Zuckerberg could ask Facebook director Hastings how to apologize

Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Reed Hastings, chief executive officer of Netflix

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t yet found the words needed to calm the market after the disastrous Cambridge Analytica story that broke Friday continues to pick up steam.

Facebook shares plunged 6.8 percent on Monday and another 1.5 percent in extended trading. This comes after a weekend when the company and independent news reports said that a psychology quiz app collected data about 50 million Facebook users under false pretenses, then shared that data with the political analytics firm without user permission.

Facebook execs took to Twitter in the wake of the reports to deny that this was a security breach, and Cambridge has said that it deleted that data, contrary to the news reports.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg, who created the social network 14 years ago from his Harvard dorm room, has stayed quiet.

If Zuckerberg really wanted help in crafting a soothing apology, he could just look across the boardroom table. There he’d find Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who seven years ago made a mistake so catastrophic that it almost sank the company he started in 1997.

In 2011, Netflix raised prices and announced it was splitting its DVD business into a separate company.

Then Hastings apologized in a letter that began: “I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation.”

That alone wasn’t enough to spark a rally, as Netflix continued to reckon with a deteriorating subscriber outlook. In fact, the stock sank more than 50 percent from there before bottoming about a year later. Along the way Hastings had to kill a hastily unveiled plan to rename the DVD business “Qwikster.”

But since mid-2012, Netflix has represented one of the best investments of the decade, multiplying 40-fold on the way to a $136 billion market capitalization. Once roundly criticized for abruptly deciding to separate the DVD and streaming units, Hastings is now lauded for his foresight in recognizing that the physical distribution business was headed for the dustbin.