Mark Zuckerberg’s original motto for Facebook was “Move fast and break things.” It now appears that the CEO is going to have to answer for moving too fast and breaking too many things.
After years of trying to avoid oversight from Washington, the 2-billion-person social network platform is set for a reckoning. This past week, Facebook faced its first major congressional oversight hearings since it revealed that a Russian “troll factory,” called the Internet Research Agency, had purchased ads on the site in order to influence the 2016 election.
In three committee hearings, representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter were grilled about their sites’ roles in facilitating the foreign influence operation. Lawmakers from both parties poked at the companies’ failure to reckon with questions about the lack of transparency in online advertising and the vast power they hold over our lives.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) took particular umbrage with Facebook: “Your power sometimes scares me.”
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JAMES LAWLER DUGGAN/Reuters
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and Elliot Schrage, its vice president of global communications and public policy, meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Oct. 12.
Facebook’s stepping into the world of virtual reality.
The company announced on Tuesday afternoon it has reached a deal to acquire Oculus VR, a company paving new roads in the field, for $2 billion. The deal is comprised of $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook stock.
Oculus VR’s flagship product is the virtual reality goggles known as the Oculus Rift, which was first funded through a massively successful Kickstarter campaign. It has already received more than 75,000 orders for development kits.
It appears that the billion-user club is about to get a new member.
Facebook announced the acquisition of messaging app WhatsApp on Wednesday, a deal worth up to $19 billion in cash and stock that puts serious muscle behind Facebook’s international reach.
In a call with investors to outline the acquisition, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum hinted multiple times that they expect WhatsApp to become a billion-user platform, a milestone that Facebook eclipsed less than 18 months ago.
Hirst made history in 2008, when he by-passed the art galleries to become the first living artist to sell an entire show directly through auction at Sotheby’s. The sale raised $198 million and his estimated net worth today of $350 million dwarfs that of American abstract expressionist painter and sculptor Jasper Johns and Welsh portrait painter Andrew Vicari, who tie for second place with net worth estimated at $210 million, each.American artists Jeff Koons and David Choe come in at fourth place on the Wealth X ranking with an estimated net worth of $100 million, each.
Choe was commissioned by Mark Zuckerberg to paint murals on the walls of Facebook’s office in 2007 and opted to be paid in Facebook stock rather than cash. This brought the graffiti artist a significant windfall when the company went public in 2012.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reaped a gain of nearly $2.3 billion last year when he exercised 60 million stock options just before the online social networking leader’s initial public offering.
The windfall detailed in regulatory documents filed Friday saddled Zuckerberg, 28, with a massive tax bill. He raised the money to pay it by selling 30.2 million Facebook Inc. shares for $38 apiece, or $1.1 billion, in the IPO.
Facebook’s stock hasn’t closed above $38 since the IPO was completed last May. The shares gained 71 cents Friday to close at $26.85.
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Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., introduces Graph Search at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2013. (Noah Berger/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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Damien Hirst/Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images
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