The guy who needed a booster seat, didn't know how to drink water, might actually have been a robot.

But in the past year, a comeback for the ages.

He is singularly focused, has been since the dorm room at Harvard, and the man can execute.

MMA fights, a blooming friendship with Jensen Huang, talks of a hot Zuck summer, chains, fur coats, and thanks to a stellar stock market outperformance, a Wall Street darling.

Now fighting it out with Elon Musk for title of the third richest person in the world.

The guy is Mark Zuckerberg.

Right.

And, you know, he may be dressing nicely, but he's still a cold-blooded killer.

But now, his moment of truth.

Metashares are set up for what could be the worst day the stock has seen in years.

Can he deliver on the most important platform shift in tech in decades, generative AI?

Now, why doesn't he deserve the benefit of the doubt?

He does.

And I'm giving it to him.

This week on Tech Check, the reinvention of Zuck and his show-me moment.

Harvard didn't have a Facebook, so that's the gap that we were trying to fill.

And now we're at 100,000 people, so who knows where we're going next.

That was early Zuck on CNBC in 2004.

Where he went next was an empire.

His family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, today touches nearly 4 billion users.

He founded his company at 19 years old, and two decades later, he is still in control and more successful than ever.

That is a feat that today is rare and getting rarer.

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the few continuing-to-work big tech founders, CEOs.

You've seen everyone from Jeff Bezos go to his effective retirement.

Larry and Sergey become much less involved.

Within Google, Steve Jobs has passed away.

And so you look at the landscape and you say, who's remaining?

The answer, only Zuck and the current AI king, NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang.

It's not a bad stage to share, and something Zuck himself seems to be proud of.

He and I actually at this point are the two longest-standing tech founders of the big tech companies.

He's actually been at it for more than, I think, more than 30 years, or almost 30 years.

So he's been doing it a bit longer than me.

But we have a lot of stories and experience that we share, and I just appreciate his wisdom on all this stuff.

That shared wisdom helped both their companies leave the rest of tech in the dust this year.

After NVIDIA, Meta is the best-performing mega-cap stock of the last 12 months, by a long shot.

Even as the rest of tech and social media stocks in particular lag.

So how did he do it?

Well, one, he got fit, dubbing 2023 the year of efficiency.

That was an incredible call, incredible turnaround in terms of management.

You don't see companies at this scale with that agility.

What we heard last night was a significant change, and I think it's really important to understand that Mark said this isn't one and done.

He cut headcount, and he went against Silicon Valley's traditionally softer culture.

They have a hiring frieze on in the company.

I think this is not only great for Meta, but it's really leadership for all of Silicon Valley and all of technology.

Zuck was seen as ruthless at the time, multiple rounds of layoffs slashing thousands of workers at a time, ultimately axing 22 percent of its workforce.

But it worked.

Quarterly revenue rose, profitability soared, and Wall Street cheered.

It's the fastest turnaround in corporate history with Zuckerberg.

You're talking about an employee number now that's around 67,000.

It was 87,000 and it's high.

Right.

You know, somebody's saying to me, how long does it take you to like, you know, you get your, you buy a new house, you put, get it together.

It takes you like nine months to feel comfortable, whatever.

It's like this guy reorganized an entire company in three months.

It's unbelievable what Zuckerberg did, and we continue to see the impact from it.

And the cherry on top, Meta issued its first ever dividend, a clear sign to investors that it was evolving into a more mature company.

It's a turnaround for the ages.

I mean, the comeback kid Zuckerberg, I mean, go back a year and a half ago and now you're doing a dividend.

One that listened to Wall Street.

They are making gestures of capital discipline, of shareholder friendliness.

They seem to have obviously taken to heart the criticism that they were being profligate and spending big.

Another key to Meta's recent success,

Zuck's early and almost accidental embracing of generative AI.

Before many of his rivals even knew to start paying attention.

We were constrained on basically the infrastructure that we had to catch up to what TikTok was doing as quickly as we would have wanted to.

So I basically looked at that and I was like, hey, we have to make sure that we're never in this situation again.

So let's order enough GPUs to do what we need to do on reels and ranking content and feed.

But let's also, let's double that.

Which meant that in 2023, when everyone began realizing the potential of gen AI and sent the prices of those NVIDIA GPUs soaring, Zuck already had a stash.

That might be why his latest AI model, the Llama 3, is seen as one of the best open source models out there.

And the fact that it's open and not closed like ChatGPT and Gemini, that is another major differentiation from competitors.

One that Zuck is betting will pay off in the long run.

There's a bunch of times when we've launched or wanted to launch features and then Apple's just like, nope, you're not launching that.

The question is, are we kind of set up for a world like that with AI, where you're going to get a handful of companies that run these closed models that are going to be in control of the APIs and therefore are going to be able to tell you what you can build?

Well, for one, I can say for us, it is worth it to go build a model ourselves to make sure that we're not in that position.

All of this has driven Meta to jump headfirst into the AI race and catch up quickly.

