Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs

After viewing “The Social Network”, the movie about the beginning of Facebook, there was a striking resemblance between Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. Both men showed such strong dedication to their respective companies, but they both also had this feeling that they were above everybody else, including the law.

 Steve Jobs started Apple with Woz, but when they came to a disagreement about where the future of Apple should go, Jobs did what he had to do to make sure that he stayed in control of Apple. Whatever happened to Woz happened, but Apple was going to stay on the path that Jobs had envisioned. According to “The Social Network”, Zuckerberg was also as determined as Jobs to make sure that Facebook continued on his envisioned path. He ignored the fact that he stole the idea from the twin brothers from Harvard, and he ended up diluting Eduardo’s shares. Both of these actions resulted in lawsuits that Zuckerberg would clearly lose.

Jobs and Zuckerberg’s personalities were also very similar. Both were awkward men who said what they thought, most of the time without thinking about how it would affect somebody. This is evident in the many instances where Jobs shouted how one of his employers ideas sucked. In the opening of “The Social Network”, Zuckerberg is on a date with Erica Albright. He says some very harsh things to her, but doesn’t understand why she is reacting with such anger. After she breaks up with him, Zuckerberg proceeds to blog about her, again saying some mean things.

 Both men give off this attitude that they can do or say whatever they want because they know that they are smarter than the average person. Zuckerberg is an excellent programmer, and Jobs has been putzing with computers all of his life. They emit this snotty personality, and many people who do not know them personally take it very offensively.

The main difference between these two men is their motivation for beginning their respective companies. When Jobs saw what Woz had created, his main intention was to find a way to make money from it. He wanted to sell it. Zuckerberg had a different motivation that is more similar to Brin and Page from Google. He wanted to provide a service to people, a social network for people to connect with other people. He didn’t want ads to clutter the page, to alter the users experience. Brin and Page wanted to create a way to search for things on the internet; a search that gave the most popular results and was the easiest for the searcher to use.

Zuckerberg and Jobs have many of the same personality characteristics, but I think their main difference is their motivation. Because they have very similar personalities, they therefore have similar ways of running a business, but their one glaring difference is why Facebook struggled in creating revenue in the beginning, while Apple had revenue from selling their products immediately.

So how does this relate to the ideas of religion? Jobs was more worried with creating revenue, creating products he could sell to individual people. These ideas support the concept of the self. Whereas Zuckerberg was more focused on creating a social network for people, rather than focusing on how to make a profit. He created a virtual community. While Jobs created products for the self, Zuckerberg created a product for the community.