The number of employees they have is mind boggeling. All for two websites, a messenger and a very long tail of stuff nobody knows or cares about. And facebook is currently crashing and burning.
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what these 100k very well paid people are doing all day.
I am very grateful to facebook because without it our business would not exist. But meta is killing their golden goose. People are leaving, advertising is barely worth it and every week there is a new glitch in core functionality. Just recently they moved the message inbox for pages from fb.com/page/inbox to some completely new URL. The old URL just shows a generic error. It's a small thing but it shows how they operate without any regard for their users.
I try not to regret things because in most cases that would just amount to second guessing myself with 20/20 hindsight. I do regret this one thing.
I went to boarding school from grade 5. You are probably picturing a fancy place with the "elite of tomorrow" walking around in smart school uniforms. My boarding school wasn't like that at all. It was located in a very small village, so small that it didn't even have a single shop. It cost like 250€ a month and you can accurately deduce the rest from that. Yes, some of the minders were clearly alcoholics. Yes, there were lots of troubled youths. Yes, some of the food barrels really did have "pig feed or millitary" stenciled on them. But they tried and on the whole they did a good job. I have to admit that in retrospect.
There are many activities you can do there. Painting, singing, pottery, metalworking, theatre, dance and all kinds of sports. There was even a warhammer table! This being Germany you can play soccer all day everyday.
I, however, was very cool, you see. I was so cool that I was too cool to do any of the activities on offer. So I spent my days on walks with my best friends just smoking and drinking and discussing how we would get rich. We did not get rich.
Now at 41 I am a non-smoker and learning to play soccer. If only I had played in my youth. If only I had been a person who wasn't repulsed by sweat and effort. If only I had the confidence to really try at something hard. If only I could have seen myself as someone with the potential for strength, for speed, as a team player. If only I had known myself a little better back then.