T
here they are.
The Zuckerbergs.
Both in black slacks and plain shoes. Both in zanily patterned shirts that look made to wick sweat. No heavy watches, no bright jewelry. They look you in the eye and don’t break contact, not even to sample the spa water or crudités provided by the Company on the glass table between us. He is a ham; she is shy. They speak, to my surprise, in unreconstructed New York accents. I don’t know what I expected them to be like, but for whatever reason this wasn’t it.
“Awl my children are amazing to me,” says Karen, when asked what it’s like.
“He didn’t stand out as the bright one in the family,” says Ed. “If anyone I would guess our middle dawtah Donna was considered the ‘nerd’ or the smart one in the family.”
I tell them I’m reminded of the first Jewish president of the United States, whose mother nudges a reporter at the inauguration and whispers proudly, “His brother’s a doctor.”
“We just had four really bright, successful kids. We’re equally proud of all of them,” says Ed. “He just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was a perfect confluence of his passion, aligned with some of my passions. And Karen and I together, Karen especially, we just created an incredibly supportive environment for him to excel.”
“I think people who have a passion,” says Karen, subtly correcting Ed, “are the luckiest people in the world.”
But were there signs? Well, yes, perhaps there were some. In nursery school, he became so possessed by a one-week unit on outer space that he implored the teacher to extend the unit to a month, to which she relented at the insistence of a four-year-old. By six, his incessant demands for logical explanations of rules and step-by-step justifications for consequences—what Ed calls the “mental PowerPoint” he expected his parents to prepare before laying down the law—convinced them he’d become a lawyer.
Then there was the time he built a social network. Ed ran his dental practice from the ground floor of their home in Dobbs Ferry, a village in Westchester County, where he went by the “painless Dr. Z” and advertised on a primitive website that he “caters to cowards.” After work, Ed would walk upstairs to join his wife and kids for dinner, where Karen would lead each of them in sharing something from their day.
“Those were some of the best times in our lives,” says Ed.
“I hope you don’t miss those,” Karen says to me.
One evening in 1996, when it was Ed’s turn, he shared that he was excited about a new technology for his dental office. He’d hired someone to string together a strip of six differently colored lights mounted in each room to serve as a silent communication system, with each combination of colors conveying a different message—the next patient needs a crown on the right molar, your 2 pm canceled, the hygienist needs an exam, etc. Ed’s son asked if they’d have to drill through all the walls to run the wires connecting the lights. They would.
“Why would you do that?” he asked. “You already have computers in every room. I could write a program in a few weeks that connects them without the light system.” He wrote the program in Atari BASIC in two days. It worked. The family also used it to communicate with each other from different rooms, and dubbed it ZuckNet. It was a year before AOL Instant Messenger.
There was also the time when he was 12, and a virus crashed the Risk-like computer game he’d built but didn’t back up. He was devastated. He cried—oh, Karen’s child! how he cried—until he stood up and declared through tears that he’d not only rebuild the game from scratch but find new ways to optimize it, he’d make it better and faster
this
time, God damn it, and he’d
never
forget to back up his work again.
The game was set in the Roman Empire; the player would conquer the world one territory at a time. Perhaps that was a sign, too.
“He was not multidimensional,” says Ed. “Like, language was terrible for him. He could do the book stuff. But his accent in French was atrocious. His sisters made fun of him.” Thus a few years later, in high school, he excelled at Latin instead. He took to Virgil. Nearly a decade later, he still recalled the Latin verse for Jupiter’s decree in the
Aeneid
:
“For these I set no bounds in space or time; I have given empire without end.”
At Harvard, one of the first websites he built was a class study tool for his art history course, “Rome of Augustus.” At early crisis Facebook meetings to fend off threats from Google, he would end his speeches by declaring
Carthago delenda est
—“Carthage must be destroyed.” Friday all-hands meetings ended with him shouting, “Domination!” Sean Parker, Facebook’s early president who warned the young founder that shouting “Domination!” could one day be cited in an antitrust suit, later observed “this kind of imperial tendency” in him. For the first two decades of the Company, he wore his trademark hair in a short Roman fringe.
In more recent years, he’s periodically mused in public about the “really harsh approach” Augustus employed before “establish[ing] 200 years of world peace.” “That didn’t come for free,” he said of Rome’s first emperor, who turned it from a republic into an empire. “He had to do certain things.” At the Company’s flagship annual conference in 2024, he wore a shirt with the words “AUT ZUCK AUT NIHIL,” a riff on Cesare Borgia’s famous motto
Aut Caesar aut nihil
: “Either a Caesar or nothing.” His wife, Priscilla Chan, joked that on their honeymoon in Rome, his constant pursuit of Augustan sites and statues made the emperor their third wheel. The names of their three children are Maxima, August, and Aurelia.
“But to me, computer science was like, okay, he’s just picking up a different language,” says Karen, qualifying the seeming inevitability of his later life. “On the East Coast for us back then, it wasn’t the road to success. If you wanted real financial success, you went into banking and finance. The epitome of academic success was to become a doctor. Computer science to me was just, you know, you might as well be doing any other activity.”
“I thought everything should be computerized,” says Ed. “Karen may have thought not. She doesn’t have the forward vision with technology that I have.”
Karen looks at me and smiles, which girds me to insist again on the question I came here to ask. What is it like for one of the most powerful men in human history—who for better or worse has, by age 42, secured a place in the books that’ll be written about his era for centuries after his death—to be your child?
A long pause to think.
“One of our most important roles that we play now in our lives is to try and keep the grandchildren grounded,” says Ed. “They have an impossible time raising kids. They’ve done an incredible job, and the kids are just great. But they’re still very protected, which you have to understand. We took the older one a couple years ago to the mall for her birthday to buy a pair of earrings. That was a really eye-opening experience, just walking through the mall.”
“We haven’t really discussed it with them yet, about how they’re going to integrate them. One day they’ll be out for high school, maybe. I don’t know.”
“It’s complicated,” says Karen.
“It’s very, very complicated,” Ed agrees. “But he knows what people need and want, sometimes even before they know it. I mean, people call him arrogant—”
“He’s not,” says Karen.
“—but time after time, his arrogance just turns into truth.”
“You will experience it one day too,” Ed ruminates, “when your children eclipse you.”
Karen nods and waits for her husband to finish, then comes alive. She shifts her posture back toward me with a tender but firm gaze. “I can tell you how it is for me as a mother,” she says. “This is my child.”
“The Eye of Sauron” is how her child’s longtime lieutenants have referred to the unblinking, sometimes unnerving silences he involuntarily imposes when preparing to answer a question or make a point. I see it now, I think.
“Things have been written and said about him that are so untrue from such an early age,” Karen says. “I wish that sometimes the people who
do that
would reflect on what it must be like to fabricate stories, or create their own imaginary scenarios of what this person is like. I sometimes really wonder if anyone has ever sat back and thought, ‘This is a real person.’”
“It’s been really brutal,” she slackens. “I mean, how would you feel if your child was subjected to that kind of scrutiny?”
It’s inconceivable to me, I offer.
“I sometimes feel that people who go into the movies, you know, they want their private life. But they
chose
to go into the spotlight. This was something where my child just wanted to make a difference in the world. It was not like he chose to be out there with all the cameras on him… I just hope he realizes within himself how wonderful a human being he is. Giving and kind, he’s always been that way… He was always so fair. I just hope he realizes how much he really is loved by the people who love him.”
Do you wish he’d stop? I ask.
“I’ve always said to him, just do this only as long as you can find happiness within it, it has to bring you joy,” she concludes. “I think as long as he feels he’s going to bring goodness and change people’s lives in a positive direction… I mean, you can’t change what people do with the tools you give them. It doesn’t make the maker a bad person just because people do bad things with what you offer, right?”
A Company press handler knocks and enters; Ed and Karen have to be going, it’s time. As we stand up to say goodbye, I mention that I’ll soon be interviewing their son at his home, then joining him and his family for dinner that Friday, and get in a parting question about it.
“We did not keep Shabbat,” says Karen. “But growing up, we wanted our children to have a Jewish education.”
“I did,” says Ed. “She did not.”
“I did not
at first
,” she confirms. “But it was really important to us that our children realize that, with their behavior and their actions, they’re accountable to something. Whatever you want to call it, there is some higher essence up there.”
“You have to live with yourself and what you do,” she says. “Because there is a higher authority.”
Mark Zuckerberg is suspended in midair.
