It's more of Thiel influence of 'build a cult' on Zuckerberg and also his inability to listen from other respectable figures for their opinions. I got that vibe from the article of the Whatsapp founders. Seems that Zuckerberg has his mind set on an idea and will shut down any other opinion. Troubling for investors, it's never good to have a monoculture or one-sided opinions and it doesn't look good to have smart people (and proven successful) jump ship at this rate.

Obviously he’s not going to buy WhatsApp for billions of dollars and then keep not earning money on it. You can’t eat having a lot of users.

who says its not good? worked for apple for many years.

Apple and Steve Jobs for that matter basically invented cross-competition inside the same company. He pushed for different teams to work on the same problem and then compared solutions. Even from the Mac vs Lisa days to the iPhone initial designs (iPod based vs what we have now as iPhone) and even on minuscule things (iOS keyboard was assigned to at least 5 different teams and then one engineer got a big breakthrough). Contrary to shutting down any other idea from the get-go and pushing away talented people.

Cults work until they don't.

I can name a few that are a couple of thousand years old and still kicking

Sounds like the upper management circle in Facebook is running off aquired executives, not nesseaarily zuck. Kind of hints at a toxic culture.

It's really Zuck. He hires management between the co-founders as a diversion.

My feeling was that FB’s desire to monetize acquired properties has put off a lot of acquired execs.

In fairness, this is also what the founders want. They got their pay day and after sometime of golden handcuffs, they get their freedom.