Facebook co-founder says friendship with Zuckerberg ‘probably’ over after call for company breakup
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes said Friday that his friendship with CEO Mark Zuckerberg is “probably” over after he called for the social media giant to break up.
“Mark is a good kind person … and I also think he has too much power,” Hughes said in an interview with “CBS This Morning.”
{mosads}Hughes, who lived with Zuckerberg while the two were students at Harvard, said he doesn’t know if the two’s friendship will last.
“I really don’t know if we’re gonna be friends,” Hughes told CBS. “Probably not, but there are some friendships where you have disagreements, and big ones, and you still stay friends.”
Do you think you’re going to stay friends with Mark Zuckerberg?
“I don’t know. Probably not… but there are some friendships where you have disagreements and still stay friends.” — @chrishughes pic.twitter.com/8GbrPpjENl
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) May 10, 2019
Hughes’s comments Friday came a day after he published a lengthy op-ed in The New York Times in which he called for the company to break up.
Hughes, who left Facebook in 2007, wrote that he feels a “sense of anger and responsibility” for the company’s wrongs.
“We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,” he wrote.
Hughes pointed to Zuckerberg’s “staggering” influence at the company, which controls three major platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — and noted that Zuckerberg controls about 60 percent of voting shares for Facebook’s board, giving him immense control over algorithms, privacy settings and “even which messages get delivered.”
He added that it would cost the government almost nothing to break up Facebook into multiple companies and urged the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department to enforce antitrust laws by undoing Facebook’s 2012 acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp.
“The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically,” he said.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
