“Markets don’t just take care of themselves. Capitalism needs to be cultivated.”

Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook turned political economist, wasn’t there to soft-sell. His new book, The Rise and Fall of American Marketcraft, is a hard confrontation with a crumbling fiction: that markets are neutral, self-regulating forces of nature. They aren’t. They never were. And the people who pretend otherwise aren’t protecting freedom—they’re engineering chaos.

And he called it out by name. That infamous image of Zuckerberg standing behind Trump wasn’t just awkward optics—it was an alignment of interests.

“They want to be marketcrafters. But without democracy. Without institutions. Without the public.”

He described how Facebook and others, in their early years, depended on government funding, infrastructure, and legal frameworks. But now, many of those same founders are financing lawsuits, lobbying against antitrust, and attacking agencies designed to keep markets fair and open. It’s not just hypocrisy. It’s an effort to replace the state with the platform—and remove any structure that might say no.