Weekly Column
What If Mark Zuckerberg Had Stayed in School?
Two more years at Harvard would have taught him some valuable lessons — and changed the course of Facebook
This month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced yet another new direction for his famously bad-acting company. Now, he says, the platform once responsible for the Cambridge Analytica election fiasco and countless other personal invasions will become the poster child for privacy and encryption. Maybe after all the evasions, missteps, and pivots, Zuckerberg is finally learning from his experiences.
But as I watch Mark Zuckerberg zig and zag his way through one disaster after another, I can’t help but muse on one of the ways he could have spared himself — and the rest of humanity — all this trouble. What if he had simply stayed in school?
At the end of his sophomore year, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard’s class of 2006 in order to pursue development of Facebook. The social networking platform was already the 10th most trafficked site on the internet, so young Zuck decided to follow in the footsteps of Harvard dropout Bill Gates and pursue Silicon Valley venture capitalists over Cambridge academics.