Its Meta AI chatbot hit the market nearly a year after major competitors,

Microsoft's and Google's.

But Zuck was quick to leverage Meta's scale and distribution to put that tech into the wild, into the hands of billions of users.

Compare that to Google, which has talked about adding AI into its core search product for a year, but has yet to take it out of beta testing.

Or Apple, which has an install base of more than 2 billion and has yet to articulate a clear gen AI strategy.

Zuckerberg is used to changing his product quickly.

I mean, if you think about the social media era, like social media companies need to shift and adapt because people get bored so quickly.

And that's why you have Facebook has gone from the news feed to stories to reels.

And now it's embedding AI. It's just built into the company's DNA.

Even if it's not ready for primetime, Meta AI has its share of issues.

The New York Times called it fun to use, but can't be trusted, saying it struggles with facts, numbers and web search.

But nonetheless, a bold move from Zuck that could keep him on top or see it all crashing down once again.

For Mark Zuckerberg, it has always been a thin line between tech visionary and villain.

And a big part of his success has been reinvention on both a personal and corporate level.

Facebook successfully navigated a botched IPO in 2012 and the shift to mobile.

But some of the most existential threats were around data privacy.

Does this data scandal show that your business model is broken?

This was a huge breach of trust. People come to Facebook every day and they depend upon us to protect their data. And I am so sorry that we let so many people down.

And amplification of political content.

The slew of negative headlines about Facebook's failure to tamp down on the spread of radicalizing content and also its failure to respond to the concerns of employees.

The procession of high-profile appearances on Capitol Hill added pressure in which lawmakers didn't pull any punches.

Was your data included in the data sold to the malicious third parties?

Your personal data?

Yes.

It was.

Are you willing to change your business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy?

Congresswoman, we have made and are continuing to make changes to reduce the amount of data.

Are you willing to change your business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy?

Congresswoman, I'm not sure what that means.

A few years after that, Zuck made a big push into the metaverse.

He's getting dragged on the internet for how ugly the graphics of this game are.

Fortune calling it an international laughingstock.

Slate labeling the look so stupid.

And Forbes asking, does Mark Zuckerberg not understand how bad his metaverse is?

A move Wall Street also didn't take all too well.

I made a mistake here.

I was wrong.

I trusted this management team that was ill-advised.

But then came his year of efficiency, saving his stock and Wall Street cred.

Plus there was another tech villain on the scene taking some of the pressure off.

Elon Musk.

His drama-filled purchase of Twitter with all of the layoffs, rebranding, outages, glitches.

That allowed Zuck to swoop in with his copycat, Threads.

Big news today.

We are launching Threads, an open and friendly public space for conversations.

And then there was the billionaire cage fight.

Musk challenged Zuck, who just happened to be 18 months into his Brazilian jiu-jitsu training, to a cage match.

And though it never ended up happening, Zuck emerged, seeming like the adult in the room, another boost to his public image.

Zuck proved he could take a punch.

I don't think it's any surprise or it's any coincidence that he's taken up MMA as he's been able to take punches in the business world and sort of respond to them.

I think those two are pretty linked.

And what Zuckerberg is trying to show himself and show the world is that he can, you know, effectively take one to the chin, but continue to compete and have no interest in standing down.

But it's windy at the top.

And Zuck might not want to get too comfortable.

Its most recent quarterly report, a reminder that Wall Street and public opinion is fickle.

Meta gave a bleaker outlook for its sales this year and way more A.I. spending than Wall Street was prepared for.

There are going to be periods of more investment.

I read that as probably several quarters of this investment phase.

They obviously just updated the CapEx guidance for the full year.

But don't expect, reading between the lines here, much of a lift or maybe a breakout in terms of A.I.

Shares plummeted in the wake of those results, erasing nearly $200 billion in market value.

A meta meltdown, shares hitting levels not seen since late January, as revenue guidance comes in below expectations.

Is this the beginning of the end for the mega cap rally?

Zuckerberg spent most of that earnings call focused on money losing businesses like A.I. and the metaverse.

But for his part, Zuck has a history of turning high costs into actual revenue, and he urged investors to remember that.

Historically, investing to build these new scaled experiences in our apps has been a very good long-term investment for us and for investors who have stuck with us.

Smart investors see that the product is scaling and that there's a clear monetizable opportunity there even before the revenue materializes.

But social media tastes and trends, they move quickly.

TikTok's rapid rise underscores that.

TikTok's potential ban, another challenge or opportunity for Zuck to navigate.

There's also the advertising market, of which 98% of Meta's current revenue rests on.

It's an industry that is subject to quick downturns.

It's one that is facing more competition than ever.

And there's a presidential election this year.

Meta's numbers have been boosted by huge ad spend from Chinese retailers like Tmoo and Shein.

So as Mark Zuckerberg rides the wave of his latest reinvention, a reminder that in the fast-paced world of tech, staying on top is just as hard as getting there.

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