Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg just says the company isn’t planning to go public yet.
Zuckerberg’s “not yet” remark came at the EG8 Forum. The question of whether Facebook would go public came at the very beginning of the question-and-answer session the CEO is appearing in.
During his visit to France, Zuckerberg met with France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy. The nation hosts the G8 conference of industrialized nations’ leaders starting tomorrow.
“Transparency makes it so that the best things can win,” like the best restaurants, Zuckerberg said. “Now with the Internet there’s the ability to get people’s opinions and the best things rise to the top. It makes a fairer ecosystem…. I hope this leads to better products.”
Zuckerberg extended that to movies. While films put a lot of money into Facebook advertising, no amount of spending can counteract bad reviews that spread virally, he said. By the time the film opens at the box office, people know whether it’s good or bad, and that makes it harder for movies that aren’t good to sell at the box office. This is all a good thing, the social network’s CEO argues.
“The trend of people being empowered to share things that they want is going to be the trend for the next five to ten years. We’re much closer to the beginning of that,” he said. “We’re just going to see more ways for people to keep sharing things.”
He says that he wants to see his company help enable companies that will share music and other forms of entertainment get going, but that Facebook can’t create some of the technologies for doing so itself. He explains that the social network is the platform.
The host of the event began with an attempt to jest about Zuckerberg’s sportsmanship, and that brought the revelation that Zuckerberg gave some pointers on fencing to Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s child.
Source: All Facebook
Wednesday, May 25, 2011