Mark Zuckerberg's displays of normalcy are as unwavering as his Caesar cut, but changes are afoot in the Facebook empire

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This week: Zuck's perpetual Caesar haircut belies changes to the Facebook empire

Mark Zuckerberg spent his Friday evening engaged in a ritual that's become familiar to people in all tax brackets: he draped a towel over his neck and sat still while his spouse gave him a quarantine haircut.

The Facebook CEO's trademark Caesar cut (as documented on his Facebook page) looks pretty much the same as his last one, a result that speaks not only to Priscilla Chan's scissors skills but to the sense of continuity that Zuck — who turned 36 years old last Thursday — is keen to project about himself and his formidable empire of apps.

Consider two of his recent signals:

1. Just a few hours before Zuckerberg sat down for his Friday haircut, the Facebook CEO spent a reported $400 million to acquire Giphy, the popular purveyor of animated GIF images.

• The deal is hardly the largest in Facebook history (the $21.8 billion WhatsApp deal holds that title), but it delivers an unmistakable and defiant "business-as-usual" message.
• That's because Facebook and its Big Tech brethren are under significant antitrust scrutiny right now, and the Giphy deal raises flags about data that might have caused other companies in Facebook's shoes to hold off on a deal (and although the deal has already closed, the FTC has made it clear it does not rule out unwinding past mergers that it deems anticompetitive).

2. Zuckerberg is literally saying that Facebook intends to stay the course. From Facebook's Q1 earnings call at the end of April: "I think it's important that rather than slamming on the brakes now, as I think a lot of companies may, that it's important to keep on building and keep on investing and building for the new needs that people have."

It's understandable that Zuckerberg and Facebook want to project calm and normalcy. After all, with so much uncertainty in the world right now, and with most of Facebook's 48,000 employees scattered across their homes instead of toiling from centralized offices, continual reassurance is vital.

But it's not really business as usual at Facebook, and not just because we're living through a pandemic.

A couple of other recent Facebook headlines make this clear.

1. Earlier this month, Facebook agreed to pay $52 million to contractors who suffered PTSD.

• It's hard to imagine a more damaging look for a consumer product than the notion that, with the safety filter removed, it brims with material so toxic that it can cause deep psychological damage.
• This is also a weak spot in Zuckerberg's recent video interviews with health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci. It's great that Zuckerberg is doing these videos, but there's an inherent suggestion — to a cynical eye at least — that the typical COVID-19 information available on Facebook is so untrustworthy that the company CEO himself must go on-air to give users the facts.

2. And now Facebook is launching a big new initiative to break into ecommerce with Shops.

• Facebook has unsuccessfully tried to make ecommerce work a gazillion times before. But this time Facebook is offering small businesses something they need — a lifeline to sell goods online while their brick-and-mortar storefronts are boarded up by the pandemic.
• And thanks to the AI prowess Facebook has developed over the years, the company now has the technology to create a special shopping experience.

The close timing of these two developments is coincidental, but they reflect a reality that Facebook is trying to change. Three years after the US election exposed the dark side of Facebook, it's now struggling to blunt misinformation involving another presidential election, plus a pandemic.

With all the headaches and problems that surely now come with moderating fake news, propaganda, and conspiracy theories, the grass growing on ecommerce platforms has got to look pretty green and comfortable. There are no PTSD lawsuits when you're helping people sell phone cases and T-shirts.

I doubt Facebook expects, or even wants, its newsfeed to ever completely shed its media and news-sharing nature. But Facebook is clearly eager to upgrade its look, no matter what Zuckerberg's neatly trimmed hairline suggests.

Sound bite of the week:

"Our balance sheet is strong, Eats is doing great, Rides looks a little better, maybe we can wait this damn virus out...I wanted there to be a different answer. Let me talk to a few more CEOs...maybe one of them will tell me some good news, but there simply was no good news to hear."

— Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in a Monday email to staff obtained by Business Insider announcing the decision to lay off 3,000 employees, in addition to the 3,700 job cuts earlier this month.

Look at that S-Team go

Jeff Bezos relies on 23 lieutenants to help him run Amazon. And these days, with the company under immense pressure from the pandemic, the team is incredibly busy. As Eugene Kim writes in this look at the Amazon S-Team (S stands for Senior, by the way), many of Bezos' chosen ones are now holding daily meetings in addition to the usual weekly S-Team meetings.

So who are the members of Amazon's elite team? Well, 20 of them are men, and only three are women. And almost all of them are Amazon lifers.

Check out Eugene's story to see the full list of the 23 Amazon S-Team members and learn more about them:

Amazon has an elite group of execs who are guiding the company through the coronavirus chaos. Here are the 23 members of Jeff Bezos' 'S-team.'

Recommended Readings:

Airbnb just cut nearly 2,000 jobs, but the layoffs aren't even close to offsetting a $2.4 billion revenue shortfall this year

A gang of hackers claims to have sold off all the data it has on Trump and plans to auction its Madonna data next

The pandemic is changing how companies like Amazon Web Services and Twilio hire software developers, as Silicon Valley rethinks the interview process

Google employees say the company culture that made it famous has almost entirely vanished, as it continues to be less transparent and more 'corporate'

Inside the unstoppable rise of 'blank-check companies,' a type of business that has no operations and can still float an IPO amidst a recession

Silicon Valley VCs opened the floodgates to a gusher of billion-dollar startups with untouchable founders. Now that world is getting turned upside down

Not necessarily in tech:

Inside the chaotic Trump campaign and the 'Death Star' tweet that's spurring calls for a change in command

And, there you have it. Thanks for reading, and remember, if you like this newsletter, tell your friends and colleagues they can sign up here to receive it.

— Alexei