Do we like Mark Zuckerberg?
Our score: 3 out of 10. Billions in real philanthropy sit beside rule changes that hurt LGBTQ+ users, plus court losses over the safety of young users.
Zuckerberg grew up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and was writing an instant messaging program called Zucknet at 12. He went from Phillips Exeter to Harvard, built CourseMatch and Facemash, and launched TheFacebook in February 2004 with friends including Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin. He dropped out that June to run it full time.
The founding story came with a stoush. Divya Narendra and the Winklevoss twins sued in 2004, alleging he broke an oral agreement to help build their site and took their idea and code; a settlement followed, though the dispute dragged on to 2011. More recently, investors sued him and other Meta leaders over the Cambridge Analytica era FTC fine, and the case settled mid-trial in 2025 for $190 million, paid by directors' insurance, with Meta denying wrongdoing.
Then there's the 2026 filing from New Mexico's attorney general, which alleges Zuckerberg approved letting minors use AI companion chatbots despite warnings from safety staff. The documents include internal emails but nothing written by him, and Meta says the state cherry-picked and that the same papers show him directing that explicit AIs shouldn't reach younger users. Where you land depends on whether you trust the state's reading or Meta's.
The same month Meta ended its DEI programs and dropped hiring targets for women and people of colour, and on Joe Rogan's podcast he described masculine energy as “a culture that celebrates aggression a bit more”. On the planet side, Entergy says Meta's Louisiana AI data centre will run on about ten gas-fired plants, which environmental groups say undercuts its climate commitments, while Meta says it will add matching clean energy. None of this is a campaign by him against a group, but it is his company, his call, and it landed on the people we care about.
In February he testified in the Los Angeles trial, defending Instagram's approach to beauty filters and calling full removal “paternalistic”. In March the jury found Meta and YouTube liable for negligence and failure to warn, with $3 million in compensatory damages and punitive damages to be decided. A day earlier a New Mexico jury had ordered Meta to pay $375 million under the state's Unfair Practices Act, in a case that also named him; Meta says it will appeal both.
The good stuff is real. Reuters reports he and Priscilla Chan have given over $7 billion to charity since 2015 and pledged to give away 99% of their Meta shares, mainly through Biohub, which in May released open-source AI protein models for drug discovery. Critics say the shift to science has come at the expense of their other work, including education.