Companies should enforce 'term limits' on tech titans

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By Parmy Olson / Bloomberg Opinion

Tech billionaires are so deep in their own reality-distortion fields that their perception of the world can get dangerously warped.

That’s the conclusion I drew from reading Sarah Wynn-Williams’ astonishing memoir about her time running global policy at Meta Platforms Inc. The company has sought to block its publication, offering a case study in the Streisand effect and vaulting “Careless People” to the top of the charts on Amazon.com Inc.

The book chimed with what I previously heard from former Meta executives about the company’s hypocrisy, its obsessive drive for growth and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s fixation on developing a fanbase. But Wynn-Williams’ vantage point in his inner orbit and that of and former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, detailing the power they wielded, also highlighted a dire need for limits to some tech leadership tenures. Wynn-Williams doesn’t offer answers, but here’s one: No single person should lead a platform for billions of users for more than a decade, never mind more than 20 years as Zuckerberg has done. Over the years and amid a string of political leaders entering and exiting power, he has been a constant presence, a monarch in a hoodie. Perhaps he needs a break just like them.

Wynn-Williams was at Facebook from 2011 to 2018. She persuaded early executives to make her the company’s first head of global policy because she believed in Facebook as a force for good. Over time, she watched with detached and horrified fascination as Zuckerberg exercised his growing power. She was in his private jet when a policy director explained how the company likely helped Donald Trump clinch his first presidential election in 2016.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-companies-should-enforce-term-limits-on-tech-titans/

[xocetaceans]

1. Not only that, but the whole idea that there should be billionaires or even near-billionaires should be abolished...

...in the tax code. The very existence of billionaires is evidence that the governmental regulation of the economic system is inherently malformed.

If financial worth is seen as a measure of a person's "value" (as it commonly seems to be taken to be), these last several months have clearly shown how badly both Musk and Trump (and the other billionaires in the Musk-Trump orbit) measure up to a regular person who works a job to help support a family or to a regular, single person who works a job to support themselves.