This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
After a rough couple of years, Meta is flying: Revenue is growing again, profits are way up after some painful belt-tightening, and its stock is at a record high.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, maybe Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO, could get hurt, or worse, in a cage match?
That’s what Meta is suggesting in a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing out this week. In the company’s newest annual report, it told investors that Zuckerberg routinely did risky stuff for fun — and that it would be a real problem for the company if he got injured doing that.
From Meta’s 10-K, filed under “risk factors”:
We currently depend on the continued services and performance of our key personnel, including Mark Zuckerberg. Mr. Zuckerberg and certain other members of management participate in various high-risk activities, such as combat sports, extreme sports, and recreational aviation, which carry the risk of serious injury and death.
Meta is presumably referring to Zuckerberg’s well-documented embrace of all kinds of brotastic fun, including mixed martial arts, hydrofoiling, and CrossFit. He has also been training to get his pilot license, The Information reported.
And he has gotten banged up along the way: Last year, he tore his ACL in a training fight.
Zuckerberg certainly isn’t the only tech mogul who likes this stuff. His rival Elon Musk, for instance, flies himself around all the time, and he famously challenged Zuckerberg to a cage match (which some people insisted was going to be a real thing but never panned out).
But he may be the only Big Tech CEO who’s spelled that out as a problem for investors.
Musk’s Tesla, for instance, simply points out that the company is “highly dependent” on his services and doesn’t mention the prospect of him crashing one of his Gulfstreams. (It does, however, say that Musk “does not devote his full time and attention to Tesla” because he’s also running SpaceX, X, and other ventures.)
Peers such as Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon either say that their CEOs are important or don’t even mention them.
Meta reps did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Zuckerberg basically did, by responding to a post about the 10-K filing on Threads:
It’s worth pointing out that while the “risk factor” section of any public company can be useful to scan, since it lays out all kinds of problems that could arise, it usually is not the kind of thing most investors care about. The point is to insulate the company from liability in case something does go wrong: “See? We told you this could happen. Now tell your lawyers to stop bothering us.”
So while Meta does take Zuckerberg’s well-being very seriously — in 2022, it spent $15 million on personal security for him and his family — it’s unlikely it thinks he’s going to get really, really hurt. But they’re letting us it could happen, just in case.
Peter Kafka
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