Bill Gates states he encouraged Mark Zuckerberg to be conscious of Washington political leaders, a lesson that obviously settled for the Facebook CEO.
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Bill Gates states Mark Zuckerberg “owes” him for some important recommendations the Microsoft co-founder offered the Facebook co-founder.
Gates, who’s ended up being a little bit of a coach and good example for Zuckerberg, both in company and philanthropy, encouraged his fellow Harvard dropout to be alert to the viewpoints of legislators, according to a profile of Zuckerberg released Monday by The NewYorker This was an agonizing lesson Gates discovered 20 years earlier when the federal government implicated the software application giant of monopolistic habits.
Back then, Gates certainly informed Congress that “the computer-software industry is not broken, and there is no need to fix it.” But the Justice Department wasn’t impressed with Gates’ statement and within months taken legal action against Microsoft for antitrust offenses, causing years of legal wrangling and the near break up of his business
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Gates told The New Yorker he regretted “taunting” regulators and encouraged Zuckerberg to be mindful of Washington goings-on.
“I said, ‘Get an office there — now,'” Gates said. “And Mark did, and he owes me.”
The advice apparently paid off for Zuckerberg in April when the Facebook CEO was called to account for data privacy lapses at his company. Facebook is a large, often secretive company that many have difficulty understanding, and Congress has toyed with the idea of regulating Facebook and other social media networks.
Although many of the questions came from tech-challenged senators, Zuckerberg patiently and respectfully addressed questions about how Facebook makes its money and how the internet works.
Zuckerberg’s appearance was widely regarded as a win for Facebook, which may help explain why the company spent more than $11.5 million lobbying Congress last year.
Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Cambridge Analytica: Everything you need to know about Facebook’s data mining scandal.
