NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- It's already starting. General Motors ( GM) decides to pull advertising from Facebook ( FB) and the bears begin to question both the social media monster's effectiveness and ability to grow and sustain revenues. It must be flattering for Mark Zuckerberg to already have a whole peanut gallery full of bears before his company's ticker even crosses CNBC for the first time.
As I explained last week on
TheStreet, it looks as if Zuckerberg is cut out of the mold of
Amazon.com (
AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos. Both men see the future before it takes place; in fact they vision and enact it. For goodness sake, Bezos invented e-commerce and Zuck created social media, this thing we all seem to take for granted now. We're just along for the ride, yet somehow every Tom, Dick and Harry makes an arrogant call for "shotgun" in an all-out sprint for the front seat.
It's typical of our society: Order something from Amazon, post a picture of your kid picking his nose on Facebook, send a text on your iPhone. The platforms, ecosystems and devices that drive these seemingly mundane activities did not just fall from the sky. They're not birthrights. Somebody smarter than you and me created the systems that facilitate our everyday lives. Thanks to these visionaries we subsist in profoundly different -- and better -- ways than we did five or 10 years ago.
Despite this, massive factions of society, particularly within the investor community, stand ready to discount, discredit and disparage the hands that fed and continue to feed them. For one reason or another, whole hosts of us have this demented need to take down the man at the top. I really believe it goes back to what Howard Lindzon called "entrepreneur envy" when he shot down the absurd notion of
an Internet/tech/new media bubble.
GM''s Facebook Envy Ten million dollars is a spit in the bucket to GM. It's also a spit in the bucket to Facebook, a company that produced $3.7 billion in revenue last year without "even trying," as
TheStreet's Eric Jackson
nicely stated.
Frankly, I think this is simply GM's old-guard way of lashing out. I am sure the suits at GM -- the same "businessmen" who required a government lifeline -- do not think Facebook "deserves" a valuation that will almost certainly be much higher than GM's right out of the gate. As Marek Fuchs says,
They just don't get it!