He is not floating or sinking, nor is he ascending anywhere. He is being hoisted like a trophy.
Outside, the lake is still in the morning air and banked by turgid grass studded with ceramic decoys in the shape of coyotes, used to deter bears and geese. Everything in a Zuckerberg residence—the flora, the doors, the bookshelves, the light—seems uncannily enlarged, like on a movie set. After walking across the vast lawns of his summer palace and entering one of its smaller structures, it is jarring to find him held aloft like this, the sovereign of history’s largest nonterritorial empire being heaved against his will.
Aden Valencia, the 149-pound NCAA Division I wrestling champion, takes it in for the length of a deep breath before delivering Zuckerberg back to earth, i.e., slamming him to the floor. The others take only passing notice. They include Dave Camarillo, Zuckerberg’s mixed martial arts (MMA) coach, and Merab Dvalishvili, the former UFC Bantamweight champion and current No. 1 contender. There are a few others from Camarillo’s coaching staff and the Stanford wrestling team here, too. They are practicing single-leg entries on each other in the cramped and humid fighting studio of Zuckerberg’s Lake Tahoe escape.
“It’s war over here!” Valencia says to them as he lifts his body off Zuckerberg. “I don’t know about over there.”
“I can’t process fast enough to understand what’s happening,” Zuckerberg says as he gets back to his feet, before asking Valencia to explain how he did it. “You can really feel the cardio difference at this kind of altitude,” he says to me, “when your opponent is 20.”
The dynamic in the room is immediately legible. Camarillo is the general, stalking the mat, weaving between the fighters, periodically breaking in with sudden vehemence to grapple himself, and throttling the intensity of the training up or down to ensure Zuckerberg won’t get maimed, but will get clocked if he loses focus. Dvalishvili is the apex predator, with a menacing look in his eye that makes you worried whether his own ferocity is subject to Camarillo’s adjustment. Valencia is the up-and-comer, the boy wonder who hasn’t yet tasted failure. When Camarillo instructs them all to don MMA gloves and box, and Valencia pairs up with Dvalishvili, it is impossible to take your eyes off them. The presence of the host, pouring sweat and landing and absorbing blows, seems somehow incidental.
Zuckerberg has spoken in public about his affinity for the “masculine energy” of MMA fighting as a counterbalance to the “neutered or emasculated” corporate world and American society writ large. After two decades in his famous uniform of gray crewneck, dark jeans, and close-cropped Caesar cut, he appeared in 2024 with longer hair, gold chain, designer clothing, and an interest in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, leading many to speculate whether he’d decided to rebrand as a pillar of the manosphere. But here in his fighting studio, you can perhaps see a different reason he’s decided to give up his lifelong habit of sleeping in late in order to hit people and get hit three mornings a week.
For 23 years, the single fact dominating every moment of every room he’s been in is that he is Mark Zuckerberg. It’s been true not just at Meta but in his Congressional testimonies and court proceedings, at Taylor Swift concerts and the Prada runway show at Milan Fashion Week, at dinners with friends and the birthday parties of his daughters’ friends. It’s been true even in his meetings with heads of state, including his own commanders in chief, to whom it must occur as they’ve tried at various points to squeeze and threaten and blame him for everything from electoral outcomes to ethnic cleansings, that one day they will be out of office, and eventually dead, while Zuckerberg—whose unique majority control of Meta’s voting power makes his removal effectively impossible—could in 50 years still be ruler of his empire. Today, that empire has 3.6 billion users, a market capitalization of $1.6 trillion, and has averaged, over nearly a quarter century, the addition of a zero to its valuation roughly once every U.S. presidential term.
It is not a normal situation for a human being to be in, let alone from the time they are 19. Three hundred thousand years of evolutionary biology do not furnish a man in this position with the keys to easily access other people or reality. Yet for all the ways in which Zuckerberg’s life is statistically anomalous, the conundrum he’s in is ancient. Among the terms contemporary scholars use to describe it are “epistemic isolation,” the “principal-agent problem,” the “hierarchical MUM effect,” and other overlapping jargon out of which tenure tracks have been laid. Perhaps the cleanest is the “dictator’s dilemma,” which needn’t apply only to dictatorial regimes.
The idea is simple and intuitive: The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet through fear or awe or self-preservation, those people often become less willing to tell him what they think he doesn’t want to hear, leaving him increasingly insulated from reality even as the consequences of his decisions become larger, and as the barriers to believing one’s own bullshit fall away.
Thus in the spring of 1941, there were no officers left with the courage to implore Stalin after he scoffed at intelligence that a German invasion was coming. For three years, the Great Leap Forward’s mass famines were reported up to Mao as record harvests. It was the self-censorship of Kennedy’s advisors during deliberations on the Bay of Pigs that popularized the term “groupthink.” The Shah of Iran was protected by his court from indications of a coming revolution until it was already too late. Henry Ford ignored warnings that the Model T was dying until the market was dominated instead by General Motors. Afraid of their volatile superiors, middle managers at Nokia in 2007 downplayed the appearance of the iPhone.
The list of great statesmen is in many ways a list of figures obsessed by the dictator’s dilemma. Lincoln, for instance, installed himself in the War Department’s telegraph office in order to read field dispatches raw as they came off the wire, before subordinates could filter them. Churchill retained the frank and combative Alan Brooke as his top military advisor, and built a private Statistical Office whose job was to cross-check every ministry’s reports. Kennedy, who learned from the Bay of Pigs, absented himself from National Security Council sessions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, so that his personal magnificence wouldn’t affect debate. Warren Buffett called Charlie Munger his “abominable no-man” for the rate at which he vetoed his ideas, for which Buffett was ultimately grateful.
The dictator’s dilemma was already a longstanding fixture of study by the time of Augustus, whose education might have included Greek texts concerned with the matter, such as Xenophon’s
Hiero
, Isocrates’
To Nicocles
, and Philodemus’
On Frank Speech
. As emperor, the eminently sensible Augustus called on senators at random to stifle premeditated remarks, periodically rotated his advisory council, and tolerated libel and jokes at his own expense. He ran three censuses of Roman citizens, kept his own ledger of the empire’s legions and treasuries, and instituted Rome’s first courier carriage system so that, like Lincoln, he could interrogate a direct source of information before anyone could corrupt it. He reigned for 40 years and died in his bed.
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According to nearly all the three dozen people I interviewed for this story, Zuckerberg is hyperaware of the dilemma’s potential, which is to say paranoid. He is an inveterate micromanager and voracious consumer of data. Aware that any chief’s inner circle is most incentivized to act as courtiers, he frequently engages the direct-reports of his direct-reports, and the subordinates of the reports’ reports. He is known for inviting outside experts and commentators to visit him and argue about his decisions (although he is not known for ever giving an inch). He often accepts personal blame in public for the mistakes of others, perhaps in part because he accepts the reality of Meta, which they accept, too: He is the company, and the company is him. He is, in any case, subject to certain types of feedback an Augustus never faced: stock prices, litigation, tell-all “whistleblower” memoirs, and the international free flow of online ridicule.
Yet a certain amount of slippage is perhaps inevitable. M.M.H. (“Make Mark Happy”) was for a time the internal nickname for a project that subordinates thought was going down in flames but felt compelled to prop up, and which they encouraged each other to “fall in love with.” In 2016, Facebook’s security team warned of instances of foreign troll farms which Zuckerberg deputies purportedly had scrubbed. Reports are endless of engineers and product managers proposing algorithmic fixes to downrank garbage content on Facebook, only to have the proposals killed by superiors who predicted, likely accurately, that Zuckerberg would not be willing to sacrifice the expansion of his empire for its content quality. There are stories, although disputed, of deputies letting him win at board games.
None of which is unique to Zuckerberg. Even the great statesmen find themselves surrounded by people, however exceptional otherwise, who in the end remain governed by fear or by awe, by the expectation of reward or defense of their fiefdoms, or by rational recognition that there is only one man who cannot be liquidated. Augustus himself earned the censure of Seneca, who chastised the emperor for lamenting that his later reign would not have been plagued by scandal if Agrippa and Maecenas, his key early lieutenants, hadn’t died. “We have no reason for supposing that it was the habit of Agrippa or Maecenas to speak the truth to him,” Seneca wrote half a century later. “Indeed, if they had lived, they would have been as great dissemblers as the rest. It is one of the habits of kings to insult their present servants by praising those whom they have lost, and to attribute the virtue of truthful speaking to those from whom there is no further risk of hearing it.”
