Displaying items by tag: zuckerberg

(San Francisco)

It is getting ugly on the left. While big tech companies have always been fairly far-left politically, a new line has just been drawn. In new transcripts just released, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, says he will “go to the mat and fight” with presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren to stop her plan to break up big tech companies. “If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government … But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight”, said Zuckerberg. Warren retorted “What would really ‘suck’ is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anti-competitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy”.

FINSUM: Warren is still a long way from office, but this is a glimpse of what the future would look like should the far-left win the election. Instead of probes and whistleblowers, we would have major courtroom dramas over anti-monopoly measures.

(Washington)

The bad news just keeps on coming for the tech industry. Already this morning there is a lot of negative press about Google allowing third party developers to actually read users’ Gmail accounts, and now comes the news that the SEC has opened an investigation into Facebook for its data breaches. The SEC is looking at Facebook’s disclosures of the breach, and in particular, Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony. Facebook says it is fully complying with all the current investigations it is facing.

FINSUM: This development might be particularly troublesome for the stock because investors are most familiar with the SEC. Hard to see what might develop here.