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Why did Jason Calacanis sell all his Facebook stock?

Calling CEO Mark Zuckerberg “completely immoral,” the provocative investor has no regrets and says “no founder should ever sell a company to him.”

Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis
Courtesy Launch Festival

Entrepreneur-turned-angel-investor Jason Calacanis doesn’t mince words, and this week’s Too Embarrassed to Ask podcast is no exception: Asked by one of our listeners if he regretted selling his shares of Facebook when they were going for only $110-120 (versus $174 at the time of this writing), he had a one-sentence answer ready.

“I just don’t like Mark Zuckerberg, or that company,” Calacanis said.

But there’s more to it than that: Partly, he doesn’t like to trade individual stocks, thinking he’s going to get out-maneuvered by “Wall Street quant people who are smarter than me.” And although he likes COO Sheryl Sandberg, Calacanis says he considers Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to be “completely immoral.”

“Every time he has to make a decision, he makes the decision that is in his own best interest, to make the company grow faster, without regard for the impact on the people who have built the system for him,” he said.

Example: Facebook allowed users to add other users to Facebook Groups without their consent. This may have been a great call if the goal was to increase the number of people using Groups, but ignored possible side effects such as a gay person being outed against their will by being added to an LGBTQ group by someone else, Calacanis said.

“The second piece is, I think he’s incredibly anti-competitive, with the way he copied Snapchat, and steals everybody’s innovations, including people like Dave Morin from Path, who used to work for him,” he added. “He’s not even loyal to him.”

As a result of that “lack of regard and lack of creativity,” the Launch Incubator boss offered this advice: “No founder should ever sell a company to him [Zuckerberg].”

You can listen to Too Embarrassed to Ask on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

On the new podcast, Calacanis also talked about tech companies that he says inflate diversity statistics (“completely fugazi”), how to fix San Francisco (basically, it’s the housing, stupid) and why Tesla is “going to be fine,” despite its record losses in Q1 2018.

“I don’t understand why this is so controversial,” he said. “Maybe it’s people on the east coast, they’re looking at ‘Oh my god, he needs another billion dollars to change the world!’ It’s like, ‘A billion dollars? That’s it?’ Look at Amazon: 20 years of not being profitable and then just — boop! — all of a sudden they flip a switch and they’re massively profitable. That’s how all of these companies work.”

Plus: He argued that Lyft missed a crucial opportunity to pounce when its larger U.S. rival Uber stumbled; worth noting, of course, is that Calacanis was an early Uber investor and is a personal friend of its ex-CEO Travis Kalanick.

“Ha ha, Lyft,” he said. “One of the crazy things about this is, never has a company had such an amazing opportunity to capitalize on unforced errors.”

“Your competitor literally flips the car over, is in the ditch, and you just sit there and watch it,” Calacanis added. “And then the car gets back on the road and starts going 100 miles an hour again. Lyft is just completely incompetent and they couldn’t capitalize on Uber’s mistakes. The window has closed.”

If you have questions about any topic in consumer tech or the week’s tech news, send them to us! You can tweet your questions with the hashtag #TooEmbarrassed or email them to TooEmbarrassed@recode.net.

If you like this show, you should also check out our other podcasts:

  • Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with the movers and shakers in tech and media every Monday. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
  • Recode Media with Peter Kafka features no-nonsense conversations with the smartest and most interesting people in the media world, with new episodes every Thursday. Use these links to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
  • And finally, Recode Replay has all the audio from our live events, such as the Code Conference, Code Media and the Code Commerce Series. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on Apple Podcasts — and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Kara. Tune in next Friday for another episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask!

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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