Curley: You may hate Zuckerberg’s superyacht in Lake Union, but you also paid for it

In 2008, if you were living in Chicago, you might’ve gotten an email offering you a pepperoni pizza for half off.

If you took the offer and ate the pizza, congratulations, you were a slice of history.

You made a 30-year-old college dropout who liked to videotape himself doing yoga in his underwear, who also admitted to lying about owning 20 cats to make himself seem lame, a billionaire. Your desire to save $7 made that quirky guy a billionaire. But only for 18 days. Bye-bye, billionaire.

His name is Andrew Mason. The company he started with just a few employees was called Groupon in 2008.

Google offered Mason $6 billion. He turned it down in 2011. The company went public. It was the biggest Tech IPO in history.

Groupon became a $13 billion company because you like saving money on pizza, or renting a kayak for an hour, or getting a pedicure.

One year later, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the CEO of Instagram and offered $1 billion. Within 48 hours, the deal was done. Check Zuckerberg’s net worth, and you’ll see the Instagram purchase has added $70 billion to his bank account.

He took some of that money and bought that 390-foot yacht. That was the boat docked in Lake Union earlier this week.

You should go see it if you can. I went there yesterday and watched as some onlookers screamed, yelled, and cursed at the yacht. I was happy to see them taking photos and posting them. Complete with F-bombs and emojis.

The irony of posting about Zuck’s big boat

Here’s some bad news for those angry, bitter, envious folks dockside. With every photo you took and posted yesterday, you helped fill Zuck’s 111,000-gallon fuel tank.

It only makes sense that you should top off the diesel tanks because it’s your yacht. You paid for that yacht.

It would only take about 300,000 bored, angry, jealous, socialist-loving, capitalist-hating folks living in Ballard, Fremont, Wallingford, Green Lake, and Ravenna one year to scroll through their Instagram to give Mark Zuckerberg the money to buy his yacht.

You bought it for him because he provided a product that you love.

You spend two to four hours a day using it. Ironically, you scroll with your thumb about 300 feet a day on Instagram, which is almost the entire length of that yacht you got for Mark.

Just like the folks who wanted half-off a pizza in Chicago in 2008 made Andrew Mason, the founder of Groupon, a billionaire for a few days. The reason you probably don’t know who Mason is is because he made that wrong decision, and the market punished him.

Mark Zuckerberg made the right call, and the market rewarded him.

You are the market. You make a millionaire a billionaire. And billionaires into millionaires.

They thank you every day. You’re a good friend to Mark Zuckerberg, just don’t try to get on his yacht.

Listen to John Curley weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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