#435 Mark Zuckerberg's Empire

Zuckerberg's unremovable control and profitable core business let him bet hundreds of billions on AI without needing outside validation, unlike Musk or Altman.

• Empire scale: Meta's 3.6B users and $1.6T market cap sit atop $200B+ annual revenue, with 2025 capex exceeding every nation's military budget except the US, China, and Russia.
• The dictator's dilemma: Stern frames Zuckerberg as obsessively guarding against isolation from reality, citing Stalin, Mao, and Nokia's 2007 dismissal of the iPhone as cautionary parallels.

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