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Andrew Bosworth AKA Boz, an advertising expert for Facebook, gives a talk at the Online Marketing Rockstars marketing trade show in Hamburg, Germany, 03 March 2017. Photo: Christian Charisius/dpa | usage worldwide (Photo by Christian Charisius/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Christian Charisius | picture alliance | Getty Images

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is turning to an old friend and former Harvard teaching assistant, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, in a time of trouble for the company.

Last week, a damaging series of reports in The Wall Street Journal showed major problems in the company’s ecosystem, including a lack of content moderators for markets outside the U.S., an avalanche of anti-vaccine misinformation in user comments, and Facebook-owned Instagram’s negative effect on teens’ mental health.

Some of the reports said Facebook employees and execs knew of these problems but could not or would not fix them. Lawmakers have already pledged to question execs from Facebook and other Big Tech companies over social media’s effects on teens.

On Wednesday, Facebook shuffled its leadership. Mike Schroepfer, its CTO of more than eight years, will resign next year and will be replaced by Bosworth.

It’s not clear why Schroepfer is leaving, or whether it has anything to do with the Journal reports. In his note announcing his resignation, he said he hoped to dedicate more time to family and philanthropy while still helping out with recruiting and with artificial intelligence technologies as the company’s first senior fellow.

With Bosworth, Zuckerberg is once again turning to one of his most trusted deputies.

Since joining in 2006, Bosworth has gained a reputation as Zuckerberg’s go-to-fix-it guy. He has developed key products and turned around crucial divisions, including hardware and Facebook’s bread and butter: advertising. He has a reputation for being direct with his peers and subordinates. He also frequently posts his thoughts on technology, leadership and personal growth — internally and on his public blog.

Some of these thoughts are unusually blunt for a corporate exec. For instance, in a leaked memo from January 2020, Bosworth said Facebook was more like sugar than a toxin.

“While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar,” he wrote. “Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.”

In a 2016 memo that leaked, he wrote about an attitude among some Facebook employees that connecting people is “de facto good” even if it sometimes leads to bad outcomes, like bullying or a “terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.” After the leak, Bosworth and Zuckerberg explained that the memo was meant to criticize this mindset among Facebook employees rather than defend it.

Bosworth is also one of Facebook’s most accessible executives, posting frequently on Twitter or holding Q&A sessions on Instagram. Most recently, he launched a podcast called “Boz To The Future” where he and guests discuss the latest in technology.

He is a polarizing figure within the company as well. One former employee who spoke on condition of anonymity so as to not break is non-disclosure agreement with Facebook told CNBC that Bosworth thinks he’s a genius, but probably just got lucky in his career. However, a former company executive who worked directly with Bosworth for several years told CNBC that Bosworth is a passionate leader to work for who demands greatness out of his employees.

Facebook declined to comment.

News Feed, ads and hardware

Bosworth met Zuckerberg at Harvard as a teaching assistant in an artificial intelligence class. After Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, Bosworth joined the company in January 2006 as one of the company’s earliest software engineers.

Within months, Bosworth had left his mark. He was one of the few software engineers who built what is now the most significant Facebook feature, News Feed. Prior to News Feed’s launch in September 2006, Facebook was a bunch of profiles users could jump between, leaving posts on each other’s “walls” as desired. News Feed brought all of these posts together in a single, never-ending screen, where the content just kept coming. Bosworth is regarded as the godfather of News Feed, a former executive told CNBC.

Some Facebook users were initially upset that their messages to one another were now easily visible for all their friends to see. But the feature eventually became a hit.

As Facebook transitioned from being primarily web-focused to mobile-first in 2012, Zuckerberg tapped Bosworth to lead the development of the company’s advertising products. In that role, Bosworth took a dysfunctional hodge-podge of products in a division that had been struggling, the former Facebook executive told CNBC, and he turned it into a a nearly $27 billion money-maker by the end of 2016.

In August 2017, Facebook announced that Bosworth would manage consumer hardware, including the company’s struggling skunkworks division of Building 8.

Even though Bosworth had no experience working on hardware, Zuckerberg turned to him to fix the teams, which included the virtual reality division Oculus acquired in 2014 for $2.3 billion. Oculus had barely released its first consumer headset, the Rift, a year earlier with little consumer success, and Building 8 was struggling to deliver products at the overzealous pace Facebook was expecting.

