The article is from WeChat public account: The Silicon Star (ID: guixingren123) , author: Doutzen, title figure from: silicon Star man

“When you stare at the abyss for a long time, the abyss is also staring at you.”

“What technology company founders are making the world a better place?”

When asked such a question, I believe most people can answer one or two familiar names: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Shell Guy Brin, wait.

Each of them, despite being in different industries and fields, has a vision of using technology to change the world.

Some want to use social networks to connect the world and help people find their place; some want all the information on the Internet to be indexed and available at any time, so that the spread of information can be unimpeded; some want to use clean energy Leave a path to life for the earth, and build rockets and spaceships to realize the great idea of ​​making mankind a resident of space.

To realize these visions, they have reshaped the world with extraordinary powers, perseverance, and money from supporters of their vision.

Disruptors-they and the company they start are called like this. This subversion of old systems and forces has been highly respected since the first two decades of this century.

“People who stare at the abyss are looking back at you,” is Nietzsche’s famous saying. Thank you for the power of technological innovation. After many years, the original disruptors have no rivals, and have become the existence that they once wanted to disrupt.

In these companies, the characteristics of their former adversaries are beginning to appear: huge, slow, unmotivated, and refusal to reform; those founders and CEOs who have become aura also appear to be more and more paradoxical. Continue to preach great ideals while bringing the world in the name of subversionThe new scars ignored the accusations and protests.

The ambitions of the past have become extravagant hopes to be maintained despite desperation. The brave boy who challenged the dragon is now transformed into a dragon.

Elon Musk: The Irony Silicon Valley Iron Man

Born in South Africa and moved to Canada and the United States, Elon Musk (Elon Musk) ‘s first Internet startup company was Compaq Acquired for $ 300 million, the second company X.com (later PayPal) was acquired by eBay. Undoubtedly, the success of these two ventures is enough to make him famous. But he was not satisfied.

In Musk’s view, There are three areas of technology that will influence human development in the future: the Internet, space, and renewable energy.

However, Musk did not go well on this road of becoming “Iron Man” in Silicon Valley.

In 2001, after two Russian rocket suppliers ate behind closed doors, Musk was determined to produce rockets with vertical integration and modular methods that are more familiar to his industry and soft drop industry, not only launch costs. It can be controlled at one tenth of the industry level at that time, and the profit margin can be maintained at about 70%.

Today, the private space company SpaceX that he founded has become an important supplier of NASA, and has successfully undertaken several missions to launch space stations and other state and private satellites.

In 2007, I watched Martin Eberhard (Martin Eberhard) is about to mess up his hugely funded electric car company Tesla. As the main investor and chairman, Musk finally can’t sit still. Tesla was developing A compact electric sports car Roadster signed a purchase agreement with Lotus, but Musk found a serious budget problem: Roadster’s cost of goods sold is much higher than Tesla’s market-acceptable final sales price. < / p>

He made a decision that seemed a little bit mean in Silicon Valley at the time, when the founder was supreme, but it turned out to be extremely correct: he entered the company strongly, declared himself co-founder and expelled Eberhard.

After having to do everything, Tesla finally survived the financial tsunami of 2008. Tesla is finally alive after Musk’s own capital injection and Toyota and Mercedes’ equity participation.

But Tesla is still very tired and has been losing money.

A company like this has always been “cared for” by bears. On Twitter, almost every few days, Musk can be seen yelling at short selling agencies with his loyal fans. At the same time, as profitability is hopeless, Musk can prove that he only has to increase production capacity.

In an interview, he told CNBC that in order to save time and meet analyst expectations every quarter, he once needed to live in a Model 3 factory and sleep on the workshop floor. “The past few months have indeed been very difficult and painful. I feel stressed.”

The tremendous pressure did not defeat him, but no doubt left a mark on him. He began to pose an indestructible, Buddha-stopping Buddha, which only made his fans more worship him.

At a Tesla earnings call in May 2018, a Wall Street analyst asked the company to provide more specific financial data—a reasonable request. On the phone, Musk apparently felt aversion to the problem, straightThen tell him “boring, stupid (bonehead) I will not answer”.