Yet in Zuckerberg’s case, it isn’t hard to imagine a more banal reason why he, despite his and his team’s efforts, could get stuck in the dilemma, which in turn might help explain the increasingly central role that fighting, of all things, has come to play in his life.
Much of Zuckerberg’s inner circle consists of people who have been with him for over 15 years, since before Facebook’s IPO in 2012. Some were even around in 2006, when nearly all of Facebook’s management team quit after Zuckerberg, who was only 22, rejected their pleas to take an offer from Yahoo! to buy the company for $1 billion, forever establishing a central tenet of the company’s culture:
In the face of opposition, Zuckerberg is right
. Others are people who long ago came to terms with the fact that they cannot do what he does, and that despite his many mistakes and missteps, he is
sui generis
. Many are men and women with lives and livelihoods they never dreamed of, and they owe it—all of it—to him. They may simply be too grateful, men in his position have often worried, to attempt too frequently or stridently to play the role of rescuing him from the isolation of his position, from the consequences of letting his relationship to reality slip for even a moment—even if he is forever probing for ways to escape the dilemma; even when it means he will get punched in the face.
The bell rings and the fighters reshuffle; now Zuckerberg is paired up with Dvalishvili. The Georgian, whose serially fractured nose no longer points in any particular direction, is of course holding back, but he does land a few wince-inducing blows on Zuckerberg’s body. Before the bell sounds, he lands an overhand right on Zuckerberg’s chin. The latter nods and shakes his hair of sweat. When the next round begins, Zuckerberg chases Dvalishvili. He lands a surprisingly quick combination of shots on the Georgian’s body, then pauses, almost sweetly, to ask if Dvalishvili is okay.
“AAAHH!!” Dvalishvili responds with a huge mouthguarded grin, clapping his gloves together. Before the round is over, he lands a kick on Zuckerberg’s chest which looks forceful but only knocks Zuckerberg back on his heels.
“How’d you do that kick where it feels like you’re also digging your toes into my chest?” Zuckerberg asks after the round is over. Dvalishvili signals for him to clench his hands and feet back into a fighting stance to prepare to be shown. He does so, but when Dvalishvili demonstrates the kick, he cracks Zuckerberg in the same spot so hard that it knocks his wind out. Zuckerberg tries to keep a smile and wave people off but sits down and rocks back and forth.
“You okay? Sorry, sorry,” says Dvalishvili.
“You weren’t ready, I think,” Camarillo says. “You were half-ready.”
“Wow,” says Zuckerberg, looking up at the gym’s skylight, his breaths uncomfortably shallow. “Oh, man.”
“I think we all have a void in our lives, and the lucky ones find something that fills that space to make us more optimal, to make us a better human being,” Camarillo tells me over coffee back in Palo Alto, where I’d camped out to interview Zuckerberg at his home. “Mark filled the void with fighting. I think he does like the element of danger. If you go left when you should have went right, you get punched in the face.
“But I think he’s also got that feeling with us now, you know. That he’s just one of the guys.”
We begin our descent into Newark
, the captain’s voice jolts me awake. We’ll be there in 30 minutes. I put away my things. In moments like this, I still sometimes consider downloading Facebook on my phone. I can’t remember if I ever deleted my account after the last time I used it over a decade ago.
The impulse is nothing more than a desire to alleviate a longing for the past, or to revisit the intense longing that Facebook made me feel back when it was still new, which is impossible to explain now to anyone who was not in college then, and which was never adequately captured by “voyeurism,” “exhibitionism,” or the other terms people used at the time to explain why it caught fire like it did. I still can conjure, for example, photos on Facebook of the girl I was in love with in 2008 as clearly as I can picture the world’s most famous paintings. I can see one of her standing on a rooftop in a pale pink prom dress, taken the year before we met; one of her wearing my fisherman’s sweater in the keyhole arch at Pfeiffer Beach, which I took; one of her dressed in black, dancing at a party the weekend after we split. These images, which are meaningless for me now, remain etched underneath my eyelids. I wonder what they’d make me feel if I saw them again. Probably nothing. I wonder if they’re still there somewhere. Probably not.
I spend the rest of the flight scrolling through photos of my children on Instagram, looking askance at their dedication to their supposed interest in outer space. Then I read through an email showing me the internal note Zuckerberg had circulated to Meta’s roughly 70,000 employees a week before, when I was with his parents in Menlo Park. He’d attempted to rally the company and address morale in the wake of layoffs and job reassignments.
Within hours, the internal note had been leaked.
Wired
ran with the title, “‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess,” and quoted one semantically challenged employee who described the company’s Applied AI unit as “literally the gulag.” It came in the midst of one of the company’s eternally recurring stints in the pillory.
This one began earlier in the year, with two jury rulings that Meta apps had knowingly or negligently harmed young users. There were thousands of related pending cases, including one in which four states sought penalties potentially equivalent to the company’s entire market cap for allegedly addicting and damaging the mental health of teenagers. (In August, Meta settled with 51 jurisdictions for up to $17.1 billion, admitting no wrongdoing.) Then came a security meltdown, when hackers gained access to high-profile Instagram accounts by getting Meta’s AI customer-support bot to hand over control. Shortly after, Meta suspended its program of recording employees’ keystrokes to train its AI after it sprang a leak and made workers’ private conversations and personal data internally visible. By the time the plane lands, Zuckerberg is being raked in the press again after yet another leak: He’d quietly ordered up a prototype of a prediction markets app (albeit with play money, to start), so that his mentally damaged users can get into gambling, too.
The man is singular, I thought to myself on the ride into Manhattan, there is no getting around it. Who else can build “literal” concentration camps out of employees reassigned to data labeling? Who else manages to embody the vice of online betting the same week Polymarket is celebrated for running a dull, corporate World Cup ad featuring Rick Rubin and beautiful Senegalese models? Who else can take an entire species clearly not meant to be on the internet in the first place and personally nuke its psychiatric equilibrium? It’s incredible. He is
Princeps
. He is The One.
It is, in any case, a disagreeable backdrop to the Hey Meta: AI Glasses Showcase, an invite-only launch event at the Terminal Warehouse on the Hudson River, where the Tunnel nightclub used to be. I’m told there will be many models and influencers in attendance. There will be an interview with Zuckerberg, and “immersive product experiences curated by prominent contemporary artists.” There will be a party DJed by Peggy Gou, and an appearance by Kylie Jenner, whose line of Meta AI sunglasses will be debuted.
At 5pm I have an hour until the event and consider downloading Facebook again, which I should probably do at some point before interviewing Zuckerberg, but put it off. I lie down on the comfy hotel bed and put on the Olympic Studios take of “Bold as Love,” wolf down a complimentary banana and bag of cashews, and play the drums on my belly.
Outside the Terminal Warehouse
it is starting to drizzle through fading sunlight as I stand in line with several people who look dressed for the Kentucky Derby. One man in a bowler hat keeps adjusting a large diamond-studded brooch in the shape of a gecko on his shirt as if he is trying to catch the light and shine it in my eyes. There is a disturbing aspect to the flesh and blood of people who live in Instagram, I think. The skin on their face is wet and their eyes don’t focus correctly, their proportions are irregular. Eventually my credentials are logged into a tablet by a woman who fastens a bracelet to my wrist and welcomes me inside.
To enter the room where Zuckerberg will be interviewed, I make my way past a row of five very tall men dressed in black and holding silver platters of bottled water. In the interview room are three columns of chairs of three rows each, and I take my seat at the back in the middle. While we wait for the interview to begin, the press handler I’d known from Menlo Park says hello and introduces me to a woman seated in front of me, who turns around laboriously.
“This is Vanessa Friedman, as you know chief fashion critic of
The New York Times
,” she says. “Vanessa, this is Jeremy Stern from
Colossus
.”
We shake hands, and Friedman nods and smiles at me with the polite confusion and quiet pain of the Queen being introduced to a plumber. I immediately take a liking to her; her face conveys capability and no character flaws. She seems to know many of the influencers around us and goes back to chatting with them as I plunder the gift bag underneath my seat to try on my complimentary pair of Meta-EssilorLuxottica AI sunglasses.
I’d spent the previous months ignoring the appearance of the flagship Meta Lab store in my hometown of Los Angeles, where shoppers can sample the company’s various AI glasses and virtual reality headsets, take selfies at its hokey art installations, and yell at their poorly behaved dogs in its in-store cafe. It all seemed like another one of Zuckerberg’s directionless projectish things he periodically pursues, like making a phone, launching a cryptocurrency, or building the Metaverse. But I’d recently learned that the glasses were perhaps not as frivolous as they seemed, which is why I accepted an invitation to hear him speak about them.
