The big thing On Thursday night, just a few days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk had joined a chat hosted on the Clubhouse platform, Mark Zuckerberg logged on. His chat was short, friendly and unannounced, one of the room’s hosts was one of his employees, another was one of his investors, so nobody was asking him about Trump or Myanmar. He talked for a few minutes about the company’s AR/VR ambitions and how he saw the tech improving the global workplace and then he logged off. In any other time in the past decade of Facebook’s social media dominance, a Zuckerberg appearance would have been a de facto precursor to an acquisition or a competitive onslaught. But in 2021, Facebook sits in a pretty hostile position with American regulatory bodies, both sides of the aisle are unhappy with the network and the company has antitrust suits looming from every agency possible making any high profile M&A of an upstart social media platform like Clubhouse an extremely unlikely proposition. Zuckerberg’s friendly moment on Clubhouse could be a broader sign that Facebook is moving past its combative phase of squashing any new social upstart that crossed its path. Then again, Clubhouse could also just be earning a police escort through the typical fray from investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, its co-founder Marc Andreessen is a long-serving Facebook board member and has been a major booster of the Clubhouse platform. His firm has brute-forced the platform by tapping their influence network. Clubhouse hasn’t scaled to slam dunk status quite yet, but it’s certainly showing more promise than any other upstart of the past several years. After already having achieved a reported $1 billion valuation, the app has banked several million new users in the past weeks. What makes Clubhouse intriguing for investors scoping out a new generation of social media platforms, is what they hope could be a more scalable moderation model that relies more heavily on users than it does central governance. On Clubhouse, users can report or block speakers, but moderators ultimately wield the power and responsibility to remove bad actors from rooms. This is all but assured to go sideways in some regards as unsavory characters set up home on Clubhouse, but there are plenty of reasons to suspect it will have a simpler go than Facebooks has. Back in 2015, this classic Vanity Fair story detailed the lengths to which Zuckerberg went to inspire his team to crush Google Plus. In 2021, after the ceaseless messiness of Facebook’s past 5 years, I think we’ve also moved pass any era where a deep-pocketed tech giant will aim to take ownership of a slice of Facebook’s problems. Facebook likely just has bigger fish to fry at this point as it tries to find what can be its post-Instagram play. Rather than wasting its attention on upstart social plays, Zuckerberg is focusing on how it can best Apple and conquer the AR/VR market, the loose topic of Zuckerberg’s chat on Clubhouse. | 
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