In the same month, Musk, who had had enough of negative media coverage of Tesla, announced that he would launch a website to give the media objectivity and credibility. Prior to this, media including CNBC had just reported Tesla’s electric car crash, delays in delivery and overtime labor issues in Autopilot mode. It was clear that Musk did not recognize these media’s normal reporting activities and monitoring functions.

In August 2018, the biggest “circus” ever staged: Musk suddenly ignored regulatory risks, (also published later) Blog) , announced that Tesla will be privatized for $ 420 per share, and said it has received sufficient funding. Tesla’s stock immediately went higher, and Silicon Valley “Iron Man” did everything.

In fact, however, Musk does not have a fully written Tesla delisting plan. And other members of the board were largely caught off guard. At the end of the month, Tesla’s board of directors announced the termination of the privatization plan. Subsequently, the SEC sued Musk on suspicion of securities fraud, accusing him of tweeting misleading investors.

Several tweets for a total of $ 40 million in fines (for compensation to affected investors) , and Musk lost Tesla Chairmanship.

Musk, who was out of breath, is finally released.

In the video of the famous anchor Joe Logan’s (Joe Rogen) , Musk rolled a marijuana and smoked unscrupulously. stand up. “You shouldn’t do this? Because the shareholders (responsible) ?” Logan asked him. “Why not? Isn’t (in California) legal?” Musk answered him.

It is true that cannabis is being used for recreation in California just legally in early 2018. However, his actions still violated the regulations of a department of the US government: his company SpaceX is a major contractor of NASA; and NASA’s superior US Air Force Space Command, which is a federal agency, has contractor employees Strict safety and compliance requirements stipulate that prohibited drugs must not be used, otherwise the contract can be completely cancelled.

What’s even more weird is that not only did Iron Man and his company not cancel their contract because of Musk’s cannabis incident, but they did not pay any form of compensation, even a penny.

According to a recent report from US media Politico, Space Command has asked NASA to conduct a strict work environment compliance check on its suppliers, and SpaceX and Boeing have completed corresponding cooperation.

The cost of this inspection reached $ 5 million because it was caused by Musk and should have been paid by SpaceX. Do not know why, NASA finally signed a new supplementary agreement with SpaceX, agreeing to reimburse the money for SpaceX.

In other words, Musk’s smoking of marijuana in public violates federal regulations, and makes American taxpayers responsible.

Last year, thousands of people from Thailand, Britain, China, and the United States participated in a half-month rescue in a trapped karst cave incident in Chiang Rai, Thailand. The Thai special forces retired soldiers died of hypoxia and received great praise.

While people are grateful for the occurrence of the miracle and the memory of the dead, Musk and one of the British rescue experts have been bickering for a year. To this day, Musk is still reluctant to apologize for calling the other party “pedophile” and completely withdraw his words.

Iron Man in the Marvel Universe is the facade of the Avengers, connecting members from different factions, races, countries and planets. Iron Man is romantic in the glorious era, and can carry the banner even more in the dark. Tony Stark is an outstanding team leader, spiritual totem, and responsible father to the end, even if the sci-fi aura of the fictional Iron Man is removed.

Musk, who is closest to the fantasy of Iron Man in the real world, is far from Tony Stark. Tesla turned a profit this year, and its stock price has soared. Perhaps it is time for Musk to reverse his public image.

Mark Zuckerberg: Leadership collapses completely

No one is set to collapse, faster than Mark Zuckerberg’s (Mark Zuckerberg) .

During college, Zuckerberg’s “The Facebook” started from a social networking site that initially only allowed Fujin students to register, and became a social network giant that completely rewritten the world.

As a nine-death entrepreneur, many of Zuckerberg’s encounters have been unfair to him and the company since the beginning.

In order to eliminate obstacles on the way of the company’s development and financing, Zuckerberg chose to betray his first investor, former CFO of the company Eduardo Safulin (Eduardo Saverin) , diluted his shares and had to pay him early in the company (and Harvard Gao, who was originally plagiarized by inspiration Winkworth brothers, seniors) Huge money as compensation;

In 2012, Facebook, which was about to go public, was going through a ten-year hurdle, but its stock price plummeted due to the collapse of the NASDAQ stock market system, causing heavy losses to himself and other investors. The frustration of the IPO has also brought a considerable blow to Facebook, which is still growing rapidly, for a considerable period of time.

