Facebook’s retirement plan

“WHITE HOT”,T a new documentary, traces the rise and fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, an American fashion label that soared in the early 2000s before crashing just as dramatically. The film explores the firm’s obsession with employing a certain type of staff—handsome, chiselled, white—which led to damaging claims of racism and sexual harassment. But just as harmful to Abercrombie was that it became dated. Its low-rise jeans, cropped -shirts and migraine-inducing cologne, “Fierce”, became inseparably linked with Americans who came of age around the turn of the century. The price of being so closely associated with one generation was that the next wanted nothing to do with it.Facebook, which took off around the same time, may be experiencing a similar problem. Its millennial identity is embodied in its 37-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who still wears his college uniform of skinny jeans and hoodie (though these days his hoodies are bespoke). The social network, which began as a way for oversexed Harvard undergraduates to rate each other’s looks, is now seen by youngsters “as a place for people in their 40s and 50s”, in the words of one leaked internal memo. Investors consider Facebook unfashionable, too: its parent company, Meta, has lost 35% of its market value this year, including a plunge of $232bn in February, the biggest one-day drop in stockmarket history.