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Hi all, it's Eric. Absolute power isn't typically a good thing—even for those who hold it. Knowing that, it's worth asking: Is a virtual dictatorship still the right governance model for Facebook?
That's the question that came to mind reading the New York Times'Â Â [investigation this week]( into how Mark Zuckerberg and his top lieutenant Sheryl Sandberg handled the fallout over Facebook's Russian election meddling scandal. The Times reporters recount a meeting in which Facebook board member Erskine Bowles, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, interrogated Zuckerberg and Sandberg over the platform's role in the Russian campaign. Sandberg apologized while Zuckerberg, "stone-faced, whirred through technical fixes."
The story made clear that not only did Zuckerberg not understand the gravity of the situation, no one around him had the power to make him understand. For shareholders, as well as Zuckerberg himself, maybe it would have been better if his board had the power to make him sweat a little.
But [unfortunately for his critics](, Zuckerberg's super voting shares give him total control over Facebook. He's CEO for life if he wants to be.
Silicon Valley has long debated how much power founders should wield over the companies they create. As with dictators in governments, there are benefits to one-person rule. A good leader can make swift, sometimes unpopular decisions for the good of the country—or the monthly active users, as the case may be. It can make transitioning to mobile quickly pretty easy.
On the other hand, having one of the world's richest men lead one of the world's largest and most influential companies while accountable to no one, has some obvious downsides too. At every turn, Facebook has understated its role in the Russian propaganda effort. And the company has been slow to address disinformation and hateful conspiracy theories, even as the platform, in its rush to expand, played a major role in fueling a genocide in Myanmar.
A recent [American Institutional Confidence Poll]( conducted by YouGov shows that Facebook is one of the country's least-trusted institutions. While Amazon and Google fall right behind the top-ranked military, Facebook is in the bottom three. It's down there with political parties and Congress. Yikes.
Other companies aren't immune to similar governance issues. Even highly trusted Google is essentially controlled by a kind of insider cabal. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have sweeping influence over the company, forming a kind of triumvirate along with former Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt. In recent weeks the company has faced protests over those executives' handling of sexual harassment allegations in the company's executive ranks. And, Evan Spiegel, the Snap CEO who also gave himself broad power over his company, is watching his stock tank this year.
Stronger boards and weaker founders aren't the answer to every problem of course. Plenty of CEOs who lack impunity mess up disastrously. But there was something reassuring about how, when Wells Fargo fraudulently opened accounts for customers who didn't need them, the bank's CEO lost his job.
I'm not saying that it's time for Zuckerberg to go. When the company went public in 2012, he faced his share of skeptics, only to prove them wrong. I don't want to be one of those writers who look stupid in three years when Zuckerberg is preventing genocides with Facebook's amazing machine learning algorithms. Maybe he'll figure it out.
All I'm saying is that even if he's the right guy for the job, it would be good to hold his feet to the fire. After all, it's easy for dictators to lose touch with the will of their countrymen. Zuckerberg may want to consider bringing his reign as an absolute monarch to an end. The move would be as likely to help him as it would be to harm him. As former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick can attest: even when you have the votes, you can still fall from grace.—[Eric Newcomer](mailto:enewcomer@bloomberg.net)
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