Originally I was just going to profile Mark Zuckerberg, as most of us use Facebook.  But I see many similarities between him and Irving Thalberg.  Both came to prominence while the world around them was undergoing great change.  So please, bear with me as I take you back into time...

     Henry Ford did not invent the car.  What he did invent was a factory system for the automobile to thrive.  Each car, each model that moved through the assembly line would get better and better.  Irving Thalberg did not invent motion pictures.  What he did invent, was a production code and a production system to allow feature films longer than 90 minutes to thrive.

     Irving Thalberg was already a legend when he was a little boy.  Told by doctors, due to a degenerate heart condition, that he would not survive past the age of 20, he spent a large portion of his youth in bed.  With nothing to do, he read a lot of books, so he was more educated than most people his age.  By the time Thalberg turned 20, he was a Manager at Universal Pictures.  He chose movies because the doctors told him College would be too stressful for his heart.  At the time, most films were shorts, 10 to 20 minutes in length.  Thalberg was more inclined to make longer dramas, comedies, and horror films that were 90 minutes or more in length, filmed by great directors with casts full of stars.  A very handsome young man, the idea of Thalberg as a doomed Prince had already spread throughout the industry.  His boss, Carl Laemmle, warned his daughters to stay away from him, ‘lest he make them a widow.

     Thalberg went to work for Marcus Loew, Nicholas Schenck and Louis B Mayer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios when Loew merged Metro Pictures with Goldwyn Pictures around 1924.  In a few short years, MGM became the most successful film studio in the history of the Golden Age of Movies (1921 to 1961).  Thalberg died in 1936 just he was getting ready to greenlight the Wizard of Oz.

     Social Media or the idea of connecting people during the internet age, began with Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, the founders of a social media site called MySpace.  I had a roommate who worked for MySpace when it was a start-up company.  Even then I thought it was a brilliant idea.  The company grew like wildfire until it was bought out by Fox Studios and Rupert Murdoch.

     Like Irving Thalberg, Mark Zuckerberg did not create Social Media.  He didn’t really create Facebook either, that credit goes to the Winklevoss Twins.  What Zuckerberg did create was an efficient way for young and old people and families to connect with each other, for businesses and social media influencers to connect with each other, and an effective way to monetize this if they chose to do so.  Facebook became a cleaner, more reliable platform focused on real-identity connections than MySpace.  The feed was cleaner, faster, easier to update and appealed to far more demographics.  In a few short years, Facebook became the premier Social Media company in the world.

     Mark Zuckerberg was already programming at a young age.  At 11 he created a program that allowed the computers in his father’s dental office to communicate with each other.  By the time he enrolled at Harvard in 2002, he was already considered to be a programming prodigy.  He established The Facebook while working with the Winklevoss Twins on Harvard Connection.  By the time Facebook established offices in 2004, they were already receiving sizeable offers to be bought out.

     How are Thalberg and Zuckerberg closely linked?

     The first is distribution.  Thalberg had theatres to display MGM product and Zuckerberg has Facebook.  When I say a distribution center, simply look at it as a place for all of us to meet.  The second is tools.  Thalberg’s cadre of filmmakers had the 35-milimeter camera and the Moviola editing machine.  Zuckerberg’s army of engineers have AI and multiple editing and software tools at their disposal.  The third, most obvious similarity, is they both had enormous amounts of capital at their disposal because their products have been successful.  Last but not least, both men built their companies based on their ideas and vision of the future. 

     When the Metaverse comes, think of it as a movie, except YOU are the star and you will be the one doing the interacting.  Zuckerberg, like the Wizard of Oz, will be the one overseeing it all.