New Mark Zuckerberg Dropped
Mark Zuckerberg is having a nice summer. By his own account, he’s in great shape, owing to a fondness for mixed martial arts and a propensity for doing calisthenics while wearing a camo-print weighted vest. He has recently welcomed a new daughter to the world; placed in jiu-jitsu competitions; appeared sweaty and shirtless with the UFC champion, Alexander Volkanovski; and enjoyed the attention from engaging in some light trolling of Elon Musk. Zuckerberg’s also been busy at work: On Monday, he boasted that it took only a few days for more than 100 million shiny influencers, anthropomorphized brands, and regular humans to sign up for Threads, his company’s new Twitter clone. As with any acquaintance in your Instagram feed who starts posting more workout selfies, one gets a sense that the tech billionaire is feeling himself right now.
All this peacocking is yielding distressing results: This weekend, real, non-AI-generated people in my social feeds were discussing Zuck’s bod and his potentially rising Q score with genuine interest and openly rooting for the Meta CEO’s success. The Wall Street Journal ran an article noting that the Meta CEO might be “cool again.” A colleague recently suggested to me that we might be experiencing a hot Zuck summer, a phrase that caused me to briefly lose consciousness. Respectfully, what is going on here? Have we succumbed to a national moment of amnesia in which Facebook’s many political and privacy sins have been absolved or memory-holed? Are people, and especially those who can’t stand Musk, falling for a PR campaign? Or are we, for the first time, glimpsing a version of the Facebook founder who has simply stopped caring what everyone thinks? Is Mark Zuckerberg finally free?
The specific answers to these questions are less important than the fact that you or I might be asking them. That’s because the mere idea that Zuckerberg is having a moment is itself a carefully composed bit of image maintenance. The feeling that there might be a new Zuckerberg in town is not an accident, nor is the fact that the CEO made headlines by saying he was down for a cage match with Musk just two weeks before launching a product to compete with Twitter. What you’re seeing—the biceps, the bravado—is yet another in a long line of Zuck eras. A software update, if you will.
There have been a few of these shifts over the past decade or so, though they’ve tended to overlap. Early on, there were dueling personas: The cocky “I’m CEO … bitch” wunderkind and the sweaty, mumbling, pre-media-training Zuck (Factory Settings Zuck). Later, we saw Stepford Zuck, a robotic version of the founder who seemed almost completely devoid of personality, yet hell-bent on appearing relatable by doing things such as smoking meats on livestreams and visiting farmers in the heartland alongside a personal photographer, like a presidential candidate. There was Philanthropy Zuck, who put his name on hospitals and gave $100 million to Newark public schools. Perhaps the most famous is Diplomatic Zuck, known for appearing in front of Congress in a suit, speaking in serious platitudes to university students about preserving free speech and democracy, and apologizing when his websites helped foment global unrest. These were calculated transformations, all designed to boost the CEO’s likability and Facebook’s own image by association.
[Read: Zombie Twitter has arrived]
The new variation is Hobbyist Zuck. It purports to be a more well-rounded model, a bit like a large language model trained on a corpus of long-form self-improvement podcasts; a Zuck with real interests, just like you. This buff, well-sunscreened Zuck hydrofoils while clutching an American flag, perhaps because he enjoys it, but also because it’s good content—the sort of thing that might attract other hobbyist males to root for him the way they do for other quirky tech founders. Hobbyist Zuck loves mixed martial arts and going on The Joe Rogan Experience. He hates TV, because it puts people in a “beta state, consuming stuff.” Hobbyist Zuck is no beta.
This is a Zuck tailored to a peculiar moment when politicians and other leaders are obsessed with shows of masculinity and feats of strength. Most important, Hobbyist Zuck provides a useful framework for the CEO to talk about his own career through the lens of martial-arts study. “You have to be willing to just get beaten up a lot,” Zuckerberg said, when asked about his recent success with jiu-jitsu on an episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast last month. To succeed in the sport (and in running a company), Zuckerberg argued, one has to be willing to be humbled in front of others. “I’ve just failed and been embarrassed so many times in my life,” he said. “It’s a core competence at this point.”
