evidence: This time last year, Meta’s reputation — and by extension, Zuckerberg’s — couldn’t have been in a more different place. Doubts were swirling about whether its ads business would recover and if spending billions of dollars on a far-out metaverse strategy made any sense. It wasn’t clear if Elon Musk was going to actually buy Twitter, which ended up giving Zuckerberg the opening to build his own competitor with Threads. A potential cage match between the two billionaires certainly wasn’t on my bingo card at the time, but here we are. That cage match isn’t going to happen after all. (Do you think Musk was ever serious about it? "You’d have to ask him.") But Zuckerberg is dead set on Threads reaching a billion people, even with reports about its early spike in engagement falling off. He’s bullish on decentralized social media, which has the potential to reshape the power dynamic between platforms and their users for the better.