Even so, something clearly needed to be done. Meta has had a terrible year. In the latest three months for which figures are available revenues fell by 4 per cent from $US29 billion ($45 billion) to just over $US27 billion. Its share price has tanked, dropping by 70 per cent so far this year as investors figure out the numbers are only going to get worse over the next couple of years. It has fallen out of the trillion-dollar club, the select group of mega-cap companies that dominate the US stock market, and with its value down to just $US270 billion it is not likely to be re-joining any time soon.

Perhaps worst of all, it has lost its dominance of the social networking industry that at one stage it controlled. TikTok, the video app, has stolen a huge chunk of the market. Snapchat is growing in messaging, and China’s giant WeChat is making inroads into the West.

Musk may have made a controversial start to his control of Twitter, to put it mildly, but he didn’t become the world’s richest man by accident, and it is still possible that he will create something out of the mess that he paid far too much money for.

Grannies and conspiracy theorists

Perhaps worst of all, Facebook, the real engine of the company, is increasingly seen as a place for grannies to swap pictures of the grandkids, and for mad conspiracy theorists to drown in a swamp of speculation. It is the least cool site in the whole world, and one that big spending advertisers can increasingly live without.

It is not hard to work out what has gone wrong. Over the last three years, Zuckerberg has concentrated all his energies, and much of the company’s money, on a bet on the metaverse. By now we were all meant to be spending our time hanging out with other avatars in a virtual world created by Zuckerberg’s software engineers, socialising, working and shopping in an entirely computer-generated world.

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There is very little sign of it working, however. Almost no one has visited it yet - perhaps they are worried about bumping into a virtual Clegg reminiscing about his days as deputy prime minister - and there are almost no revenues, virtual or otherwise. The plans for a Facebook currency, so bonkers that almost no one could understand what it was for, have been quietly shelved. Instagram, probably its most successful product right now, has been losing out to the French start-up BeReal. And the company has been so busy focusing on bizarre new products that it has paid very little attention to the ones it already has.

The trouble is, there is very little that can be done about the downward spiral. Sandberg, the operational and marketing brains behind the company’s astronomical rise in the 2000s and 2010s, perhaps wisely sensed that the gig was up, and got out before the carnage started.

Sir Nick has risen from the glorified flak and door-opener he was meant to be when he gave up British politics for California, to Zuckerberg’s effective deputy, even though he has zero commercial experience, nor does he seem to have any clue how to rein in the founder’s wilder ideas. Neither can do anything to bring Zuckerberg under control.

Neither unfortunately can the shareholders. The founder owns only 13 per cent of the shares, but 54 per cent of the voting rights thanks to a complex share structure that was nodded through at the time of its stock market listing in 2012. In effect, he can’t be replaced, and neither can he be controlled either.

In reality, the only hope for Meta’s long-suffering shareholders and staff is that Zuckerberg himself recognises what a mess he has made of the last few years, and either changes course himself or brings in a capable new chief executive to do it for him - but there is very little evidence that even as he approaches 40 he has developed that kind of maturity yet.

The Daily Telegraph, London

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