It is a truism that while Zuckerberg is sovereign within his imperial court—immune to control by shareholders or his board—he does not actually hold the empire’s territory. He did only once, back when Facebook was a desktop site on the open web. But when the smartphone appeared, he lost his ground and never gained it back. The early trauma of having nearly missed the switch to mobile apps—scrambling during the 2012 IPO to rebuild Facebook and its advertising business around a platform shift he didn’t see coming or initially understand—has never left him. Although the Facebook app’s eventual conquest of mobile more or less made Apple’s App Store, the App Store in turn made Facebook. And Zuckerberg does not like being made.
As it does with every mobile app, Apple charges a toll on digital goods sold within each of Meta’s apps. It collects a tax on Meta’s core advertising product, such as when a business “boosts” a post through Instagram. Every update to Meta’s apps must pass Apple’s App Review, which has a history of being arbitrary and capricious. Apple denies other companies’ hardware products the privileged wireless access that makes its own products, like AirPods, seamless. In 2021, in what Ben Thompson describes as “one of the worst antitrust violations in the history of technology,” Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature—which it positioned contra Zuckerberg as a protection of user privacy—crippled the tracking machinery of every mobile ad business that depended on cross-app data
except its own
, costing Meta roughly $10 billion in the first year alone. (Google, which holds the same powers over its Android platform, has wielded them more sparingly than Apple, owing largely to its own advertising business model.)
Many of Zuckerberg’s ventures ever since have often been puzzling to outsiders, or else delightful to those who enjoy any sign that he’s jumped the shark as a technologist. Zuckerberg himself describes them as part of Meta’s DNA not as a mere social media service, but as a full-stack deep technology company. These ventures can also be understood, however, as attempted jailbreaks from Apple and other competitors, a determination to regain and hold his territory.
Thus over the last 15 years, Zuckerberg explored building a Facebook Phone. He tried to replace the Android home screen with Facebook Home. He launched Internet.org and its Free Basics service to deliver Facebook through carrier deals in India and other markets where Apple barely existed. He tried building Libra (renamed Diem), a cryptocurrency, to facilitate payments. He bought Oculus VR in the hope that virtual reality headsets would replace the smartphone the way smartphones replaced personal computers. Each has been, at least in part, a tunnel Zuckerberg dug to escape the prison of his competitors. To varying degrees, each collapsed.
“One of my things for the next 10 or 15 years is I just want to make sure we can build the fundamental technology that we’re going to be building social experiences on,” he told Jensen Huang at a conference in 2024, in the course of explaining his investment in building foundational AI models. “There have just been too many things that I’ve tried to build and then have just been told, ‘Nah, you can’t really build that,’ by the platform provider. At some level, I’m just like, ‘Nah. Fuck that.’”
No pasarán
! From his fetters in the meantime, Zuckerberg only achieved his species-warping goal of networking billions of human beings in real time through social media by age 30. By 32, he built the most unstoppable entertainment and advertising business in history. By 42, his products are used by one out of every 2.3 people currently breathing, more than the total number of humans that existed in 1965. Annual revenue runs well above $200 billion, and Meta’s capital expenditure this year will exceed the military budget of every country on Earth, save the U.S., China, and Russia. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp
each
have more monthly active users than the number of living adherents to Christianity. Pity the empire held from a prison, the largest ever assembled by a man bound.
No matter. This is how it is for him; there is no stopping. He is not like the others of his vintage, who all at some point abdicate, or sell, or are overthrown, or appoint a regent to face the music instead, and recede into varying types of billionaire afterlife. It is the Portuguese model of empire: After winning half the world, you return home, dabble gentlemanly in philanthropy and physics, build your villa, and fuck the servants.
Not for him. Two hundred years of peace will not come for free; you have to do certain things. You wake up, you hit people, you pay them to hit you. Then it’s another subpoena, another lawsuit. The president whose election is your fault is calling. Witness testimony. Congressional hearing. The president whose election isn’t your fault demands you censor the opposition or else there will be new taxes, new investigations. Product review until 3am. Facebook is causing genocide in the Third World. Instagram is responsible for teen suicide. There’s another whistleblower with a book deal. Here comes another Aaron Sorkin movie. You’re behind on AI. No one respects social media or digital advertising. It isn’t rocket ships. It isn’t brain chips or cool cars. The sun still sets on too much of the map, and the map is a prison. Testify. Pay the settlement. Build “personal superintelligence.” Put it in the apps. Put it in sunglasses.
This is my impression, at any rate, as he takes the stage in the Terminal Warehouse in a pair of optical Meta AI glasses, and sits with his characteristic ramrod posture on the edge of his seat. As the conversation unfolds, I notice he must have overcome his trancelike silences and nervous sweating at some point, although he retains other eccentricities. For example, when he is facing his interlocutor, he often does so with his head swiveled 10 degrees, as if someone is tugging at the back of his collar and he is trying to pay it attention without taking his eyes off his questioner.
Prompted by the interviewer, Zuckerberg discusses the glasses. He believes they are the vindication of his bet dating back to 2014, when he acquired Oculus for $2 billion and began his work in virtual and augmented reality, a division of the company that convinced him to rename the whole thing from Facebook to Meta by 2021, and which to date has burned through approximately $90 billion. The Metaverse as such was a collapsed tunnel, but Zuckerberg is convinced that the glasses are one of the payoffs. They are “the ideal form factor” for an AI that can “see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day,” and also overlay information on the world and conduct “agentic live sessions” from ambient context. For example, he says, he recently wore them while baking with his daughter and the glasses, without being asked, told him he was botching the recipe.
The frames of the standard pair, he explains, have a capture camera in the front frame and speakers in each arm above and in front of the wearer’s ear canal, where audio can be piped in at high volume while remaining near-silent to the outside world. There are two microphones in each arm and one seated near the nose pads, closest to the wearer’s mouth, where the clarity of the audio it picks up is so high that you can, he offers, take business calls on a jet ski. The churched-up Display model also has a screen embedded in the right lens, which serves as a tiny projector within the glass, bending light into one eye only, so that the user can choose whether to glance at text messages, directions, or real-time translation captions. The miniaturized light engine and geometric waveguide within the frame connect via Bluetooth to the smartphone in your pocket, from which the Meta AI app relays the agentic intelligence.
Zuckerberg mentions the importance of “empowering” individuals six times in the 45-minute interview, which you can tell he really believes—AI glasses really will give people superhuman vision, hearing, memory, and cognition, he deems—without appearing to anticipate or perhaps care that they will
of course
soon come to be known among skeptics as “pervert glasses,” and associated, like Facebook and Instagram before them, with empowering individuals to commit random acts of harassment. Although the interview continues on through various buzzword questions about taste, instinct, superintelligence, and unemployment, Zuckerberg does make the central point he came here to proselytize.
“You kind of have this trajectory over time,” he explains, “where computing gets to be more natural and more integrated in our lives. And glasses just give you the opportunity to interact with technology but remain present with the people around you, which I think is a really fundamentally important thing that obviously
phones don’t do
. When you interact with your phone, you’re kind of interacting with this small rectangle. It pulls you away from the world around you. [But] you want to have technology be able to effectively fully integrate with the world around you.”
It is a brilliant if puckish bit of logic. That glowing rectangle you spend your life craning at in vacant prayer? Perhaps
that
is what’s making you and your children anxious and depressed, he seems to be suggesting. Maybe
that
is why you no longer have sex or sleep soundly, and can’t finish a movie or read a whole book anymore. Your prison is not my apps; it is your phone, which is my prison, too. It is time we relearn to live without it, together. It won’t go anywhere; it’ll just stay in your pocket, or perhaps at home, where you can leave behind the harm it’s done. Every positive good it provides will live instead in your EssilorLuxottica glasses, which unlike handheld LED heroin rectangles are beautiful and cool, like Kylie Jenner. Besides, he says, they are “great glasses first… the technology is secondary. The fashion and the wearing of it is actually primary.” “There are almost two billion people in the world who wear optical glasses already,” he notes, “and billions more wear sunglasses.”
