The Man Who Cannot Be Overruled Wants to Talk About Balance of Power

Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto rests on a single elegant idea: safety comes from distributing power so no one actor can impose their will.

It’s a fine principle. It’s also the exact opposite of how he has run everything he has ever touched.

Start with the structure of Meta itself. Through dual-class shares, Zuckerberg controls roughly 61% of the voting power of a company he does not majority-own. No board can fire him. No shareholder vote can bind him. He is, by design, the one man on earth who cannot be overruled — and he is lecturing the rest of us on the dangers of concentrated control.

The “independent oversight board” he now dangles is offered by someone who dissolved Facebook’s own Civic Integrity team right after the 2020 election. We have seen what his oversight is worth when the cameras move on.

Then measure the values against the receipts — and not just on AI.

• He says superintelligence must protect your privacy. In 2019 he stood on a stage and announced “the future is private.” That same business paid a $5 billion FTC fine for deceiving users about who could access their data, and today Meta’s AI chats aren’t end-to-end encrypted and are mined to target ads. The pledge is identical. So is the gap between the pledge and the practice.

• He says AI must reflect human values. In Myanmar, Amnesty International documented that Facebook’s own algorithms proactively amplified the hatred that fueled the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya — and Meta has refused to pay reparations. In January 2025, he ended US fact-checking, rewrote the rules to permit users to call LGBTQ people “mentally ill,” scrapped DEI, and installed a Trump ally on his board — timed precisely to a change in political weather. These are not the choices of a man guided by values. They are the choices of a man reading the room and calling it principle.

• He says AI will create more employment, not less. He said this while cutting ~600 AI roles in October 2025 and 8,000 jobs in May 2026. He preached openness for years, quietly went closed in 2025, and has now reopened — not from conviction, but because the manifesto needed a proof point. Ask the Metaverse how his grand, world-remaking visions tend to end.

• This is the deeper problem. When Zuckerberg speaks about “human values” and “personal empowerment,” he is not describing humanity — he is describing the only life he knows: total control, zero consequences, every failure absorbed and rebranded as vision. “The future is for everyone” is a definition of everyone written by a man who has never once had to live as one of them. It is not a vision of the world. It is the view from inside the bubble, mistaken for the view of the world.

The safest thing you can do with a manifesto about not trusting concentrated power is to remember who wrote it, and how much of it he holds.