Over the past four years, Bosworth has reorganized and refocused Facebook’s hardware unit, which is now called Facebook Reality Labs.

Now, the company finally has a broad stable of hardware gadgets available for purchase. These include the Oculus Quest headset, the Portal, Portal Go, Portal+ and Portal TV video-calling devices, and smart glasses built in conjunction with Luxottica called Ray-Ban Stories. Earlier this year, Facebook also announced a new team within Reality Labs that will focus on the metaverse — a future space in virtual reality where people can meet.

Facebook has yet to break out specific sales figures for its hardware devices, but the company’s other revenue category, which includes Facebook’s Workplace enterprise software division, has grown to nearly $1.8 billion in 2020, up nearly 118% from $825 million in 2018.

Now, with a key spot needing to be filled, Zuck is turning to Bosworth again.

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Binance secures ‘largest investment ever’ in crypto as Abu Dhabi’s MGX pledges $2 billion

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Binance secures ‘largest investment ever’ in crypto as Abu Dhabi’s MGX pledges  billion

The Binance logo is displayed on a screen in San Anselmo, California, June 6, 2023.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Emirati state-owned investment firm MGX announced a $2 billion investment into Binance, in what marks the cryptocurrency exchange’s first institutional investment and the “single largest investment” ever paird in crypto.

In a joint press release, the firms said the minority stake would be paid for in stablecoins, making it the “largest investment ever” paid in cryptocurrency. Stablecoins are a type of digital asset designed to hold a constant value, typically with a peg to a fiat currency. 

Abu Dhabi launched the MGX investment firm last year with a focus on AI technology. In September, MGX partnered with the likes of BlackRock and Microsoft to launch a more than $30 billion AI fund, but it had yet to invest in the cryptocurrency industry and blockchain sectors. 

“MGX’s investment in Binance reflects our commitment to advancing blockchain’s transformative potential for digital finance,” Ahmed Yahia, managing director and CEO at MGX, said in a statement.

The press release added that “by partnering with the leading industry player, MGX aims to enable innovation at the intersection of AI, blockchain technology and finance.”

Binance and MGX did not immediately comment on the size of the stake or what stablecoin would be used for the payment. Binance has not responded to an inquiry on whether the deal had been completed.

As part of the UAE’s broader ambitions to become a global technology leader, it has been growing into a regional crypto hub

Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, has grown its Middle East footprint as it faced regulatory hurdles and enforcement measures in other jurisdictions in recent years, 

According to the press release, Binance employs approximately 1,000 of its roughly 5,000 global workforce in the UAE. It adds that it now boasts over 260 million registered users and has surpassed $100 trillion in cumulative trading volume. 

Binance CEO Richard Teng is scheduled to take part in a panel session at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE in Singapore at 2:40 p.m. local time (2:40 a.m. ET) on Thursday.

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Meta goes to arbitrator to prevent whistleblower from promoting tell-all book

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Meta goes to arbitrator to prevent whistleblower from promoting tell-all book

This photo illustration created Jan. 7, 2025, shows an image of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and an image of the Meta logo.

Drew Angerer | Afp | Getty Images

Meta is seeking to stop the promotion of a new memoir by a former staffer that paints the social media company in an unflattering light, including allegations of sexual harassment by the company’s policy chief. 

An emergency arbitrator ruled Thursday that Sarah Wynn-Williams is prohibited from promoting “Careless People,” her book that was released Tuesday by Flatiron Books, an imprint of publisher Macmillan Books.

The memoir chronicles Wynn-Williams’ tenure at Facebook from 2011 through 2017. During that time, she became a high-level employee who interacted with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, then-COO Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan, the company’s current policy chief. In the book, Wynn-Williams alleges that Kaplan made a number of inappropriate comments to her, which she then reported to the company as sexual harassment.

“This is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” a Meta spokesperson previously said about both her book and complaint.

Wynn-Williams also details in her book the company’s various attempts to enter the Chinese market, including building tools that would censor content to appease the Chinese Communist Party. Wynn-Williams addressed some of these China-specific claims in a whistleblower complaint that she filed in April with the Securities and Exchange Commission, NBC News reported.

