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A few months ago, a guy my age turned down 1.6 billion dollars. It was Mark Zuckerberg, the 22 year old creator of facebook.com. Yahoo offered to pay the one guy 1.6 billion and he turned it down. Newspapers explain he enjoys working on his site, building a vast social network and adding new features. We’re told that it’s not about the money for him. It’s hard to comprehend turning down that much money, but it’s understandable in his case. By keeping Facebook, I’m sure he’s able to generate a few million dollars of personal income every year, so he’s already set for life. An insane amount of money plus a fun job is better than an ultra insane amount of money and no job.
I don’t think there’s any evidence pointing to this, but just for fun, let’s consider the things Zuckerberg could do if he were evil.
How much evil could he do with 1.6 billion dollars? Could he buy a few nuclear warheads on the black market? I have no idea, possibly. The best case scenario for him is he’d be able to take out a few major cities. On a scale of evil, that’d rank pretty high.
Since he hasn’t cashed in (yet), let’s consider how much evil he could do by controlling Facebook for the next thirty years.
Today, Zuckerberg
could ruin my life if he wanted to. It’d only take a few fake messages
sent from my account to certain people. If you’re on Facebook, he could
probably do the same to you. It’s nothing we should worry about though.
He won’t ruin our lives for the same reason King Dunlap doesn’t
punch the moon out of orbit. They have no reason to do these things. They
already have everything they need. We’re insignificant to them.
However, it can be safely assumed that twenty-five years from now, every country’s
leader will have had a Facebook account at some point in their life. Even
today, politicians are signing up for Facebook as a political tool. Zuckerberg
has unlimited control over every one of these profiles.
Chances are VERY high that the president in the year 2037 has a Facebook account right now - he probably has over 700 friends and he probably logs on daily. Every senator will have had a facebook account at one point as well.
If Zuckerberg is truly evil, he’ll wait until 2037 and issue a press release saying that in 2007, President Groves sent daily private messages to a leader of some rogue nation discussing plans to attack Europe*. If he handled it just right, chaos would ensue.
Facebook has only been around for three years (this website is older than that) and it has over ten million users. The vast majority of these users are college students and Zuckerberg has complete control over a tool they use daily. Many of history’s most evil dictators have done some pretty bad things with influence over smaller and usually impoverished groups of people.
If Facebook’s popularity keeps increasing like it has in the past few years, Facebook messages may become an official means of communications between government officials. Zuckerberg could really do harm with that type of control.
Chances are good that Zuckerberg’s a good guy who enjoys working on Facebook and enjoys the usefulness it brings to others. As lame as it seems to put up an online profile, his website does come in handy. Heck, it has probably done some good for society. I doubt there are statistics on this, but I bet less people cheat on their boyfriends and girlfriends now. These days, if a guy cheats on his girlfriend, the girl he’s cheating with will know if he’s in a relationship within a day or two because of Facebook. Laci Peterson would probably be alive if Facebook came out when she was in college.
Billionaire or not, Mark Zuckerberg’s control over Facebook puts him on track to be the most powerful person in the world. He’s probably not evil, but I’d be nice to him just in case.
* In the case
of president Groves, his campaign will have already been under fire for having
to explain why he was a member of TheAuburner.com’s
group on Facebook back in 2007. The lies about Europe will cause even
more problems.
E-mail mark at mark@theauburner.com
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