Live from SF: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tapes podcast with 6,000 friends

By MIKE ISAAC

More than 6,000 techies streamed on Tuesday evening into San Francisco (SF)’s Chase Center, a cavernous event space that is home to the Golden State Warriors and hosts pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo.
 

Engineers, venture capitalists, and other Silicon Valley digerati chatted as they found their seats, with Modelos and slices of pizza in hand. The anticipation was high.
 

They were not there to join a rager of a concert. Instead, they had paid $50 or more a ticket to see Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, tape a podcast about artificial intelligence, the metaverse and how he outmanoeuvred the rest of

 

Silicon Valley to keep his company winning. “You underestimate how painful things are going to be, so you can go and do good things,” Zuckerberg told the crowd about the 20-year history of building his empire, which includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. He mentioned Aeschylus, the ancient Greek dramatist who is often described as the father of tragedy, in

a nod to the lengthy time horizons he thinks in for his company. The audience, a sea of Patagonia sweater vests and technooptimism, roared in approval.
 

Other scions of capitalism piped up, too. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, appeared on the jumbotron. Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, flew in from Sweden for the chat. Even Jensen Huang, the very busy chief executive of Nvidia, made a cameo.

It was the hottest ticket in San Francisco as Zuckerberg spoke for nearly an hour and a half with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, the creators of the podcast ‘Acquired.’ The hit show, which has become a must-listen for business people the world over, has an audience of more than 800,000 and has taped episodes with the top executives of Uber, Sequoia Capital, Berkshire Hathaway and others.
 

But Zuckerberg, 40, was the biggest get yet. “This is a celebration of technology,” Rosenthal declared onstage.

If it sounds strange that a podcast managed to land some of the world’s highest-profile business leaders, you may not have been paying attention.

In recent years, billionaires and top executives in Silicon Valley, Wall Street and beyond have started

to opt out of sitting only for traditional media interviews.

Instead, they increasingly prefer to tell their own stories in the friendly spaces of podcasts and YouTube streams, where they often have more leeway to expound — usually at great length — on their pursuits and passions. Many of the interviews are like fireside chats over beers with the boys. 

And the “Acquired” event showed how these formats have amassed significant gathering power, as podcasters like Rosenthal

and Gilbert have risen to fame from relative obscurity.
 

©2024 The New York Times News Service