Killing him will only make him stronger.

Facebook is fully capable of changing the world, just standing today looking back at the company ’s past five yearsWhat you can see is no longer an Internet company that brings positive change to the world, and its founder with a sense of mission, but a Facebook that has split human society by itself and holds the hegemony of the digital world. And Zuckerberg, who has lost himself on the road to becoming a leader in this new world.

Facebook was founded with a mission to make the world more open and connected. In 2017, this sentence was revised to “ Give people the power to build communities and make the world more connected.”

Fifteen years after its founding and sitting on 2.4 billion users, Facebook today has not fulfilled its mission.

The collapse of Zuckerberg and Facebook’s image began in 2015.

The stalemate before the US election, Facebook has become an important battleground for politicians to pull votes. Cambridge Analytics, a British-based political services company, (Cambridge Analytica) obtained nearly 100 million from Facebook by violating platform rules Users, with up to 5,000 information points per person, will analyze the insights from these data to help select politicians who work with the company. This behavior violates the U.S. Elections Act and seriously violates user privacy.

At the same time, information activists supported by Russia occupied the Facebook platform, disguised as U.S. news sites and political institutions, created a large number of accounts and pages, and published massive amounts of fake news and political content in an attempt to interfere with ordinary American users. Political positions and voting behavior.

It was later learned that Facebook executives, including but not limited to Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Cheryl Sandberg, (Sheryl Sandberg) , and Joey Kaplan, vice president of U.S. Public Policy (Joel Kaplan) , fully aware of the above two things, but in To a large extent, did not stop, but instead acquiesced in the development of the situation.

Facebook even sent employees to Cambridge analysis and some politicians’ campaignsTeam to help them optimize their political ads on the platform. For fear of alienating Republican allies, Kaplan, who served as deputy director of the White House office in the Bush administration, ordered that the company’s security team investigate reports of Russian intervention.

In 2018, Zuckerberg was questioned by Congress because of the above incident. It is like a robot that stays on the bottom line of commercial organizations and has no sympathy. It has a strong contrast with the 2017 personal challenge that has previously declared that it is necessary to visit every state in the United States to understand people ’s ideas. deep impression.

In 2018, Zuckerberg’s annual personal challenge was only two words, concise: Fix Facebook.

Until 2019, this challenge has not been completed.

Facebook has repeatedly stated that it will cope with fake news and hate content. However, according to “New York” magazine (NYMag) According to information from people familiar with the matter, at a high-level meeting on related issues, Zuckerberg either expressed Not enough interest, or simply not appear.

It has been four years since the Russian intervention, and another election is coming.

In order to reflect the seriousness of false political ads on the Facebook platform, Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren (Elizabeth Warren) Political advertising, the first sentence of the beginning is a fake news: “Zuckerberg and Facebook announced their support for Trump’s re-election.”

Facebook has opted for laissez-faire, and this ad remains on the platform to this day. Warren wants Zuckerberg and Facebook to swallow the bitter fruits that she planted, but she did not expect that her targets were alreadyThis feels nothing.

This is because fake news is not a problem at Facebook, but a solution.

In 2017, due to the outrageous media coverage of the siege of Facebook, under the guidance of Zuckerberg and Kaplan, Facebook hired a political consulting agency specializing in conspiracy theories to try to invest investment mogul and Facebook critic Camp George Soros is behind the anti-Facebook movement.

This year, he said at an executive meeting that Facebook is facing a war. There was no democracy during the war, and only he could lead the company to overcome the difficulties.

No matter what other people think, at least within Facebook, no one can stop Zuckerberg anymore, after all, he has more than half of the company’s voting rights. As long as he is still a day, Facebook is his.

To do this, he must actively protect himself and the company’s image.

In October, Zuckerberg delivered an appalling speech at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He brought the audience back to Harvard in 2003 and “reinvented” the story of Facebook’s founding.

Zuckerberger said, He created Facebook “for his own community” and to create a tool for voice during the Iraq war.

However, Facebook in reality is no longer a platform to empower people and fight against power—at least not for ordinary people. Today’s Facebook, has become a platform for powerhouses to further strengthen their voices with advertising budgets.

