How Mark Zuckerberg escaped a metaverse-sized hole

livemint.com:

Elon Musk that never happened; public haranguings, such as lawsuits filed by dozens of American states on October 24th, alleging that Meta intentionally sought to make users addicted to Facebook and Instagram. And yet, in the space of a few months late last year, he made two transformative business decisions that were remarkable for their humility and agility—all the more so, given that he controls 58% of the firm’s overall voting rights and barely needs to work, let alone listen to shareholders. In response to investor pressure, Mr Zuckerberg performed one of the fastest pivots in tech history.

Within a fortnight of the third-quarter rout he slashed Meta’s spending plans, cut costs and fired staff. And in response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the blaze of excitement around generative artificial intelligence (gen AI for short) he launched an internal revolution aimed at using the technology to galvanise Meta’s core business. Those manoeuvres reveal a lot about Mr Zuckerberg’s leadership style.

They may even end up vindicating his faith in the metaverse. When Mr Zuckerberg realised he had incensed investors, those around him say, he did not panic. He became methodical.

As Nick Clegg, a close adviser to Mr Zuckerberg, explains, his boss doesn’t like people around him “shouting and yelling". He prefers, like an engineer, to break down a problem to its component parts and decide on a course of action. In this case, he understood that his long-term focus was at odds with investors’ short-term horizons.

So he decided to “cut his cloth accordingly". But he kept many of his long-term investment plans intact, emphasising that they mainly concerned AI, not the metaverse. That emphasis looked shrewd weeks later, when ChatGPT burst onto