This was Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday present from his wife.
With a sly smile, Zuckerberg smiles at the camera while sitting in a carefully made copy of his childhood bedroom. There’s a lava lamp, a participation trophy, and a white stuffed dog, all of which are very childish. But the environment foreshadows the cultural-shifting, technological force that Zuckerberg would build. A framed sepia-toned picture of what looks like a young Zuckerberg poses in his desk chair the same way he does now, with one arm over the back of the chair and the other over his legs spread out. The books are about C++, Java, and Windows 95.
These pictures, which are based on different times in the CEO’s life, show how far Zuckerberg has come: He used to be a skinny kid learning to code, but now he’s one of the richest people in the world… But that wasn’t what most people thought about when they saw the picture. Instead, they make you wonder: Does Zuck have the drip?
Zuckerberg looks a little too cool for all the old tech gear for the first time in his life. He wears a thick gold chain around his neck, but it’s not long enough to cover the big gothic writing on his graphic t-shirt: “Carthage must die.”
Zuckerberg’s sudden change in style stands out. For about 13 years, he’s worn the same gray shirt and jeans to most public events. This is because, of course, he’s focused on such big issues that regular people, who aren’t as rich as he is, can’t understand them because they take too much time getting dressed. When Zuckerberg shared an Instagram reel in April about updates to the Meta AI assistant, people looked at his chain like a frat boy instead of the Llama 3 model’s many details. A picture of Zuckerberg’s video went viral after someone changed it and gave him a beard. He looked pretty good! Now, the most popular comments on the video beg him to get rid of his beard.
Zuckerberg wore an Alexander McQueen suit with beads to a recent high-profile wedding in India. The next day, he wore a Rahul Mishra (one of India’s best designers) tulle shirt. The shirt is so carefully embroidered that the price is listed online as “request price,” as if it were a lobster at a fancy restaurant that had just been caught. In a picture, Zuckerberg was seen wearing a flashy shirt with a tiger on it next to Bill Gates, whose outfit would be okay at my grade school.
People think Zuckerberg’s clothes are silly, but they have an effect on how people see him and his business. When you’re the CEO of one of the biggest tech companies in the world, that’s not something you should take lightly. Especially since your company has been criticized for child safety problems and designs that are too addicting. If Zuckerberg suddenly turns into a cool MMA fighter instead of a nerd who’s making money off of our personal information, might his cool style protect him from being questioned?
“Style is a way to communicate,” fashion writer and founder of the shopping app LTK Amber Venz Box told TechCrunch. “Our look does say a lot about us and affect how people feel about us. We have spoken and written communication, body language, and “drip.”
This is not the same man who appeared before Congress about how Facebook could hurt the election process and looked creepy and wide-eyed. Remember when we all made fun of that picture of Metaverse Zuck in front of the Eiffel Tower two years ago? What’s with our thirst over his nonexistent beard now? We stopped caring about Horizon Worlds about the same time Zuck lit up. He runs a 21-minute 5K on Instagram and brags about being a buff MMA fighter. He no longer looks like the high school bully who was picked on. Instead, he looks like the bully who was picked on.
A podcaster and fashion expert named Avery Trufelman told TechCrunch, “Maybe he stopped caring.” “He sounds like Taylor Swift after I Forgive You.”
It might seem like a stretch for Trufelman to say that a computer science geek with superpowers is like a record-breaking pop star, but in a time when tech companies keep our attention for hours on end every day, tech CEOs are like celebrities.
Swift and Beyoncé, two of the biggest stars, don’t talk to the press very often. It’s not necessary. Fans instead carefully read through lyrics to find hidden messages, as if they were Talmudic experts reading old books very carefully. Like when techies listen in on Meta’s quarterly earnings calls to study the rare insights we get into how Zuckerberg talks about his business.
“That’s kind of what the fashion conversation has turned into,” Trufelman said. “Image decoding or armchair psychology.” “Should it really matter this much? I’m not sure. We’re trying to use this as much as possible, especially for big, scary public people, because it’s one of the few open windows we have into how they really live.
That shirt that Zuckerberg wore wasn’t just worn because it looks cool. The phrase refers to the CEO’s early days as a startup founder. In his photoshoot, he reminds us that he slept in a simple bedroom with a mattress on the floor until Facebook had 100 million users. He could have bought a bed frame and some light decor used, but then he wouldn’t be able to dress up his sigma grindset for his 40th birthday photoshoot.
Because his old bedroom was scary and he made a reference to Carthage’s fall, Zuckerberg came across as a rebel against the power of big tech companies. Business Insider says that Zuckerberg said “Carthago delenda est” at Facebook in 2011 when Google released Google+, which was seen as a threat to Facebook at the time. Zuckerberg put his team into “lockdown mode,” which is another “era” shown in his picture. He then told his team to work hard to beat their competitors.
Cato the Elder was a Roman politician who used this Latin phrase at the end of all of his speeches to urge people to beat Carthage. But Rome wasn’t exactly the loser in the Punic Wars, and Zuckerberg isn’t exactly an underdog either. The republic won all three of these wars, and it wouldn’t stop until Carthage was gone for good. There’s a saying that goes along with “move fast and break things,” but that one is a bit more aggressive. It worked.
It’s clear from Zuckerberg’s picture that he wants to be remembered as a major figure in American business history. There is a strange picture of Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, sitting on a tiny chair next to Mark Zuckerberg in a model of the Harvard apartment where Zuckerberg started Facebook.
The picture is scary. Putting on a jacket, gym shorts, Adidas sneakers, and tube socks, Gates looks like he’s getting ready to go for a run. Because Zuckerberg is sitting up straighter, he looks like he’s presiding over the computer giant. Right now, Zuckerberg has more money than Gates.
Mark Zuckerberg has always seemed to know that he can’t take Meta’s power for granted and that he can’t get comfortable with his position in the company. The board is set up in a way that makes it impossible to fire Mark against his will. The bloodthirsty statement on his T-shirt is still true: TikTok, Meta’s biggest rival, is fighting for its life right now.
Meta is full of examples of how hard it is to stay on top. For example, its shares dropped a lot in 2022 when it became clear that Zuckerberg’s big plans for the metaverse weren’t as certain as he made them seem. One of these reminders is built into the doorway to the company’s main campus. When the business opened its doors in Menlo Park for the first time, it kept the main sign that had been there before by Sun Microsystems. It was just the sign turned over and the Facebook “thumbs-up” stuck on it. The SunSystems name was left visible from behind on purpose.
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Trufelman said, “I always thought it was so poetic to keep those reminders of empires that rise and fall. It’s clear that Zuck has this Ozymandias mentality.” “I’m sure he knows where he fits in the big picture of history.”
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