The interview fittingly concludes with a question about why Zuckerberg, the planet’s sixth richest person, doesn’t just stop. “That is something Priscilla asks me a lot, especially when stuff is hard,” he says, but that he isn’t wired to stop. He illustrates the point rather nicely by digressing somewhat unprovoked into an exposition of cattle genetics, which he’s studied in service of husbanding high-quality beef on his ranch in Hawaii, where he is harvesting macadamia trees and roasting nuts for the cows’ caloric density and brewing beer to induce their appetite. “I’m never going to stop,” he says, by way of getting back to the question. “I can get obsessive.”
The next day, the press handler who’s been shepherding me asks where I’d gone after the interview finished at the Terminal Warehouse; she couldn’t find me when Zuckerberg materialized again later in the evening with Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet, and speeches were given that it should not have been physically possible for me to have missed, but of which I had no memory. I think I got lost in something called the Cherry Galaxy Room, I tell her, where I’d lost track of time asking my complimentary AI glasses to explain this immersive product experience curated by prominent contemporary artists, and for icebreakers to use on Vanessa Friedman, who I never saw again.
Back in Menlo Park
, Zuckerberg’s obsessiveness is on display again in a conference room, where I’m shown a number of AI products and other gestating things. These include the Display model of the glasses, which I use to send a WhatsApp message and order Starbucks while a woman from the company’s Wearables division gets down on both knees and speaks to me in Japanese, which the glasses translate via the live captions feature. There is also Muse (it was then codenamed Hatch), a personal AI agent that can connect to your apps, email, security cameras, and other devices, and do things while you’re asleep or otherwise occupied, like fill out paperwork, resolve conflicts on your calendar, remind your son to take out the trash, or get your spouse an anniversary gift. I’m also shown some other things I’m forbidden to write about, though they strike me as impressive and cool. I try to imagine Zuckerberg pulling them out of an envelope or his coin pocket on a stage to fawning gasps and rapturous applause.
No matter how such products turn out, it isn’t an easy thing to picture. Part of it is that, unlike Steve Jobs, he doesn’t have the magic. The other part, according to Zuckerberg’s loud and persistent detractors, is that it’s been 20 years since he actually invented a good product. In their telling, everything since Facebook has either flopped or, if it worked, was merely copied or bought. There has been no burst of genius like the iPhone, no masterpiece of modern art like tweezing a rocket from the sky with giant metal chopsticks. With Zuckerberg, there is no flair. Which helps to explain why every few years, despite the plodding survival and expansion of his empire, Zuckerberg is pronounced dead.
There was the mobile crisis following the IPO in 2012, when Facebook was declared an overvalued website whose audience had moved to a platform it couldn’t monetize, and Zuckerberg was considered “in over his hoodie,” too immature to run a public company. There was the mass exodus of teens to Tumblr and then Snapchat between 2013–2017, leaving Facebook to die as “the next MySpace” after Snapchat rejected a $3 billion acquisition offer, and after Zuckerberg was mocked as overpaying in a panic for Instagram and WhatsApp. There was the political crisis of 2017–2020, when Facebook “broke democracy,” the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued it for allegedly maintaining an illegal monopoly, and the company suffered what was then the biggest one-day loss—$120 billion—in market history. Then there was the most recent period, between 2022–2025: Users decamped for the algorithmically superior TikTok, Apple’s ATT threatened to obliterate Meta’s mobile ad business, Zuckerberg lit tens of billions of dollars on fire in pursuit of the Metaverse, and promised to do the same on an even bigger scale with AI.
Yet after every period, Zuckerberg somehow managed not only to survive, but to emerge with his position strengthened, having conquered more than he’d previously held. By the end of 2013, he’d built one of the two most profitable mobile ad businesses in the world. By the end of 2017, he’d crushed Snapchat by copying its killer innovation with Instagram Stories. By the end of 2020, the widely predicted death of Facebook was revealed as a fantasy, as the number of daily active users had only grown during each quarter of political scandal, advertisers never left, and Facebook paid the FTC a $5 billion privacy settlement. By the end of 2025, he’d survived the TikTok threat by cloning it with Reels, circumvented Apple’s ATT by rebuilding ad targeting with large AI models, beat the FTC’s attempt to break up the company (which the agency has appealed), and saved cash by weathering mass layoffs. When Meta hit a record market cap of nearly $2 trillion, he’d done it while refusing investor demands to cut spending on his Reality Labs division, where the Metaverse lived.
The serial underestimation of Zuckerberg as too vulnerable, derivative, or incompetent; of the durability of his core constituencies and sources of advantage; of the undislodgable nature of his personal power; of his grinding unsentimentality about the past; of his desperation to survive; and of his attritional willingness to absorb ridicule and retaliation, is not only an equally apt description of his Roman spirit animal. It is also, perhaps, a better way to understand his attempts to win AI.
ILLUSTRATION BY JR DUENNWELLER
Now that he’s behind Anthropic and OpenAI
, it is easy to forget that prior to 2024, Zuckerberg had been hovering around the frontier of AI for over a decade. Dating back to 2006, Facebook had been a leader in machine learning, which it used to power its News Feed, targeted ads, and face recognition. By 2013, after trying and failing to acquire DeepMind (which Google bought instead), Zuckerberg recruited the future Turing laureate and legendary AI researcher Yann LeCun to start Facebook AI Research (FAIR), which over the next 11 years became one of the top corporate research labs in the world. Among other things, FAIR produced influential work in computer vision, speech, and self-supervised learning, as well as PyTorch, one of the principal deep learning frameworks used to build modern AI.
By 2024, Meta’s Llama 3.1 model performed about as well as the latest models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google; unlike its competitors, Llama was “open-weight” (meaning the underlying files were free for the world to download and modify). By March 2025, Llama had been downloaded over a billion times, creating a massive developer ecosystem. For that precious, fleeting moment, Zuckerberg had seemed to create something more valuable than a chatbot: the Linux of AI, as he put it in a manifesto, the underlying platform on which everyone else would build, and which he, crucially, controlled. It was looking like a tunnel that could hold.
Then it seemed, to Zuckerberg at least, to collapse. The release of Llama 4 in April 2025 was met with great mockery as an overhyped and underperforming model that simply gamed the various benchmarks used to grade a model’s capabilities, which obscured some of the real technical advances it had made. Given the manic-depressive nature of these things—every major AI lab but one is “behind” the frontier at all times, and which lab is “winning” changes every three-to-six months—the release of Llama 4 was more of a large but reversible setback than some sort of catastrophic event. If Zuckerberg had taken it on the chin and pursued Llama 5, it is unlikely that users, investors, or employees would have revolted.
The problem was that by 2025, it had become clear to Zuckerberg that in AI, there are compounding advantages to having a track record of winning in the past, meaning that “not currently winning” is in fact, in any particular quarter, a potentially irreversible catastrophe. Among other reasons, AI labs use their most recent model to train the next one, and Zuckerberg’s latest model wasn’t good enough. What’s more, FAIR had been only one of a number of major divisions within the company for the previous 12 years, including while Zuckerberg was occupied with the Metaverse. Yet it seemed clear to him by now that AI was not just one of many potential tunnels; it was an event horizon which, if he missed it the way he nearly missed the switch to mobile and the threat from TikTok, might cause his empire to slowly, if very slowly, go to nothingness.
Thus in his first board meeting after the release of Llama 4, he announced a plan of regime change. The 11 weeks that followed demonstrated the sheer power of his position as the undeposable head of a galactically resource-rich empire. He subsumed FAIR into a new organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), and reset the market on compensation for top AI recruits to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars per head. He paid $14.3 billion for a stake in Scale AI and installed its founder, Alexandr Wang, as Meta’s head of AI. He recruited ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao, former GitHub chief Nat Friedman, Safe Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Gross, and picked off dozens of other defectors from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. He cut hundreds of employees from the older organizations, and LeCun soon left. Within one quarter, MSL was up and running.
Less than three months after the release of Llama 4, in other words, Zuckerberg had dumped the previous decade-plus of his AI people and strategy, recruited new leadership, new chief scientists, and new core researchers, and announced a new capital expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars. By April 2026, MSL released its first closed-weight model, Muse Spark, and deployed it through Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and the Meta AI app, which powers the glasses. It was greeted as the cautious return of Zuckerberg to AI, but not yet to the frontier.
By the time I received the demos in June, there was already a surfeit of predictions that all this would at last—
finally!
