What's the Public Value of Mark Zuckerberg?

Today's Battle is About MarketCrafting in the Public Interest

“It does feel like we’re in the Twilight Zone here”

— Rep. Joe Neguse, October 31, 2025

Big tech bros speak of saving humanity with the swagger of young generals before their first battle, convinced that salvation can be coded, that redemption lies in the syntax of their machines, all the while blind or oblivious to the strange, consuming vanity that hums beneath their every promise.

There is an entire genre of it, a froth, a foam, a form of performance art that is starting to feel a bit silly. But the trope derives at least part of its effectiveness from the fact that it ennobles the cliché. It turns the most quotidian action into some sort of genius aesthetic, a big vision that empties into the status quo, ultimately coasting on habit, feeding the infinitely-recursive feedback loop of inertia.

And it rules the tech industry, which relies on this gestural kind courage again and again, on hyping things into grand acts of “disruption” and nonconformism. Adrian Daub, in What Tech Calls Thinking:

“You repeat what people around you are saying and you get to call yourself a free thinker. You invest other people’s money to make use of other’s people’s labor, and you get to call yourself a risk-taker. You tell your coworkers that they really shouldn’t be your coworkers, then you go on Tucker Carlson and talk about persecution.

And with this sort of courage, which consists only of gestures of courage, comes a communication that likewise just goes through the motions. If this chapter was about what a certain genius aesthetic sees as courage and independence, then the next will be about the disappointment that occupies the gap between the aestheticized simulacrum and the genuine article.”

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg last week sat with a16z’s Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg, and Vineeta Agarwala to share HOW AI WILL CURE ALL DISEASE! by century’s end (emphasis added). Zuckerberg opens the conversation with the perfectly true and perfectly inarguable framing, the ‘ectoplasmic generality’ that encapsulates Silicon Valley’s gospel so well:

“This is a space that I mean that there’s just going to be a huge amount of leverage with AI,” says Zuckerberg. “When we first set out that the goal is to cure and prevent disease by the end of the century, people like honestly most scientists couldn’t look at us with a straight face.

The biology folks, I think, looked at it as if it were crazy ambitious. And then the AI folks are like, well, that’s kind of boring. That’s just automatically going to happen.

It’s like, okay, there’s something in between there that needs to be bridged.”

That bridge is called reality.

The rapid ascents that once defined technology-fueled economies have yielded to sclerosis: the world is now a closed club of aging, fragile incumbents and failing systems of markets.

Today’s technologies have not remade life as the Industrial Revolution did. And there’s no reason to think the future will be any different, not unless there’s an almost complete reframing around what Mariana Mazzucato says is “making and taking in the global economy”, a different ‘narrative layer’ about who truly produces value and wealth, how that production happens, and whose interests it ultimately serves. Modern strategy is about economic competition, between nations, between markets, between brands. China, in search of AI supremacy, approaches this through the lens of a new “whole of society” campaign.

Questions for Mark and Priscilla as they podcast from their $365 million compound in Hawaii or $112 million ever-expanding compound in Palo Alto, the one that’s pissed off his neighbors:

What happens when a flow of boring cures from competing AI-enabled drug companies — say a cure for Hepatitis C or obesity or sickle cell disease — floods the budget director’s office of a state Medicaid program? Or the health benefit budget of a self-funded employer? Or the budget of a terrified family whose health insurance premiums are skyrocketing?

For that matter, what happens when an AI-enabled business invents a blood test able to screen for multiple cancers years before they become symptomatic, but “market access” and shareholder + public health value hasn’t materialized because everything really depends on innovation diffusion” (see above about China). And this diffusion in turndepends on sales teams selling into economic systems whose arteries are clogged by obsolete rules and reference points to measure value, like QALY? Or where the practice of medicine around a boring AI-enabled cure is controlled by prior authorization from “money sucking” health insurance companies (per Trump on Truth Social yesterday)?

Note to Silicon Valley: Technical invention is relatively simple. Technical diffusion, not so much.

No one is paid big enough and long enough to “care” about the ICER of a product whose earn-out doesn’t happen for decades. The American Way of Healthcare is an embedded, lethargic, un-productive economic system where all the money is in short-term wins. The entire $5 trillion operating model rewards performance for the now, the narrow, the results for next quarter.

For evidence, look no further than UnitedHealthcare yesterday rolling back remote monitoring coverage for most chronic conditions (the new policy says remote patient monitoring is only medically necessary in two instances: to treat chronic heart failure and hypertension during pregnancy. It explicitly says the use of remote patient monitoring for Type 2 diabetes and hypertension — two of the most popular uses — will no longer be covered).

Yup, healthcare is “the largest and most lucrative market on Earth” (quoting Andreessen Horowitz), if you can get access to it. But that market in the United States at least is still defined and managed by commercial payers competing in a six-month cycle of member churn.

