> he famously doesn't understand human beings and has never come up with a single product idea that became popular
This point is at least contentious. I am not going to go into weeds, but I fail to see how you can make a product that literally popularizes the term “network effects” without vision. You can say he “stole” the idea for facebook, but what about everything after? Ideas are cheap.
> no ability to execute
I see no evidence of this. How does someone scale from $0 to $1T without the ability to execute?
> Spending $50B in a few years with almost no revenue to show for it has to be the biggest business failure of all time.
I also think the metaverse was a failure. But I think they failed fast and have more experience in that area than any other company. They basically spent $50B to get data on the intial vision for the metaverse. Their stock and business has fully recovered.
It was a hedge against being “too late” and they got the timing wrong.
It’s one thing if you fail and the business goes bankrupt. It’s a completely different scenario when they recover completely. How does “the biggest business failure of all time” not end in that business going bankrupt?
Off the top of my head I am pretty sure hundreds of billions of dollars of value vanished after the Lehman Brothers collapse.
In tech (adjacent) you got worldcom, which was of a similar magnitude but in y2k dollars.