Actual scientists and engineers (I'm both of these) often are too narrowly focused on their own interests to be good at business at the scale of Facebook (or anything else for that matter). Scientific and engineering acumen are signs of intelligence, but not indicative of being "the best" in most contexts.

The cloning of snapchat has succeded though, Instagram is doing great and it’s actually stealing users from that platform

I agree it was a business success. It's just not very innovative. But in business a lack of innovation is sign of decline. It signals to people that a company has become reactionary rather than revolutionary. I don't know if it matters, but it could be a cause for concern.

I'm fairly certain you would characterize nearly all of the world's largest and most successful companies as "not innovative" and therefore on the decline.

Samsung. :)

If you're not failing occasionally or perhaps regularly, you're likely not often attempting anything difficult.

Amazon & Bezos, as one example, has failed at several very prominent efforts over the years, from competing with eBay in auctions, to competing with Google in traditional search, to the Amazon phone.

Companies should not succeed at every venture. Not only is it impossible, it's undesirable for them to succeed like that. By that standard there has never been a successful company, because nobody has managed to own everything yet.

The measure is overall value creation by the business for shareholders. Facebook is one of the greatest success stories in world business history by any reasonable measure of value creation, both in regards to its profit levels and balance sheet value increases. And they've done that in a shorter amount of time than any other company before them, with perhaps only Google a close second.

FB net tangible assets have increased from $41 billion to ~$58 billion in the last year, that's twice the net tangible assets of Microsoft. Not only does Facebook have a healthier balance sheet than Microsoft, they're going to catch them on quarterly profits within about ~18 months. Microsoft is 42 years old, Facebook is 15 years old. Facebook's net tangible assets match that of Walmart.

Here's what the balance sheets of other blue chips look like:

Coca Cola: zero net tangible assets

McDonald's: negative $5.6 billion

Oracle: negative $1.5 billion

Netflix: negative $6.7 billion

Starbucks: positive $831k

Comcast: negative $46 billion

Boeing: negative $7.7 billion

GE: negative $40 billion

AT&T: negative $78 billion

Verizon: negative $84 billion

Procter & Gamble: negative $15 billion

IBM: negative $22 billion

Pfizer: negative $33 billion

Johnson & Johnson: negative $25 billion

Lockheed: negative $15 billion

Home Depot: negative $821k

3M: negative $1.8 billion

Delta Airlines: negative $731k

UPS: negative $4.8 billion

PepsiCo: negative $17 billion

Walgreens: negative $590k

Where are you getting this data from? None of it matches anything I'm seeing or is even close...

Additionally, without knowing what is listed as a tangible asset there is very little way to compare them to businesses in completely different markets/industries.

Most of the companies you’ve listed pay dividends. You can’t track what they return to investors year over year simply by comparing differences in book value.

How close is Zuck to Thiel? I see some strong parallels to his initial mentor and would think he still supports him. You are right, maybe he should've surrounded himself with more variety of people.

GraphQL and React are some solid initiatives coming out of Facebook though

They don't make any money within themselves and those were engineer-driven initiatives.