This is a useful, self-serving line that casts Facebook’s scandals and missteps in a better light. It also feels like an honest admission. Zuckerberg, who spent the latter part of the 2010s as a chief villain of the techlash, knows public humiliation in a way that few people do. And although there is no evidence that constant ridicule, Senate interrogation, and mockery have made him a better leader (a legion of recently laid-off Facebookers certainly might take issue with his argument), it’s entirely possible that this has all left Zuckerberg feeling as if he has very little to lose, reputationally speaking. It certainly helps explain his being able to stay in the spotlight after trying and failing to generate interest in a legless, lonely metaverse.
Contrast this Zuckerbergian attitude with that of Musk, a man so thin-skinned that a gentle criticism from Twitter’s previous CEO seemingly triggered him to up and buy the platform out of spite. So much of Musk’s tenure as the owner of Twitter has been defined by changing the platform to troll his enemies and delight his sycophantic fans—unverifying journalists, welcoming previously banned trolls back to the platform, and acting as personal tech support for right-wing users like Catturd2. The product has suffered dramatically; not only is it choked with bigots and spam, but at one point over the Fourth of July weekend, it limited users’ access to the platform. Musk, once a golden child of Silicon Valley, has seen his reputation as a visionary diminish as he’s all but destroyed the social network.
As others have observed, Musk’s stark mishandling of Twitter and speedy radicalization into a right-wing-influencer reply guy is responsible for much of the goodwill toward Zuckerberg. And the excitement for Threads this weekend appeared to be rooted in schadenfreude: “It’s just because we all hate elon musk and this is just twitter before he bought it,” one threader told me of their enthusiasm for the platform.
[Read: Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time]
Zuckerberg’s popularity may be inflated by the Musk moment, but that’s exactly the point. The Meta CEO has stumbled on a truism of modern fandom: Your popularity is sometimes defined not at all by who you are, but by whom you stand in opposition to. It is the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” school of business and public relations.
Zuckerberg may be inspired by Musk in other ways, too. It’s possible he’s realized that there’s no genuine advantage to being universally liked, even if that’s the goal of his sterile mass-market platforms. Maybe it’s best if Zuckerberg caters to a very specific set of fanboys, without making the Muskian mistake of becoming terminally online. In this sense, a cage fight against the only person in Silicon Valley who is more widely known and polarizing than he is might be savvy image management, even if the idea makes most of the world roll their eyes out of their head. Perhaps Zuckerberg knows that, after years of being a villain, there’s real value in volunteering to get punched in the face, because it satisfies both his small cadre of fanboys and his army of critics. (The image has worked before to sell magazines.)
Whether Zuckerberg has actually won the summer is up for debate, of course. Threads, despite its rush of sign-ups, may come back to earth as the shine of onboarding wears off. The pay-per-view cage match may never materialize, which would make the machismo schtick look even more man-childish. What is unquestionable is that those of us trapped in the middle of the “billionaire cold war” are the real losers. The entire spectacle obfuscates what’s really going on. A 39-year-old mega-billionaire who was once among the world’s foremost villains of industry—and who is sitting atop a flailing, expensive metaverse pivot—has leveraged the radicalization and impetuousness of the world’s richest man to once again copy a successful idea from a smaller competitor and juice it up overnight into a competitive business.
It’s easy enough to get roped into the royal-rumble shenanigans, just as it’s easy enough to use a Meta product to spite Musk for destroying the platform you used to like. But Zuck or Musk? is a false binary. It’s reminiscent of the effort to romanticize the George W. Bush presidency during the roiling chaos of the Trump administration. The self-immolation of one billionaire’s image is not reason to reappraise another’s. It is, however, an indicator of just how far the bar has been lowered when it comes to evaluating the men who lead Silicon Valley.