Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time, and one of the board members at Meta has an interesting insight into one of the factors that makes him so successful.
Marc Andreessen, who’s a longtime board member at Facebook, has said that what sets Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apart from other entrepreneurs is that he’s able to respond to the toughest situations without emotions getting in the way of his judgement. “A great superpower that Mark Zuckerberg has — it probably is not well understood enough — is he does not get emotionally upset in stressful situations,” Andreessen said in an interview. “He is able to maintain an analytical frame of mind even when other people would be literally bursting into tears and hiding under the table. And I’ve seen that many, many times,” he added.
Marc Andreessen is someone who knows Zuckerberg well — he’s been on Facebook’s board since 2008. “The company’s been through a tremendous amount of both good and bad things over the last almost 20 years. We’ve been through almost everything good and bad. And I’ve literally not once seen him raise his voice,” Andreessen continued.
Andreessen said that Zuckerberg’s unemotional nature was useful in business settings, but didn’t extend to his personal relationships. “He’s very sympathetic when somebody has a personal crisis. It’s not that he’s not emotional. He engages emotionally with people and he’s very supportive of people when they have issues. He feels things very deeply, like everybody does,” he said.
“But, you know, he has a level of emotional self control psychologists would call “0 percent neuroticism”. He just doesn’t respond emotionally. And as a consequence, he can keep his head right when everybody around him is losing theirs,” Andreessen said.
Marc Andreessen isn’t the first person who’s brought up Zuckerberg’s emotional composure. Until a few years ago, Zuckerberg’s emotionlessness was commented on so much that it had become a meme online, with many commentators comparing him to a robot. But what Andreessen says is that Zuckerberg’s ability to manage his emotions is a superpower in the business world, allowing him to dispassionately and rationally make decisions, and keep his calm in difficult situations. And this lack of neuroticism appears to have played a part in making him one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world.