—be the end of him. It was typical of his arrogance to think he could simply copy the real AI labs, just as it was his habit to try and buy his way to victory. He doesn’t understand that AI research is not like social media or product development; it is science, which is to say bottom-up, and he will fail like he did with FAIR in his attempts to micromanage his subordinates into reaching the frontier, or to use money, pressure, and punishing timetables to solve research problems he doesn’t have the wherewithal to solve. He doesn’t understand that his subordinates are not able to prevent him from making bad decisions, and given how few training runs even Meta can afford, one wrong decision is all it takes to fall behind the frontier for good. He doesn’t understand that AI will not commoditize, and that because Meta has never had the best model, it therefore never will. He doesn’t understand that AI
will
commoditize, and therefore will be like the First World War, in which he will expend untold treasure and blood without ever gaining an advantage. Heads, his rivals win; tails, he loses.
From this vantagepoint, it doesn’t matter that since June, Muse Spark has overtaken Google’s Gemini, vaulting Meta back to the frontier pack. It matters little that Muse, now released, was received somewhat ecstatically as perhaps the best consumer AI agent on the market, or that expectations are increasingly giddy for Watermelon, the forthcoming model. It doesn’t matter that Zuckerberg is taking on billions in new debt and spending up to $145 billion this year, including on four data centers of a gigawatt or more, one of which is planned to scale to five. It matters even less that he positioned Meta in a recent manifesto, “The Future Is For Everyone,” as more open, optimistic, and empowering of ordinary people than its relentlessly apocalyptic competitors. He’s either placed the wrong bet, and is reliving the Metaverse; or he is too late, and he’s already lost.
Unsure of my own ability to evaluate such things, I leave Meta HQ and spend another few days in Palo Alto and San Francisco ahead of my interview with Zuckerberg, seeking out a number of MSL’s competitors and investors who agree to speak to me on background. Many of them take pleasure in what they describe as the organizational “mess” of MSL, in the people there allegedly being motivated more by money than by true belief, and in Zuckerberg as a maker of boredom-relief apps and targeted advertising, not of godlike intelligence or the singularity.
I’m inclined toward sympathy with much of what they say, though I am also irritated and want to shove them in a locker. While I am not the first to chafe at their combination of messianism, contempt for ordinary consumers, and denial that they, too, are rapacious capitalists, I am apparently the first to ask them to steelman the outcome in which Zuckerberg, in light of his long history, survives and expands. Which turns out to be simple:
AI is not, in fact, God. Instead, it does math and solves a limited set of problems humans face, and is otherwise simply useful and cool. Anthropic, and to a lesser extent OpenAI, have trouble ever accepting this fact. Zuckerberg does not. He has not spent a decade comparing his company to the Manhattan Project, and thus he is not above pushing the frontier of AI to help people book airline tickets, make dinner reservations, and edit photos. He will use it to drive down the cost of serving his users to zero, and to drive up his revenue by improving ads. He will use cash from the ad business—and his ownership of data centers, chips, and other infrastructure that Anthropic and OpenAI have to pay to rent—to undercut them on price. The potential install base for his AI is 3.6 billion people, who don’t care whether a given model is six months behind the frontier.
If AI commoditizes, then Anthropic and OpenAI go to zero, and value accrues instead at the complements Meta already dominates, like distribution, attention, personalization, and commerce. If it doesn’t commoditize, then at least he is not his competitors’ prisoner the way he’s been with Apple, and all he has to do is remain within six months of the frontier, which he’s already close to. Heads, he wins; tails, he wins.
Do you think there’s a chance that this is what happens? I ask. “Yes,” is how I’d paraphrase their answers. Do you think this is his wager? “Probably.” Would you be willing to bet that he fails? “Probably not.” When do you think we’ll know which way it breaks? Very gradually, then all at once.
“I’ll be honest, I used to work [at Meta],” a researcher at a competing lab tells me. “They have lots of problems, and there are so, so many ways it could go haywire. But Mark is the fucking Terminator. He’s actually not an asshole, which is interesting. He’s not a miserable fuck. But his source of advantage is he’s never happy. He just doesn’t fucking stop.”
“The world thinks that people out here [in tech and AI] are pretty soy or whatever. But you actually have to be pretty fucking tough and aggressive, just in a classic masculine sort of way,” he says. “And Mark’s still the alpha of that. I am not hoping they get to a place where we compete with him.”
The doorbell rings at my home
in Los Angeles, where I await the call to return to Palo Alto; after the summer’s spell of bad press, my interview with Zuckerberg’s been rescheduled. I open the door to find Zhenya, who never lets you know when to expect him. He kisses me on both cheeks, declines to join me for a drink, hands me my package, and leaves.
When I lived in St. Petersburg in 2009, I became close friends with Zhenya, who is probably lying when he claims to be under six-foot-eight (and whose name I’ve changed in deference to his paranoia). A dozen years later, he left Russia to avoid military conscription and reinvented himself in Los Angeles as a sort of Hollywood fixer, which at the time I took as some sort of joke. But Zhenya has exceeded every favor I’ve since asked of him, of which there have only been three. Once I asked for a ticket to the premiere of
Barbie
and received two. Once I asked for Carmelo Anthony’s email and received his phone number. And once, in June, I asked if he could get me into an early cut of
The Social Reckoning
, Aaron Sorkin’s second movie about Zuckerberg, which doesn’t appear in theaters until October.
Zhenya couldn’t get me into an early screening, he said, but he could get his hands on the script. If I wanted to read it, however, I’d have to do so in person, then hand it back to him to shred. It was typical of my American naivete, he said, when I insisted that Zuckerberg does not in fact control every encrypted messaging service in the world, and he could therefore just text me the PDF. But there is no arguing with Zhenya’s paranoia or testing the limits of his generosity. Thus I returned to my kitchen to read the script and rewatch
The Social Network
, Sorkin’s first movie about Zuckerberg.
When it came out in 2010, everyone at Facebook rented a theater to watch it together with Zuckerberg, who was overwhelmed and afraid. He was 26 years old, and the creators of
The West Wing
and
Se7en
had teamed up to make a movie about him scored by Nine Inch Nails and based on a book which told the story of Facebook’s founding from the perspective of Eduardo Saverin, its most aggrieved co-founder, who was squeezed out in 2005. What was worse, the reviews were really
good.
Although the film inspired a generation of undergraduates to drop out and join or start tech companies, Zuckerberg still refers to
The Social Network
as “that stupid movie.” While a certain amount of artistic license was expected, he feels, certain sins were unforgivable. The movie’s central conceit is that Zuckerberg started Facebook not because he “loves building things,” but out of class resentment, social exclusion, and romantic rejection. The film is bookended by Erica Albright, the girl who dumps him and won’t take him back; in between, he is spurned by the Harvard WASP clubs he tries to join. Thus he must start Facebook in order to get in with, or back at, her and them.
In real life, there was no Erica Albright; by the time Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004, he was already dating Priscilla Chan, whom he married. In reality, he wasn’t rejected by the WASPs because he never tried to join one of their social clubs; he was a popular, beer-guzzling member of Alpha Epsilon Pi, the Jewish fraternity. According to the available evidence, he and his co-founders built Facebook because he was in the habit of serially building new websites and social networks, and clearly had no idea where this one was going.
In a 2010 interview with
New York
magazine, Sorkin acknowledged that his loyalty was to storytelling rather than facts. Sixteen years later, however, the movie reads as a keenly aware and prophetic bit of projection. The class resentment that pervades the film is not Zuckerberg’s but Sorkin’s, who seemed brilliantly to understand even as early as 2010 that social media was in the beginning stages of annihilating the traditional media on which his career is built, and which therefore must have been motivated by a venal loser.
The Social Network
survives not only as an excellent piece of fiction, but as the ultimate collision of the theater kid and the tech bro at a hinge moment in American cultural history: the former taking revenge on the latter’s newfound wealth and power by forever ascribing to it, in the minds of the public, the root motive of social and sexual humiliation.
The Social Network
survives not only as an excellent piece of fiction, but as the ultimate collision of the theater kid and the tech bro at a hinge moment in American cultural history.
The reason that Zuckerberg has never been able to live the movie down is because it was only the beginning of a long slide into true popular ignominy. The same year the film came out, he had his “Nixon moment” during an on-stage interview with Kara Swisher, in which Zuckerberg—who was prone to public speaking-induced anxiety—sweated through his hoodie and was incoherent. By 2011, Facebook was first credited for the Arab Spring, then blamed for its violent suppression. In 2012, Republicans complained that Facebook aided the reelection of Barack Obama, whose campaign bragged openly about its deft use of the platform’s targeted advertising.
