Thiel and Zuckerberg on Facebook, Millennials, and Predictions for 2030 (2019)

> One theme we've discussed is that many important institutions in our society (eg education, healthcare, housing, efforts to combat climate change) are still run primarily by boomers in ways that transfer a lot of value from younger generations to boomers themselves.

I do not understand the reason for assuming any successive group of old leaders to behave differently than boomers?

Millenials are going to have an even more disproportionate old age population, and presumably will seek to squeeze the younger generations even more than the boomers:

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

> While our company has a special role in the lives of this generation, this is likely particularly important for how I show up because I am the most well-known person of my generation.

They really are up their own asses so much in this thread. Just the arrogance of these people absolutely kills me.

Previously (2024-07-07; 136 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40898654

This article flame bait. No point in keeping it up.

** maybe edit of un-shame: ... is it?

* edit of shame: it's satire. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.

> there is a certain sense in which Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as 'the spokesman' for the Millennial generation — as the single person who gives voice to the hopes and fears and the unique experiences of this generation, at least in the USA

That is an absolutely bananas read of Zuck's place in American culture.

Isn't Thiel the one that believes democracy and freedom are incompatible and also a co-founder of Palantir? Why do we give these people any legitimacy? Because they have money?

The most striking thing about this exchange for me is how abstract it is: until the last email from Clegg, there's no reference to any of Facebook/Meta's products. It sounds more like political strategists trying to find out how to appeal to Millennials, but by pandering to Millennials' pre-existing political views rather than trying to push a political view.

Facebook and instagram are a disease. Time and again Meta’s properties have been shown to be detrimental to children’s (and adults’) mental health. Even by Meta’s own research!

The whole thing stinks of the same foul reek as big tobacco. When their reckoning comes we will wonder how we could have let one megalomaniac’s scam go so far.

> They trust me. Dumb fucks.

> Zuck aut nihil.

He never changed.

"One example of such an "iron grip" from my colleague Eric Weinstein: Of the 67 top research universities in the US, 62 have Baby Boomer presidents (three are Silent Generation and only two are Generation X). Today, the median age of these 67 university presidents is 65 years-old... And this is very different from the recent past. Only thirty years ago, in 1990, the median age of these same university presidents was a much lower 52-years old;"

Got to admit that's very interesting. That was January 5, 2020, I wonder how it looks today.

I asked chat:

Boomers: ~13 of 20 (~65%) Examples: Princeton (Christopher Eisgruber, 1961), MIT (Sally Kornbluth, 1960), Harvard (Alan Garber, 1955), Duke (Vincent Price, 1957), Brown (Christina Paxson, 1960), Johns Hopkins (Ron Daniels, 1959), Columbia’s acting leaders across 2024–25 were also Boomers.

Gen X: ~7 of 20 (~35%) Examples: Stanford (Jonathan Levin, 1972), Yale (Maurie McInnis, 1966), Dartmouth (Sian Beilock, 1976), Rice (Reginald DesRoches, 1967), Vanderbilt (Daniel Diermeier, 1965), WashU (Andrew D. Martin, 1972), Notre Dame (Rev. Robert A. Dowd, 1965).

Millennials/Silent: 0 in this Top-20 (today). (A few large publics just outside the USNWR top-20 have Boomer or Gen-X chancellors as well; e.g., UC Berkeley’s Rich Lyons, 1961.)

The boomers are still holding on to power. Amazing!

What's it like in the private sector?

Gen X: ~53% (Microsoft/S. Nadella 1967; Alphabet/S. Pichai 1972; Amazon/A. Jassy 1968; Tesla/E. Musk 1971; Eli Lilly/D. Ricks 1967; Walmart/D. McMillon 1966; Tencent/Ma Huateng 1971; Visa/R. McInerney 1975; Mastercard/M. Miebach 1968; ExxonMobil/D. Woods 1965; plus Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters 1970.)

Boomers: ~43% (Nvidia/J. Huang 1963; Apple/T. Cook 1960; Saudi Aramco/A. Nasser 1958; Broadcom/Hock Tan 1951/52; TSMC/C.C. Wei 1953; JPMorgan/J. Dimon 1956; Oracle/S. Catz 1961; plus Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos 1964.)

Millennials: ~5% (Meta/Mark Zuckerberg 1984.)

Silent Generation: ~5% (Berkshire Hathaway/Warren Buffett 1930 — slated to hand CEO role to Greg Abel, b. 1962, at year-end 2025.)

A little better, but my gosh they are really holding on. I'm sure it is unprecedented. Certainly heath is better than any time in history, but this seems extreme.

No matter how hard I try I fail to see why would anyone mentally stable dislike Peter Thiel.

Well if the changeover happens it seems it will happen in the 2030s.

Amd millennials found their replacement for housing bubble with the stocks / crypto bubble.

