Zuckerberg Emailed All Employees Telling Them 'Please Resign,' 'Confidential' Message Leaked on Twitter
By Mike Landry
March 22, 2023 at 2:29pm
There was a leak from the Facebook hive to a tech publication saying Facebook was developing a mobile phone.
Not so, said Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg.
And in denying the content of the leak to TechCrunch, Zuckerberg went ballistic, dashed out an angry email to all hands, and told the leaker to resign, following it with this threat: “If you don’t resign, we will almost certainly find out who you are anyway.”
Gulp.
As a retired business professor, when I see heads of major corporations making major errors I sometimes jokingly tell people: “Why didn’t they take one of my courses?”
With that in mind, class, let’s continue looking at this real-world case.
The Zuckerberg email — under the subject line “Please Resign” — was sent more than a decade ago, but recently came to light on the Twitter account “Internal Tech Emails.”
The story comes in the wake of accounts of Zuckerberg’s dictatorial management and of ongoing workforce reductions at Facebook — now Meta — numbering 21,000 from last fall through the end of this year, according to Reuters.
The leaked information regarding the development of a phone by Facebook came after a 2010 session Zuckerberg had with employees in which he discussed “ways to make all phones and apps more social,” according to his follow-up email.
“It is frustrating and destructive that anyone here thought (it) was okay to say this to anyone outside the company,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“The fact that the story was innacurate doesn’t make it any better,” he said, lamenting having to spend considerable time “cleaning up the damage from this mess” and assuring cell phone companies Facebook was working with that Zuckerberg’s company would not become a competitor.
By the way, maybe next class we’ll discuss how Jeff Bezos and Amazon like to partner with people and then turn on them and compete with them. But I digress…
“So I’m asking whoever leaked this to resign immediately,” Zuckerberg’s email said. “If you believe that it’s ever appropriate to leak internal information, you should leave. If you don’t resign, we will almost certainly find out who you are anyway.”
The email said Facebook was “a company that promotes openness and transparency, both in the world at large and here internally at Facebook.” (This, of course, was written long before the hordes of Facebook fact-checkers unsuccessfully tried to bottle up major aspects of conspiracy- theories-turned-generally-accepted-truths).
“But the cost of an open culture is that we all have to protect the confidential information we share internally. If we don’t, we screw over everyone working their a***s off to change the world.”
WARNING: The following tweet contains vulgar language that some may find offensive.
Poster Comment:
I wish Zuck would have his technicians investigate why my Facebook page was hacked by some woman who apparently lives in Lubbock, Texas. She ordered things from J.C. Penny catalog in Monroe, Wisconsin that were never delivered. But this stuff came up on MY credit report.
WHERE IS THE FACEBOOK POLICE?
J.C. Penny Customer Service did put a fraud alert on my credit reports.