David Marcus is used to building great things. In 1996, at age 23, he founded a successful company and went on to sell another one for $240 million to eBay in 2011. Soon after, he became president of PayPal, helping to turn the firm into a payment giant before taking a senior role at Facebook where he oversaw the growth of the wildly-successful Messenger app. Marcus is not the sort of man who accepts failure. Yet, in recent years, this is what he has had to confront.
In his final role at Facebook, Marcus led the ill-starred Libra project—a wildly ambitious attempt to create a global cryptocurrency, pegged to real-world currencies, within WhatsApp and the company's other apps. The project triggered a ferocious blowback from politicians and was ultimately crushed. Undaunted, Marcus went on to launch a company of his own called Lightspark in 2022, raising $175 million to promote the mainstream adoption of Bitcoin. This too has been an uphill struggle.