The emergency arbitrator ruled in favor of Meta after watching a podcast appearance of Wynn-Williams in which she discussed her memoir and her allegations that Meta was attempting to “shut this book down.”

“The Emergency Arbitrator finds that, after reviewing the briefs and hearing oral argument, (Meta) has established a likelihood of success on the merits of its contractual non-disparagement claim against Respondent Wynn-Williams, and that immediate and irreparable loss will result in the absence of emergency relief,” the filing said.

Additionally, the arbitrator ruled that so much as Wynn-Williams can control, she is prohibited from further publishing or distributing the book and from further disparaging Meta and its officers or repeating previous disparaging remarks. The arbitrator also ruled that Wynn-Williams is to retract her previous disparaging remarks.

The company has previously dismissed Wynn-Williams’ claims as “out-of-date” and said that she was fired for “poor performance and toxic behavior.”

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone shared the emergency arbitrator’s ruling in a post on Threads, saying that it “affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published.”

“This urgent legal action was made necessary by Williams, who more than eight years after being terminated by the company, deliberately concealed the existence of her book project and avoided the industry’s standard fact-checking process in order to rush it to shelves after waiting for eight years,” Stone said.

Meta alleged that Wynn-Williams violated the non-disparagement terms of her September 2017 severance agreement, resulting in the company filing an emergency motion on Friday. The emergency arbitrator then conducted a telephone hearing involving legal representatives of Meta and Macmillan Books, but not Wynn-Williams who did not appear though she was given notice, the filing said.

Wynn-Williams, Flatiron Books and Macmillan Books did not respond to requests for comment.

WATCH: What’s driving Meta’s stock run

What's driving Meta's stock run

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Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as new CEO, stock jumps 12%

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Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as new CEO, stock jumps 12%

Lip-Bu Tan appointed chief executive officer of Intel Corporation

Courtesy: Intel

Intel said on Wednesday that it had appointed Lip-Bu Tan as its new CEO, as the chipmaker attempts to recover from a tumultuous four-year run under Pat Gelsinger.

Tan was previously CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which makes software used by all the major chip designers, including Intel. He was an Intel board member but departed last year, citing other commitments.

Tan replaces interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and MJ Holthaus, who took over in December when former Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger was ousted. Tan is also rejoining Intel’s board.

The appointment closes a chaotic chapter in Intel’s history, as investors pressured the semiconductor company to cut costs and spin off businesses due to declining sales and an inability to crack the booming artificial intelligence market.

Intel shares rose over 12% in extended trading on Wednesday.

Tan becomes the fourth permanent CEO at Intel in seven years. Following Brian Krzanich’s resignation in 2018, after the revelations of an inappropriate relationship with an employee, Bob Swan took the helm in Jan. 2019. He departed two years later after Intel suffered numerous blows from competitors and chip delays. Swan was succeeded by Gelsinger in 2021.

Gelsinger took over with a bold plan to transform Intel’s business to manufacture chips for other companies in addition to its own, becoming a foundry. But Intel’s overall products revenue continued to decline, and investors fretted over the significant capital expenditures needed for such massive chip production, including constructing a $20 billion dollar factory complex in Ohio.

Last fall, after a disappointing earnings report, Intel appeared to be for sale, and reportedly drew interest from rival companies including Qualcomm. Analysts assessed the possibility of Intel spinning off its foundry division or selling its products division — including server and PC chips — to a rival.

In AI, Intel has gotten trounced by Nvidia, whose graphics processing units (GPUs) have become the chip of choice for developers over the past few years.

In January, Intel issued a weak forecast even as it beat on earnings and revenue. The company pointed to seasonality, economic conditions and competition, and said clients are digesting inventory. The prospect of tariffs was adding to the uncertainty, Zinsner said.

Intel said that Zinsner will return to his previous role of CFO. Holthaus will remain in charge of Intel Products.

Intel was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in November and was replaced by Nvidia, reflecting the dramatic change of fortune in the semiconductor industry. Intel shares lost 60% of their value last year, while Nvidia’s stock price soared 171%. At Wednesday’s close, Intel’s market cap was $89.5 billion, less than one-thirtieth of Nvidia’s valuation.

WATCH: Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as CEO

Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as CEO

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