Very true. Some large tech companies now still have pretty horrendous stocks. Microsoft has been flat for like a decade and it's still an industry leader which is counterintuative to people who don't know that much about the market.
I'm sure he meant that they could, in theory, utilize their brilliance towards kickstarting something business oriented to reverse the sentiment. For whatever reason though, Mark seems more interested in Frank Gehry's NASA hanger than actually making money. It's a big fucking revelation to him that people in finance actually care about financials. Who knew?
The whole situation really makes me think how much the current funding model as just a glorified legal ponzi scheme: More users, more funding, more users, more funding, IPO & profit.
I'd say most of the better business minds were the investors and the prudent ones have already sold. I'm convinced Eduardo Saverin is really the genius of the entire group. He sold shares right before the IPO, renounced his US citizenship, and moved to Singapore. He may have been screwed over by Facebook before but he gets the last laugh now that he sold his shares for double what their worth and got to avoid some taxes while doing it :)
In contrast, Mark choose to be more of a Sean Parker - a great creator of free products and, thus far, a fairly lousy businessperson. Companies like Spotify are amazing for users yet that doesn't stop them from losing millions each month in licensing. These companies dig themselves into holes from the very beginning and simply pray the financial problem fixes itself. My opinion and seemingly that of investors is that there is no indication that it will until the model itself is changed. Recent IPOs all tell the same story: that businesses not built with long term viable business models have trouble performing well on the market. Until "free" can work like Google enables it to in more companies, nobody is willing to bet on the hole not getting deeper without the likelihood of a larger round to keep these failing companies afloat.
