An email surfaced on the internet showed Mark Zuckerberg expressing his disappointment and asking "‘whoever leaked the story" to resign after TechCrunch published a story, claiming that Facebook was building a new phone secretly.
The mail, sent in September 2010 by Zuckerberg who was 26 then, was published by Internal Tech Emails.
"Lots of you saw the TechCrunch story over the weekend claiming that we're building a mobile phone. We're not building a phone and I spoke at length at the Q&A... about what we're actually doing - building ways to make all phones and apps more social," the mail read.
Zuckerberg termed "an act of betrayal" the alleged leak and asked, "whoever leaked this to resign immediately."
He threatened that if the employee did not come forward and resigned willingly, the company "will almost certainly find out who you are anyway."
"If you believe that it's ever appropriate to leak internal information, you should leave," he said in the mail.
“It is frustrating and destructive that anyone here thought is was okay to say this to anyone outside the company. The fact that the story was inaccurate doesn’t make it any better.”
“I’ve had to personally spend a lot of time over the last few days … cleaning up the damage from this mess,” he said.
"We are a company that promotes openness and transparency...but the cost of an open culture is that we all have to protect the confidential information we share internally," he wrote.
“If we don’t, we screw over everyone working their asses off to change the world," he added.
Zuckerberg has often come under criticism for how he runs his company, Meta, with some calling his style "dictatorial."