Mark Zuckerberg says he’s ready to ‘go to the mat’ with Elizabeth Warren

Mark Zuckerberg struck a defiant tone against Facebook critics at an all-hands meeting in July that was secretly captured on audio, saying he was ready to “go to the mat” with Sen. Elizabeth Warren if she’s elected president.

The 35-year-old CEO said Facebook would fight tooth and nail against any attempt to break up the company, adding that he expects a legal challenge from Warren if she is elected to the White House, according to audio obtained by The Verge.

“If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win that legal challenge,” Zuckerberg told his employees.

“And does that suck for us? Yeah,” Zuckerberg added. “I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government,” but “if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”

Warren responded to the leaked comments on Twitter, slamming Facebook for its “illegal anticompetitive practices.”

“What would really ‘suck’ is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy,” the Democratic presidential candidate wrote.

Zuckerberg also addressed criticism of his refusal to appear before numerous governments around the world that have demanded he answer for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying that he did enough when he appeared for hearings in the US and the EU.

“It just doesn’t really make sense for me to go to hearings in every single country that wants to have me show up and, frankly, doesn’t have jurisdiction to demand that,” he said. “But people are going to use the position of the company and me to criticize us.”

Zuckerberg joked that if not for his iron grip on the company, he would have been ousted a number of times, eliciting laughs from the audience.

“I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on,” he said. “And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure.”

The audio captures Zuckerberg speaking candidly about scandals that have dogged the company, which has seen its reputation plummet after it was discovered that it leaked users’ personal information to political operatives even as it spread disinformation during the 2016 presidential election.

Asked what employees should tell peers and friends who have a negative opinion of Facebook, Zuckerberg suggested they tell them they care about the problems and “have their best interests at heart.”

“For the first 10 years of the company or so, we got more glowing press than I think any company deserves,” he said. “People are just more aware of a lot of these issues, and the pendulum in terms of perception is swinging, or has swung, to focusing more on issues.”

Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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