And democracy is good for boomers, because they are too many and outnumber everyone else in battle. So millennials and genz are not unsympathetic to less democracy (a view that Thiel shares).

Thiel in this context could be considered a boomer, and his interests lie with them

Is “techmails.com” a trustworthy source? This seems like a made up thread. Although plausible enough to seem real.

  [This document is from Tennessee v. Meta (2024).]

Reminder to millennials:

Socialism in real life = Biggest Government, Biggest Tech monopoly, forced uniformity, no self-agency, no authenticity for anyone who slightly disagrees with any aspect of the agenda, etc.

Source: I fled Venezuela because I lived in it.

Wow am I reading this correctly? To recap:

- They're going to run Zuck for president to beat the millennial socialist zeitgeist.

- They're going to use generational warfare to stage an institutional coup.

> we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed

Classy.

> When Mark and Priscilla commit to giving away 99% of their wealth during their lifetimes

I hadn't heard this before but googling it seems like a genuine commitment at the time[0]. I mostly feel like Zuck isn't making the world a better place, but this sounds really impressive as a commitment - any idea if this commitments been stuck to now we're around 10 years on?

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34978249

The thing that most surprises me in these emails are that those two people care about housing price or student debt, or millennials in general.

And cynical me can't brush of the feeling that this is satire or that I need to read between the lines.

A dude that buys all houses around him just to get privacy and "fuck off" others (Zuck) cares about housing? A guy that think Greta is antichrist and think anyone that blocks AI advancement is antichrist, somehow thinks "we should look at why millennials choose socialism" as a thought process?

A more realistic, "what they mean" interpretation of this emailing is:

"FB product have influence over millennials (Instagram) and Boomers (Facebook). Boomers are dying out, so we should double down on our grip over millennials and tune the algorithms so we can manipulate them more than ever. We should lobby and push out the boomers and set millennials in the position of institutional power, and no other cohorts, so that we have a direct pipeline of controlling the public discord and communication between this generation "

> Thanks Peter – hugely thought provoking!

Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth, I never liked Clegg much even when he was in office but bleh.

> Millennials remain our most active users.

Even in back in 2019 I have a hard time believing this was true. As a millennial, my facebook feed was overtaken by my parents generation in the early 2010s and the handful of peers I know who still use it regularly use it to communicate with that generation.

Maybe he's counting Instagram usage as part of Facebook?

This site needs better links to sources. Hard links to the case files + Archive.org mirror too.

"This document is from Tennessee v. Meta (2024)" ain't cut it in the age of LLMs anymore

Do these dweebs ever let up on huffing their own farts? I can only hope that the actual measurements of their declining platform influence and use are true and we see FB peter out at some point. Sadly, it'll be replaced by something even more banal, but at least Zuck will fade away, here's hoping Thiel does as well.

> Of course, there are numerous ways in which this role (Mark as Millennial spokesman) is both pretty unfair and highly inappropriate. It is unfair because this much of a burden should not be placed on any single person; and it is inappropriate because Mark is a highly unrepresentative example of the Millennial generation, for a whole range of reasons that we do not need to enumerate. But even with these caveats, I believe that we might be better served by understanding that something like this is going on and trying to think about what it would mean for Mark to think of himself as a Millennial spokesman... and perhaps to contrast this with what I take to be our current policy (at least implicitly) — of Mark as a Baby Boomer construct of how a well-behaved Millennial is supposed to act. If forced to make a choice, I would always rather win popularity contests with Millennials than with Boomers!

That entire paragraph is mind bending. I really wish he had enumerated for a wider audience what was there because you could read something quite profound into it.

> there is a certain sense in which Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as 'the spokesman' for the Millennial generation — as the single person who gives voice to the hopes and fears and the unique experiences of this generation, at least in the USA

Fucks sake... that is an absolutely bananas read of Zuck's place in American culture.

Zuckerberg as generational representative made my millennial and Gen Z kids lol

It's extremely telling that as Thiel is talking about Zuck's speech at Harvard, he is using the pronoun "we", as if Thiel was also giving the speech.

Zuck is Thiel's mouthpiece, through and through. And it explains everything about Meta.

Thanks for this. This helped me understand Zuckerberg’s recent change of style.

It is now clear that he made a repositioning, and not that was fruit of some psychological breakthrough or something like that.

At the same time it’s scary to think about to what extent that men can go for business and also, given his pathetic behavior at the White House dinner, who is actually controlling that man.

Are we sure these guys didn’t actively contribute to creating this future?

> We have a team working on an ambitious long term project on loneliness/isolation which, again, has the potential to hold particular appeal to the Millennial sentiments set out in the paper. The latest plans will be presented to Mark next week.

With the goal to reduce it, right?

...right?

Surprisingly self-aware and empathetic from Thiel:

> I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.

But when he gives examples of the "iron grip" boomers have on power, he only talks about their control of universities and the government. He leaves out wealth and capital.