Mark Zuckerberg

""Rupert Murdoch holds 15% of the shares of News Corp., but 39% of the voting rights; even better, John Malone, with only 3% of the shares of Liberty Media, can rely on 28% of the voting rights; and it goes up to 53% for Facebook, of which Mark Zuckerberg [the founder] has only 15% of the shares.""

"When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t."

"Now he can think about what to do together with the boys who dominate the future, like Mark Zuckerberg, who came all the way to Agordo to see his factory, with whom he designed the glasses of tomorrow."

"For the young leaders of American capitalism, Del Vecchio is a point of reference, not an old-timer, one with whom to discuss policy and the future. This is the reason that, as we have seen, causes Mark Zuckerberg to go all the way to the outskirts of the outskirts of the empire to meet him."

"Benko started as a start-up entrepreneur and simply remained one, even as the company branched out and grew in width and height. Other start-up entrepreneurs eventually bring in experienced managers to reorganize the company – like Google's bosses did with Eric Schmidt, who had previously led traditional IT companies, or Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg with manager Sheryl Sandberg, who had stints at McKinsey and Google."

"I took to that market like a fish to water. I had some experience of the tech sector through my gaming portfolio companies. One such business was CCP, an interesting company founded in Iceland by a team of developers and gaming enthusiasts with investments from an Icelandic pension fund. These two very different groups did not see eye to eye at all, so the founders approached me to buy out the institutional investor. They presumed someone like me who had founded and built several businesses would speak their language and be a better fit to expand the company. The founders and management had massive ambitions that I took with a pinch of salt, but there was an incredibly loyal fanbase of customers who paid a monthly subscription fee. The company’s stated goal was to create another world outside the real one: to their users, the creation was more important than the actual world! They called it the ‘Metaverse’ and they were actually the first real players there, years before Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg called it out as the next level of social networks and renamed his company Meta. CCP’s EVE Online game was and is a space-based sandbox ‘massively multiplayer online’ (MMO) game known for its player-driven economy, vast universe and complex gameplay mechanics. It allows players to explore, trade, engage in player-versus-player combat, and participate in large-scale battles and political events within the game’s persistent universe. I saw CCP grow from one office in Iceland to large offices in the US, Shanghai, the UK and elsewhere. As most of EVE’s players were inside that sandbox world for hours each day, it really felt that it was becoming the most important place for many of them. The annual EVE Fanfest attracted thousands of people from all over the world, and often people from different countries who had met inside the game would get married there in reality. It was astounding to watch this community as it grew, and I really felt that if this was a guide to the future, then technology was changing the social fabric in more fundamental ways than most people realised."