should lead a platform for billions of users for more than a decade, never mind more than 20 years as Zuckerberg has done. Over the years and amid a string of political leaders entering and exiting power, he has been a constant presence, a monarch in a hoodie. Perhaps he needs a break just like them.

Wynn-Williams was at Facebook from 2011 to 2018. She persuaded early executives to make her the company’s first head of global policy because she believed in Facebook as a force for good. Over time, she watched with detached and horrified fascination as Zuckerberg exercised his growing power. She was in his private jet when a policy director explained how the company likely helped Donald Trump clinch his first presidential election in 2016.

Zuckerberg would give speeches to heads of state whose countries' annual economic output paled in comparison to Facebook’s own revenue, and rather than speak about national issues he’d talk of presiding over a “global community.” And it was clear that presidents and prime ministers accepted that power imbalance. They frequently asked him if Facebook could put its thumb on the scale to garner more political support, Wynn-Williams writes, and when Zuckerberg spoke at an international summit after Trump’s win, they asked him not about the spread of conspiracy theories and polarization on his site, but softball questions about civic engagement. “Trump’s election elevated Mark in their eyes,” Wynn-Williams writes.

In the book, Zuckerberg handles all this power in the way many would expect. He wanted more. He asked his advisers about running for president and spent a year traveling across America in 2017 to meet citizens in swing states. Few humans in history have accumulated this much wealth ($204 billion as of today for Zuckerberg, according to data compiled by Bloomberg) or the ability to influence billions of people at once. Not to mention a stomach-churning circle of sycophants. Sandberg’s advisers showered her with praise after a speech, even after texting each other about how boring it was, and they let Zuckerberg win at board games, according to Wynn-Williams.

The billionaires eventually get bored, the memoir shows, with Zuckerberg glassy eyed at presidential meetings and Sandberg, author of Lean In, uninterested when her staff repeatedly tell her about thousands of women protesting in Washington in 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration.

Wynn-Williams was banned by a court order from promoting her book, but she did manage to record a podcast interview with Bari Weiss, founder of media company The Free Press. When asked to speculate on Zuckerberg’s mindset, she says that he “looks at the world like it’s a big board game, like it’s a game of Risk.”

To that end, expanding his territory into China became an obsession. It promised impressive growth and still does today — between 2023 and 2024, Meta’s China revenue increased 34 per cent to $18.4 billion. Wynn-Williams’ book includes internal memos discussing the special access Facebook proposed giving to the Chinese Communist Party. Facebook managers admit at one point that passing data of dissident Chinese Facebook users to the CCP “could lead to death, torture and incarceration.” Did that make Facebook’s staff uncomfortable? No, says Wynn-Williams, thanks to the broader effects of Zuckerberg’s reality-distortion field.

The problem of such highly concentrated power is that the price of a single person’s questionable decision is paid at scale. Facebook shouldn’t have morphed into Meta, for instance. It would have made more business sense to experiment with virtual reality as a side project. But Zuckerberg has majority voting control over his company, and so his idea to pivot to VR is costing the company $100 billion, with little obvious upside. Ironically, he barely talks about the metaverse now. He mentioned the term twice during his latest quarterly earnings call, compared with 15 times when he was more excited about it two years ago.

Worse is when powerful tech billionaires go off the rails. Elon Musk’s online behavior became more reactionary and troll-like around the time he bought Twitter. He has targeted his critics with bans and lawsuits, spread conspiracy theories and made impulsive policy changes that have driven away advertisers. While millions of people have ditched the site, Musk’s influence (not least now in the White House) means he has transformed a major social platform and online discourse.

But we tolerate such behavior in part because of expectations laid in Silicon Valley of giving tech founders the time, space and money they need to pursue their vision, no matter how crazy it seems. Such ideas lead to founder worship, and Zuckerberg, Sandberg, Musk and others exist in echo chambers largely insulated from criticism.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Shareholders or regulators should demand limits on founders who oversee these platforms to prevent the reality distortion that decades of unchecked power can bring. Well-run democracies have term limits for their leadership, and while corporate CEOs don’t, the unprecedented societal influence that tech leaders have calls for some sort of cutoff point. It’s a radical proposition and would take a combination of shareholder activism, voluntary governance reform and potentially even regulation to make it happen.

But consider the unprecedented global influence some tech companies now have, not only as the largest public firms in history but in their ability to affect the mental well-being and information environments of billions of people. CEOs in consumer goods, automotive and even finance don't wield such power. Yet companies like Alphabet Inc.’s Google, OpenAI and Meta make up a new category that demands proportional oversight in the same way financial firms face special regulations because of their systemic influence. Novel forms of power require novel checks and balances. And as artificial intelligence looks to be just as transformative as social media, we’d do well to prevent it from becoming further concentrated and unchecked.