Money Winners of 2007: Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg calls the shots

15 12 2007

Money Winners of 2007: Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg calls the shots

Posted by: in Marketing and Advertising

Filed under: Products and services, Management, Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Marketing and advertising, Viacom (VIA), Rich in America

If half the stuff published about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is true, the 23-year-old Harvard dropout is a major league kook. But he’s also one of the most important entrepreneurs of the past 20 years.

People — including me — thought he was nuts when he turned down a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and a $750 million one from Viacom Inc. (NYSE: VIA). It turns out that Zuckerberg got the last laugh. In October, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) agreed to invest $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook in a deal that values the company at $12 billion.

Zuckerberg also reportedly drove the suits who wanted to buy his company bananas for, among other things, delaying meetings in order to spend time with his girlfriend. But he knows his user base. When Facebook users revolted over the company’s Beacon advertising program, he admitted the company screwed up, saying on his blog “we simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.” Now, users who don’t want to participate in Beacon can opt out of it.

But like all great entrepreneurs, Zuckerberg has a gigantic ego and is attracting his share of nasty lawsuits. The New York Times recently reported that Facebook tried to get the magazine 02138 to remove documents from its website related to a lawsuit against that claims Zuckerberg “stole the idea and some of the personal source code for Facebook from some fellow students.”

Let me make a not so bold prediction and say that this case will be settled sometime next year. The settlement amount will be considerable and kept confidential, allowing Zuckerberg to continue tinkering with his company, enabling him to wreak havoc in the media world for years to come.

He’s got plenty of time to make and lose several billion before he turns 30.

Be sure to check out more Money Winners of 2007.