A ‘million messages’ that are ‘usually not good’: Mark Zuckerberg details Meta’s rough year on Joe Rogan show

Meta has battled competition, lagging user growth, and internal scandal

Each morning when Mark Zuckerberg wakes up, his phone is flooded with a “million messages” and they are “usually not good”, the Meta CEO said in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan released Thursday.

“People reserve the good stuff to tell me in person, right?” the billionaire Facebook co-founder said on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “So it’s like what’s going on in the world that I need to pay attention to? So it’s almost like every day you wake up you are punched in the stomach.”

Indeed, it’s been a year full of challenges for Meta.

In October, The Wall Street Journal released “The Facebook Files”, a blockbuster investigation revealing a variety of controversial internal conduct at the social media giant.

The reporting showed how high-profile political and entertainment figures got around fully adhering to some of Facebook’s content rules, teen girls suffered negative mental health experiences on Instagram and company monitors offered response to illegal conduct on its platforms that critics felt was insufficient.

In February, the company reported its streak of user growth had finally come to an end, causing Meta’s stock to drop by 26 per cent, triggering what was, at the time, the worst Wall Street drop in nearly a year.

Around that time, the company also announced that changes on Apple devices making it harder for Meta to track iPhone users and their data would cost the company about $10bn in ad revenue.

These challenges came as Facebook fends off competition from the ever-dynamic TikTok platform, and as Meta has poured immense resources into building out virtual- and augmented-reality software and hardware for its planned “metaverse.”

Then, this summer, Sheryl Sandberg, the founding COO of Facebook, announced she was leaving Meta, with plans to resign in the fall.

The only way the tech executive survives the onslaught of bad news is exercise, Mr Zuckerberg added on the podcast.

“Then it’s like okay, well f***, what do I need to do to go and reset myself and be productive and not stressed by this?” he said. “How do I do that? I basically read, I take in all the information and then go and do something physical for an hour or two and reset myself. I used to run a lot but the problem is you can think a lot when you are running, the last few years I have gotten into things that require full focus.”