Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to be remembered for it

• Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg knows how he wants to be remembered.
• Zuckerberg hopes Meta will be a “technology” company decades from now — not just an “app company.”
• Zuckerberg wants people to say that Meta made “really big changes” that changed the industry and the world.

Mark Zuckerberg already knows what he wants his legacy to look like.

Zuckerberg sat down for an interview with content creator Tiffany Janzen, which aired on Sunday. He asked him about the legacy he wanted to leave behind a hundred years from now.

Zuckerberg responded that his work is building “fundamental platforms around how people connect” — and that the work is still evolving.

“I guess if you look back, you know, 20, 30 years from now, we’re still going to be a technology company. Right, we’re not like — we’re not an app company,” Zuckerberg said. of Meta.

“So we’re primarily focused on building the core technology platform, and I think that’s probably going to be true — and certainly as long as I’m going to be doing that,” he added.

Zuckerberg also said he just wants Meta to be a company that “builds awesome things.”

“And I wish people would look back at us and say, ‘Oh, they took a bunch of really big changes. And maybe not everything they did worked. But a bunch of things they did really pushed the industry. and it pushed the world in different directions and that was cool,’” the Meta boss said.

Zuckerberg’s representatives at Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.

The 40-year-old billionaire has come a long way since starting Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004.

Zuckerberg’s company continued to grow over the years as it acquired competitors like Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.

Then, in 2021, Zuckerberg renamed the company Meta, signaling his intention to rebrand it as “metaverse first, not Facebook first.”

Under Zuckerberg, Meta has continued to make inroads into hardware as well.

In addition to stocking Nvidia’s highly coveted AI chips, Zuckerberg has been looking to dominate the wearable tech space with the company’s Quest mixed reality headset. On Wednesday, he unveiled the company’s Orion AR glasses, which impressed analysts with their lightweight design.

That said, winning the wearables industry won’t be easy.

Apple has struggled to sell its Vision Pro headphones despite the product’s glitzy launch earlier this year. The tech giant is not expected to sell more than 500,000 headsets this year, according to forecasts from market intelligence firm IDC.

But that hasn’t stopped Zuckerberg’s ambitions for Meta, which he has repeatedly stressed has the DNA of a tech company.

“I think we’re a technology company focused on human connection, not a specific type of app. We’ve never thought of ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that,” Zuckerberg said. in an interview with the “Acquired” Podcast that aired on September 18.

“To me, building these kinds of glasses to enable future people to feel present with another person, regardless of where they actually are physically, is the natural continuation of the kind of apps we’re building today.”

Certainly, Zuckerberg and his colleagues are in the business of building the legacy.

Silicon Valley has long had its fair share of leaders like Zuckerberg, who have been outspoken about their desire not to be defined by a single product.

For example, late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs wanted the iPhone maker to be more than just a consumer electronics company.

“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married to the liberal arts, married to the humanities, that gives us the result that makes our hearts sing,” Jobs said in March 2011 while launching the iPad 2.

Zuckerberg’s rival Elon Musk has similar ambitions for his legacy, albeit on a multiplanetary scale.

Musk runs a constellation of six companies, from EV giant Tesla to rocket company SpaceX. Although they are disappearing, Musk considers all of his companies essential to achieving his goal of colonizing Mars.

“It’s a way to get humanity to Mars, because establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars is going to require a lot of resources,” Musk said during court testimony in 2022 about his hefty Tesla compensation package.