Mark Zuckerberg once issued a stern warning to Facebook employees after allegations surfaced that insider information had been leaked to the media.
In 2010, Meta co-founder Zuckerberg, then 25, was enjoying significant success.
He had just been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year and was recognized as the youngest billionaire in the world by Forbes.
However, behind the scenes, the entrepreneur was reportedly upset after learning that one of his Facebook employees had allegedly ‘betrayed’ him.
Last year, an email from Zuckerberg to his employees in 2010 reappeared online with the subject line ‘Please Resign’.
In the email, the Harvard University dropout expressed his disappointment after reading an article that claimed Facebook was developing a cell phone.
“Lots of you saw the TechCrunch story over the weekend claiming that we’re building a mobile phone,” wrote Zuckerberg in the leaked email.
“We’re not building a phone and I spoke at length at the Q&A on Friday about what we’re actually doing—building ways to make all phones and apps more social.”
He described how ‘frustrating’ and ‘destructive’ it was to find out that someone had spoken to TechCrunch, labeling it as an ‘act of betrayal’.
“The fact that the story was inaccurate doesn’t make it any better,” Zuckerberg continued. “I’ve had to personally spend a lot of time over the last few days—as have a lot of other people—cleaning up the damage from this mess.
“Even now, we’re in a more precarious position with companies in the mobile space who should be our partners because now they think we’re competitors.”
The email, initially shared by the popular Internal Tech Emails X account, showed the father-of-four threatening the alleged ‘leaker’.
He stated that if they didn’t ‘resign immediately,’ he would ‘certainly find out’ who they were.
“If you believe that it’s ever appropriate to leak internal information, you should leave,” Zuckerberg continued.
“We’re a company that promotes openness and transparency, both in the world at large and here at Facebook.
“That’s culturally important to us and I’m committed to keeping it. But the cost of an open culture is that we all have to protect confidential information we share internally.
“If we don’t, we screw over everyone working their asses off to change the world.”
He also stated that press leaks ‘undermined’ work culture and expressed a desire to continue allowing employees to ask ‘difficult questions’.
“Let’s commit to maintaining complete confidentiality about the company—no exceptions. If you can’t handle that, then just leave. We have too much social good to build to have to deal with this.”
Since the email was posted online last year, Zuckerberg has not made any public comments about it.