In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, the nascent civil war between the Democratic Party’s three major factions—the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, and
The New York Times
—was resolved by mutual agreement to scapegoat not Obama for creating Trump, nor Clinton for running an entitled and uncharismatic campaign, nor the
Times
for breathlessly covering Clinton’s email controversy, but Zuckerberg, for allowing “disinformation” and “Russian interference” to brainwash voters. As if such horrors hadn’t previously been possible, and as if no other communications system could have been used instead if Facebook and WhatsApp hadn’t existed, he was duly accused after 2016 of failing to prevent his apps from being used to foment genocides, ethnic cleansings, and sectarian riots in India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Kenya.
In 2020, Republicans blamed “Zuckerbucks” ($400 million in donations made by Zuckerberg and Chan to election administrators to assist pandemic-era voting) for the election of Joe Biden. In 2021, Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by insisting on the First Amendment rights of vaccine-skeptical users (which he later retracted), while White House officials publicly threatened antitrust suits and Section 230 reform if Zuckerberg did not comply with demands to censor several other categories of pandemic and election-related “misinformation,” including humor and satire (which they did not retract). After Zuckerberg finally caved to a number of the Biden administration’s censorship demands, he was blamed by Republicans for suppressing information about the vaccine and the lab leak theory of COVID-19, and for keeping Trump out of power. After Trump’s reelection in 2024 made nonsense of the claim from eight years earlier that a man like that could never have won without Facebook-facilitated “lies,” Meta fought, lost, and settled a bipartisan wave of suits charging it with deliberate harm to teenage users, culminating in last month’s $17 billion settlement.
Perhaps the apogee of Zuckerberg Derangement Syndrome was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, still remembered by millions of people as perhaps the founding crime of the digital era. The story went that a knowing or at least negligent Zuckerberg allowed a British political consulting firm to “harvest” the private data of 87 million unwitting Facebook users and feed it into a psychographic tool that was used to brainwash Americans into electing Trump and Britons into voting for Brexit. The story resulted in two days of Congressional hearings, over a year of nonstop news coverage, the $5 billion FTC fine, and a Netflix documentary, despite the fact that it was almost entirely bullshit.
In reality, a Cambridge academic called Aleksandr Kogan had gathered data through a personality quiz taken by fewer than 300,000 Facebook users via the same Application Programming Interface (API) which the Obama campaign used in 2012, and which was an open feature on the platform for years. By handing the data over to Cambridge Analytica, Kogan had violated Facebook’s terms. But the data itself was mainly dross, consisting of names, birthdays, current cities, and page likes, which together produced a “psychographic weapon” that ended up predicting voter behavior more poorly than the Republican National Committee’s voter file. The definitive investigation into the scandal—the largest ever undertaken by a data-protection authority—was concluded in October 2020 by the British government’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which raided Cambridge Analytica’s offices and examined its servers. Its report concluded that the firm’s data had been mostly commercially available and primarily used by the consulting firm as a fabulist marketing device. Regardless, the ICO concluded, the data had not actually been used in the Brexit referendum. At that point—one month before the 2020 US election—the scandal gradually disappeared from the American news media, too.
None of which is to say that Zuckerberg has not committed his own unforgivable sins over the last two decades. Early on, he took information users designated as private and made it public without warning or consent; shared user data with advertisers after claiming he didn’t; and granted corporate partners access to data he claimed they couldn’t see. The youthful glee he took in Facebook’s systematic destruction of the business models of legacy news media and other information gatekeepers showed little appreciation for the consequences of such a dramatic social revolution. Facebook likewise did enter markets, like Myanmar, where both users and the company were completely unprepared to handle the newfound political power of social media.
A younger Zuckerberg demeaned himself, moreover, when he tried for years to break back into the Chinese market after being shut out in 2009, including by staging a copy of Xi Jinping’s book on his desk, having himself photographed jogging through Tiananmen Square, and reportedly asking the Chinese president to name his unborn child (which Facebook denied). Under pressure from radicalized employees and government officials after 2016, he made a political sacrifice out of Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, and for a time betrayed his own foundational commitment to free speech. Much of the content on Facebook and Instagram really is addictive slop, and Zuckerberg can often display a frustrating refusal to acknowledge that the time a user spends on social media is not by definition a reflection of the “value” they are deriving from it.
Which in turn helps explain the August settlement. TikTok and YouTube boast more teenage users than Instagram, in fact, and Snap has far more than Facebook. Yet these platforms, which are likewise awash in addictive slop, face a fraction of the litigation claiming harm to children. If Zuckerberg wanted to use regulatory capture to lock his competitors out of their core demographic while consolidating a hold over his own, he could presumably lobby the government and publicly favor a nationwide ban across all social media of under-18 users, who in any case are less valuable to Meta’s ad machine than to its competitors. Yet such a canny business decision would require him to concede the one point we all demand from him, but which in his veins he does not believe is true: that social media is bad for children. Thus he refuses, and concludes the settlement. Thus are the sacrifices he makes on the altar of an authority higher than his own, but which appease no mortals.
And thus the more salient question about Zuckerberg than his obvious defects, which is why he alone has managed to remain the most persistent scapegoat of the 21st century. Most children, after all, are on other people’s social media apps. Meta is not exactly alone in its collection and use of rivers of data (which is what computers are designed to spew), and it is hardly shy about the fact that Facebook and Instagram are platforms for sharing information in public. During periods of government pressure to suppress speech, Zuckerberg held out far longer than Twitter and Google. Apple and Tesla actually comply with and profit from the Chinese Communist dictates that Facebook only explored a willingness to accept. Everyone knows that lies, envy, and mass murder existed and proliferated throughout humanity before Mark Zuckerberg, just as they existed before the internet, television, radio, the telegraph, and the postal system.
Yet perhaps it is that simple, intolerable fact—that new technologies are always being invented; what remains broken is
us
—which requires a scapegoat. And who could ask for a better one than him? He is, for millions of people, a hideous mirror of both modern technological capitalism, and the resistance of history and human nature to perfectibility by it. He is seen at once as shrewd and naive, calculating and lucky, too powerful and too craven. Unlike the Boomers and Gen X, he is the only trillion-dollar founder of his generation, and Millennials are cringe. He is Jewish and uncool, yet impervious to humiliation. He is, in one man, the personification of responsibility for alt-right populism; leftwing authoritarianism; the death of journalism; polarization; political propaganda; political censorship; the dangers of free speech; human rights violations; teenage depression; body dysmorphia; and male loneliness. He is an emperor for life. He is, in a word, an easy mark.
In the script of
The Social Reckoning
(potential spoilers ahead), Sorkin again bookends the film with an invented female character. In reality, the whistleblower behind Sorkin’s source material—Frances Haugen—had a friend who was radicalized by conspiracy theories on “online forums,” which motivated Haugen to take a role policing “misinformation” on social media, which led her to a job at Facebook. In the film, however, the friend is a progressive woman radicalized
by
Facebook, an injustice which Haugen—already employed there—must bring to light. In the opening scene, the friend is drunk on a highway and hurls racist insults at two police officers who pull over to check on her, which she records on her phone for clicks. During the course of the movie, we learn that Zuckerberg personally manipulated Facebook’s algorithms to bait progressives like her with racist outrage content, because it’s good for business.
In the climactic scene—perhaps the choicest in all of Sorkinalia—we meet her again. She is trampling a Black police officer at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
ILLUSTRATION BY JR DUENNWELLER
“
I think for some of them
,
it’s like a trauma
,” he tells me, when asked how he experiences the canonical moments in his life not as public artifacts, but as his own memories. “It’s imprinted. It’s not just this subtle thing.”
“But in terms of how you reflect on them,” he says, “I think part of what keeps memories alive is revisiting them. Because these are important moments in [the company’s] history, they just come up a bunch. I think there are probably more subtly important things that happened in our history that just weren’t fitting for stories. And those have probably been more forgotten over time, because you just don’t talk about them.”
