Mark Zuckerberg with UFC legends, Israel Adesanya, left, and Alex Volkanovski in 2023.
Dianna “Mick” McDougall for Insider; Mark Zuckerberg
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg loves extreme sports and other high-risk activities. Last year he got hurt while training in mixed martial arts.Now Meta is warning investors that Zuckerberg’s risk tolerance could be a problem for the company.
After a rough couple of years, Meta is flying: Revenue is growing again, profits are way up after some painful belt-tightening, and the stock is at an all-time high.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, maybe Mark Zuckerberg could get hurt, or worse, in a cage match?
That’s what Meta is suggesting in a new SEC filing out this week. In the company’s newest annual report, it has told investors that Zuckerberg routinely does risky stuff for fun — and that it would be a real problem for the company if he got injured doing that.
From Meta’s 10-K, filed under “risk factors”:
We currently depend on the continued services and performance of our key personnel, including Mark Zuckerberg. Mr. Zuckerberg and certain other members of management participate in various high-risk activities, such as combat sports, extreme sports, and recreational aviation, which carry the risk of serious injury and death.
Meta is presumably referring to Zuckerberg’s well-documented embrace of all kinds of brotastic fun, including mixed martial arts, hydrofoiling and CrossFit. He has also reportedly been training to get his pilot license.
And he has gotten banged up along the way: Last year, he tore his ACL in a training fight.
Zuckerberg certainly isn’t the only tech mogul who likes this stuff. His rival Elon Musk, for instance, flies himself around all the time, and he also famously challenged Zuckerberg to a cage match (which some people insisted was going to be a real thing but never panned out).
But he may be the only Big Tech CEO who’s spelled that out as a potential problem for investors.
Musk’s Tesla, for instance, simply points out that the company is “highly dependent” on his services and doesn’t mention the prospect of him crashing one of his Gulfstreams. (It does, however note that Musk “does not devote his full time and attention to Tesla,” because he’s also running SpaceX, X, and other ventures.)
Peers like Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon either say that their CEOs are important, or don’t even mention them at all. I’ve asked Meta reps for comment.
It’s worth pointing out that while the “risk factor” section of any public company can be useful to scan, since it lays out all kinds of potential problems that could arise, it usually is not the kind of thing most investors care about. The point is to insulate the company from liability in case something did actually go wrong : See? We told you this could happen. Now tell your lawyers to stop bothering us.
So while Meta does take Zuckerberg’s well-being very seriously — in 2022 it spent $15 million on personal security for him and his family — it’s unlikely they think he’s really going to get really, really hurt. But they’re letting us it could happen, just in case.
