By Nicolas
Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook employees he was ready to “go to the mat” with US Sen. Elizabeth Warren if she gets elected president.
The giant social network’s CEO, striking a defiant tone against critics at an all-hands meeting in July that was secretly captured on audio, said Facebook would fight tooth-and-nail against any attempt to break up the company.
The 35-year-old tech tycoon added that he expects a legal challenge from Warren if she is elected to the White House, according to audio obtained by The Verge.
“If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win that legal challenge,” Zuckerberg told his employees.
“And does that suck for us? Yeah,” Zuckerberg added. “I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government.” But “if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”
Warren shot back at Zuckerberg on Twitter just hours after his leaked comments got published.
“What would really ‘suck’ is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy,” the Democratic presidential candidate wrote.
In the recorded audio, Zuckerberg also responded to criticism of his refusal to appear before governments around the world who have demanded he answer for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying that he did enough when he appeared for hearings in the US and the EU.
“It just doesn’t really make sense for me to go to hearings in every single country that wants to have me show up and, frankly, doesn’t have jurisdiction to demand that,” he said. “But people are going to use the position of the company and me to criticize us.”
Zuckerberg also joked that if not for his iron grip on the company, he would have been ousted a number of times, eliciting laughs from the audience.
“I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on,” he said. “And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure.”
The audio captures Zuckerberg speaking about scandals that have dogged the company, which has seen its reputation plummet after it was discovered that it leaked users’ personal information to political operatives even as it spread bad information during the 2016 presidential election.
Asked what employees should tell friends who have a negative opinion of Facebook, Zuckerberg suggested they tell them they care about the problems and “have their best interests at heart.”
After the transcript of the meeting got published, Zuckerberg posted the link to the story on his Facebook page, telling his followers to “check it out if you’re interested in seeing an unfiltered version of what I’m thinking and telling employees on a bunch of topics.”