It’s also a “space” where self-funded employers + government budgets can’t afford the miracles of medicine, where “science” now sparks savage political conflict and structural stalemate. Like “mRNA”, the ‘narrative power’ of the word itself has collapsed, dissolved into the same mist of intent as “patient engagement”, that limp darling of healthcare purpose, possessing the kinetic force of a dying lightbulb: drained of voltage, incapable of illuminating the room where the real transformation might begin.

What’s needed now a different kind of strategic logic.

When Trump Asks Novo for a Cut

During a press conference last week to announce a drug price deal for GLP-1s, President Trump asked Novo Nordisk CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar for more details about the bidding war between Novo and Pfizer over Metsera. “Our message to Pfizer is that if they would like to buy the company, then put your hand in the pocket and bid higher,” Doustdar said from the lectern in the Oval Office on Thursday, as President Donald Trump looked on.

Doustdar was then asked by a reporter about the Federal Trade Commission’s objection to the deal structure Novo has put forth.

“Maybe you should give us a piece of the company like I’ve been asking for,” Trump said to Doustdar, as he took the lectern. (Earlier in his prepared remarks, Doustdar had sought to frame Novo not as a Danish company but as one with deep American roots through its 100-year history.)

Here’s the clip:

President Trump’s economic policy is best understood as rule by deal.

He makes ad hoc agreements with domestic companies, and deals with foreign nations that benefit particular businesses the president favors. Each deal is individually negotiated, unpredictable, and contingent on executive favor. Chris Hughes in The American Prospect yesterday:

“Foundational to the administration’s dealmaking is the need to create leverage where it might not already exist.

In his second term, Trump has used tariffs to bring companies and foreign governments to the negotiating table. In the first Trump administration, and in the Biden years, tariffs were primarily used tactically to craft particular markets, like supporting American automobile production. Trump and Biden both employed them as a means to build negotiating leverage with foreign adversaries, particularly with China, and to signal to voters their seriousness about supporting domestic manufacturing.

But Trump’s vision of the relationship between government and private industry transformed in the COVID crisis. In Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration led a public-private collaboration to develop and distribute lifesaving vaccines, illustrating how policymakers might work with private companies to further political goals. In the absence of a problem as urgent as the pandemic, national self-sufficiency has emerged as the rhetorical goal. Instead of a public-health emergency to compel corporate action, the threat of new taxes on imports has forced business leaders to negotiate with the White House.”

There are some things money can’t buy, but these days, not many.

Today, almost everything is up for negotiation within the context of a business deal. The bigger the business deal, and the more disruptive it is to the status quo, the better aligned its value proposition will be to the world according to Trump.

And there are no bigger business deals to be made than the ones that invent new economic systems (‘ecosystem-centered market strategy’), the kind with ‘gravitational pull’ to displace or degrade current structures and orientations, that have the power to snap things into a whole new orbit for competition.

Debugging Mark

“Accelerating science is the most positive impact we think we can make,” said Zuckerberg in his How AI Will Cure All Disease conversation with a16z. “Just to use an engineering example, it’s kind of like you’re coding without being able to step through the code and debug things, right? So it’s um that’s like the old days when our whole approach on this is to basically let’s help build tools that will accelerate the pace of the whole field, and I think that there’s a niche that I think fits that because if you look at how funding works in science you know the vast majority of funding comes from the government and NIH grants.”

In other words, the taxpaying public, like me.

Policy-minded people are stuck in an impossible bind: How to help a portfolio of economic systems jump to the next S-curve. How to advocate for big, good, better, unique, different, creatively destructive ideas to improve economic prosperity for the most people at the same time. The bridge that Mark is looking to build comes from different construction physics, a new kind of profit motive. This is platform capitalism where everyone gets a cut, including and especially the taxpaying public, whose data is being mined by government and industry to develop not only all those boring cures from AI, but all those Google and OpenAI and Apple and Meta “technologies that build the future of human connection”….and have given Mark Zuckerberg an estimated net worth of almost $213 billion.

The public has financed the inputs; the private sector is monetizing the outputs; the new strategic task is to reconnect the loop.

The “greatest impact” I can think of for Mark to make on humanity starts with a wild change in perspective around his origin story about the source of value, his as well as the public’s. For starters, and because it’s Veteran’s Day, collaborate with the Veterans Health Administration to establish the nation’s first citizen data trust or sovereign data fund, from which I as a Veteran can earn from every AI-enabled market, product, service or revenue stream, now and in the future, my data is and will be mined to invent, sustain or grow.

Healthcare is a hard knock world for the “profit” minded, but it doesn’t have to be.

The credible path to saving humanity is with marketcrafting in the public interest.

And the foundation for the kind of big system disruption, the “digital transformation” thing that every executive management team desires, is the one where the 3.96 billion monthly active users of Meta platforms and products get a cut of Mark Zuckerberg’s future value.

/ jgs

John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon specializes in constructing new industry narratives.