I think you're dead wrong on this. Mark Zuckerburg is actually in an almost unique position that he has full control of facebook, so he can do literally anything he wants. He doesn't have to prioritize profit or shareholder value, he could sit in his board meeting just continually insulting his board's family members. He really does believe in what he's doing.
The problem is that sitting in your basement coding in PHP isn't going to give you the right grounding in psychology, sociology, and politics that runninng a social network will need. Being a billionaire at the age of 23 also doesn't give you a great lesson in how to learn from mistakes, and take criticism. All the way through his management of facebook Mark has been getting dragged through lessons about life that only a teenage boy in his bedroom needed to learn because he never got a life to learn them.
The problem is that sitting in your basement coding in PHP isn't going to give you the right grounding in psychology, sociology, and politics that runninng a social network will need. Being a billionaire at the age of 23 also doesn't give you a great lesson in how to learn from mistakes, and take criticism. All the way through his management of facebook Mark has been getting dragged through lessons about life that only a teenage boy in his bedroom needed to learn because he never got a life to learn them.