Mark Zuckerberg’s employees compare his management style to the Eye of Sauron

Have you ever had a boss whose undivided attention made you feel like you were under the watchful eye of an evil dark lord? Well, apparently the employees at the company formerly known as Facebook are intimately familiar with the sensation.

In a recent interview on The 4-Hour Workweek author Tim Ferriss’ YouTube channel, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about everything from his background with fencing to how he’s shaping the future of the Metaverse. Zuckerberg also revealed that his employees have a nickname for his management style: the Eye of Sauron. “They’re like, ‘You have this unending amount of energy to go work on something. And if you point that at any given team, you will just burn them,'” the tech mogul said.

This is hilarious. Sauron is the evil dark lord from The Lord of the Rings, whose sole mission is to sweep destruction and terror across the land. The Eye of Sauron is the big flaming eye that hovers over the tower of Barad-dûr in Mordor. Whenever Frodo puts the Ring on, or someone picks up a Palantír, Sauron’s fiery gaze falls on them with such malice that they often fall writhing to the ground.

So yeah. I can see us non-Meta people making Eye of Sauron jokes about Zuckerberg, but it’s pretty funny that his own employees use that as a nickname.

Meta employees say Mark Zuckerberg has the “Eye of Sauron”

At the end of the day, who can say whether Zuckerberg’s intensity is a terror or a boon for Meta. The CEO obviously thinks it’s the latter. “I just think the engagement that you get of having, like, an immediate feedback loop around thinking about something and then getting to go talk to the people who are working on this is so much better than going and scheduling a meeting that you’ll have three weeks later,” he said.

Meta has come under fire over the past few years, such as during the Cambridge Analytica scandal surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election or the big tech monopoly hearing in 2020. More recently, Meta’s management style was called into question when employees’ concerns about the tech company’s role in the January 6 capital riot were ignored by the higher ups.

Lately, the company has tried to reinvent itself. What began as a social media platform is now trying to become a full-on digital world for people to live in. Because that has always gone well in science fiction. “At this point, I kind of feel like if people fully feel like they understand what we are as a company and what we’re doing, then I’m not pushing it hard enough,” Zuckerberg told Ferriss.

I imagine Sauron felt much the same about the plight of the orc. Really, it all boils down to bad PR.

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h/t Business Insider