At the time of the Iraq war, he regretted that if Facebook was set up a few years ago, “the situation may develop in a different direction.”

In fact, most readers ca n’t be more familiar with the early stories of Zuckerberg and Facebook: when he was a sophomore, because of his girlfriend’s breakup, Zuckerberg hacked into the school’s official website late at night with Jiu Jin download Girls’ photos are posted on the Internet for students to compare who looks better. After being almost expelled from school, Zuckerberg borrowed inspiration from the Winkworth brothers before starting The Facebook.

This lecture on freedom of expression was banned from asking questions by faculty, students, and journalists of Harvard University.

In an interview with The New Yorker last year, Zuckerberg revealed his voice.

He compares himself to Augustus, the first Roman emperor, a dictator who ended a century of civil war, created the Roman era of peace, and ruled the Roman Empire for 43 years.

“He created two hundred years of world peace through very rigorous methods. What are the trade-offs here? He has to do something,” Zuckerberg said.

The implication is that in order to maintain world peace, or at least to complete the 2018 personal challenge “ Fix Facebook” -he, Zuckerberg, also had to do something.

Adam Newman: Office Superman to Real Estate Scammer

The financial tsunami in 2008. Adam Newman (Adam Neumann) found:Rising from the ground up, it will be enough to reach the sky in three or five years. Providing office space for them will become a rare opportunity that is both disruptive and profitable.

He and co-founder Miguel McKevie (Miguel McKelvey) will be a rough warehouse in Brooklyn, New York City, After turning it into a new and high-end co-working space Green Desk, after selling it to the warehouse owner, Newman formally started WeWork in 2010 with the money earned, setting off a “shared office” (co-working) .

From the beginning, Newman’s target customers were programming kids who had to “garage startups” because of shyness, and self-employed and freelancers at home in Tiantianwo. WeWork provides these future unicorns who cannot afford or rent an office, providing office space that matches the style, quality, and freedom.

But its benefits are not only reflected in flexible workstations, free high-speed Wi-Fi, snacks and craft beer-WeWork’s regular events, and supporting community and business cooperation resources have become key additions to the settlement. value. WeWork also set up its own incubator and investment institution for a time, not only attracted the executives of top 500 companies as mentors, some of them even tried to settle in the space.

Although he runs an essentially real estate company, Newman is the same as the founders and CEOs of tech companies. Speaking of subverting the traditional real estate industry, he once told New York Daily News:

(Newman has returned the purchased shares) .

Newman will use the borrowed money to buy some luxury housing and commercial real estate projects, and then lease some of them to the company to earn rent.

As of the end of September this year, a total of four real estate projects leased to WeWork were under the actual control of Newman. Three of them had the lease contracts signed on the day Newman acquired real estate ownership. The prospectus showed that WeWork promised to pay at least $ 237 million in rent to entities controlled by Newman.

At the beginning of this year, WeWork announced that its head office was renamed The We Company to better manage its sub-businesses such as office space WeWork, private elementary school WeGrow, and gym Rise by We. Registered related trademarks including “we”-The We Company had to transfer him $ 5.9 million worth of stock (Returned) In exchange for the right to use the trademark.

For the results of these bad choices, the CEO who walks barefooted in the company every day and has always shown the exaggerated image of hippies disapproves. The company’s success in growth has allowed him to do what he wants.

The Wall Street Journal quoted a person familiar with the matter as saying, Newman will make a 20% layoff requirement every year , although the actual ratio varies from year to year; his wife will suddenly ask for human resources fire Some employees were dropped, just because meeting them for just a few minutes made her feel “lacking energy.”

At a staff meeting in 2016, Newman suddenly opened the door to the room after announcing the layoffs. The glasses filled with wine were brought out one after another by the lucky employees who had not been cut. He invited the attendees to toast, pour, and toast, to enjoy his favorite Don Julio 1942 tequila with him, and then invited a well-known rapper to perform.

The employees present experienced a thrilling night from nervous tension to misery.

Another time last year, he rented a private jet and flew with his friends to his native Israel for a tour. After getting off the plane, the crew was in a cereal box