He’d entered through the back door of his living room in Palo Alto, where I was waiting on a couch, and sat again on the edge of his seat with a poker-straight back. It’s our second conversation here but the first on the record, and the fourth time I’ve seen him by now. Yet the surprise of it hasn’t worn off. He is in person, as I was repeatedly told by his longtime colleagues, quite different than he is on camera. His eyes are crow-footed and more crystalline than they look in pictures, and my first thought is to recall that he is red-green colorblind (blue is the color he sees best, hence the one he chose for Facebook). He is less awkward than I would’ve thought, but also harder to follow. He is energetic and kind and emotionally carapaced. It all adds up in him to charisma of a sort, the kind of quietly implacable faith that is both admirable and maddening in the harassed but undoubting believer. When goaded into reflection, he appears to try earnestly to turn off his company brain, and to file down the calluses built up over 20 years. Yet he can’t, quite. You can almost see him turning words over in his mind to make sure they will also work for his corporate mission, or that they won’t let down his people by embarrassing them.
“Early on, whenever I [communicated in public], people were like, oh, you’re super robotic or whatever. So I’m like, all right. I hate this. This sucks. Then I got really insecure about it,” he says. “And it wasn’t super critical, at least at the time, for me to get right… But [acting as a public figure] was either a no positive feedback or even a negative feedback cycle for me. What I learned is, I don’t need to do that, and when I do, it’s not super helpful. So whatever, I’m just going to keep my head down.”
Because the company was profitable early and has always been under his complete control, he explains, he could afford his natural instinct to tune out external criticism, and focus instead on “this pretty deep need I have for internal cohesion.” “A lot of people probably care about public perception more than I do,” he says, “but I probably care about team cohesion more than most other people do, which means that weighs on me more. So at times when that’s not as strong, it probably stresses me out more… My main tool in the world is sitting down, building a team, and methodically improving something over a long period of time. It’s not a very sexy process. But also fundamentally, because of that architecture, where I don’t need to raise money, I don’t have to convince a lot of [other] people along the way.”
He contrasts it with Sam Altman and Elon Musk, whose companies were both capital-intensive and unprofitable early, and thus for a time had to be memed into life. “Now, the question is, how much did that situation turn them into what they are, versus how much did it just select for them?” he ponders. “I think there’s probably both some feedback loop where doing it built their confidence and built their skills at [being public figures], but they also had some fundamental skill at being able to do it.” “They probably also like it more,” he continues. “I think some people have that deep need to be liked externally by people they don’t know, and I don’t really have that. Maybe that’s a disadvantage, because I think to some degree you want that. It probably actually does matter what people who don’t know you think. But I think to some degree, doing it is so hard that you only really go out of your way to do it at an excellent level if there’s some part of your psychology that needs it. I don’t need that, and they may.”
I note that Musk is not particularly good at speaking in public, but that he is fully himself, which makes him free in a way Zuckerberg is not. All of Musk’s bottomless flaws are right there on the surface for everyone to see, which is why millions of people hate his guts, and also why millions of people get to feel like personal stakeholders in his dreams. Whereas Zuckerberg is an easier mark, Musk’s lack of concealment paradoxically makes him harder to hit. It somehow makes sense that Musk is the man who builds rocket ships to escape Earth, whereas there has always been something dissonant in Zuckerberg as the man who connected billions of individuals in a web of their own self-expression.
“I think there is some dynamic which is, who are you building in service of?” he says. “For me, I’m trying to build things for pretty much every person in the world. So there’s a degree of humility and care, where if you’re trying to serve all these people, I don’t want to just be dismissive of half their views. So unless I feel like something is incredibly important to communicate, it’s not going to actually be aligned with the interests of what I’m trying to do to alienate a bunch of people. Whereas I think for Elon, or some of these other folks who have either a smaller set of people that they’re serving, or if you’re just building a core technology, then it just doesn’t matter as much what he says.”
When asked about the tsunami of hatred that crested in 2016 and is yet to recede, he draws four concentric circles. First is a larger animosity toward Silicon Valley and tech billionaires, which were fair game, he says, for questions about giving back to society more than they take. Second is the refusal of elite political coalitions to look inward after election losses, and to instead blame a different industry for their defeat. Third is the inherent nature of social media in particular, which by definition invites questions about privacy and sharing information in public. Fourth is what he wishes he’d handled differently.
“It was a situation unlike anything I’d ever seen before, so I didn’t quite know how to analyze it,” he says. “But I think the reality is that this was more of a political issue than it was a corporate issue, and the physics of it were different. The more we took responsibility, the more people felt like, ‘Oh, we can just blame them for stuff and they’ll accept the blame.’ I think over time, we just sort of realized that no, we actually just need to fight back on this. And that’s not going to necessarily be popular, because these are issues that matter. If someone’s having a challenge using your service, my first instinct is, okay, how can we help them? Not, ‘How do we argue that they should take some more responsibility themselves?’ But I think in society today, a little bit more of that’s required.”
“If it wants to make life difficult for a person or company, it can,” he says, when asked about government pressure during and after 2020. “In theory, you want to think that the branches of government are impartial… But I think in practice, you could also see situations where the White House tells you that they want stuff to be censored, and then you push back, and that’s your right, because you have the First Amendment in the United States, so we should have the protection to do that. But then all of a sudden you get all these investigations from all these different parts of the government. And it’s like, okay, this isn’t right.”
“I feel like it’s our responsibility to do what we think is right and to incur certain pain in the near term. But it’s a tricky balance, because I think in general we’re patriotic, and my default position is we want to have a positive relationship with whoever is the government of the United States, because we’re an American company and we want America to do well. I guess when I was getting started, I didn’t think a major part of what we were going to have to do is fight against the government. It’s not a thing that I want to spend our energy doing, or even think should be super productive. I’m here to build things and shape the world in that way, not be an activist against our government. But I guess you just get into situations where that’s sort of inevitable, or you have to do some amount of that.”
I can tell the interviews are wearing on him; he doesn’t like doing this. He pauses every so often to express doubt that he’s explaining something as well as he’d like to. He at times seems frustrated that the world doesn’t just take his passion for “building things” and “empowering people” at face value, but also vaguely aware that it can’t. He has a sense of humor about all the viral memes from the last 10 years, in which images of him simply sitting, speaking, ambulating, or sipping water become the basis of jokes and conspiracy theories that he is secretly a humanoid or lizard person; and yet there is something in his good cheer about it that fills one with pity. I wonder if it’s even possible for a man in his position to have real friends. I wonder why he’s allowed me to intrude and inspect him like this. Does he care at this point to be understood? Does he think now about things like “legacy,” with several decades in power potentially still ahead of him? I despair of getting a raw answer, and ask instead, in an oblique sort of way, about history.
“I think in some ways, he was seen as sort of brutal,” he says of Augustus. “But to me, the most important contribution he made was basically teaching society that you didn’t have to always be at war. Before Augustus, the definition of peace was the temporary period of time during which your enemies were subdued before you had to defeat them again. Maybe there is some truth to that in the grand scheme of things. But he had to rewire the economy to, instead of having this massive standing army, to convince people that they could build things, and that having this trade-based economy rather than a pillage-based economy was going to be a positive-sum thing. And it worked to some degree.”
“They did also need to keep on expanding the empire,” he qualifies, with due understatement; Augustus having also established peace through a monopoly on force and an end to political liberty. “All these things sort of worked as a theory, but then with other rulers down the line, they weren’t as committed to it, or it wasn’t fully sustainable. But I thought that was a very important contribution. It’s partially why the Augustus thing resonates with me a lot. It’s this evolution where you’re not physically endangering people. There’s this set of rights that everyone has, but you can have this intellectual sparring and debate that pushes the world forward in a way that is much more net positive without a lot of the downsides, where the people are not literally going to war and killing each other.”
“It’s interesting looking back at history,” he concludes, “because it seems like that would have just been an obvious thing that people understood all along. But no, it wasn’t. It kind of took this act of leadership and courage, someone who everyone thought was probably wrong. But he was like, no. We should do this.”
On my last visit to their home
in Tahoe, I walk into the kitchen from outside and offer to help. I don’t expect to be taken up, but Priscilla Chan hands me two very large trays of salmon she’s baked for a 16-person dinner, which I’m entrusted with transporting through the self-closing screen door. Terrified that I will spill or drop the food, I take my time finessing my way through the door before hitting my head on a metal barn light. Zuckerberg, his three children, two of his sisters and their families, and extended family and friends are standing on the lakeside lawn, and turn around to look at me. I assure them I’m fine before delivering the salmon safely onto a buffet table, where there are Shabbat candles, a kiddush cup, and a braided loaf of challah bread.
Zuckerberg and his family light the candles and say the prayers, then everyone eats lazily in the summer breeze. They plan out the rest of the night. After dessert, Zuckerberg will take his sister and nephew paddleboarding, then put the baby to sleep. Then there will be the weekly tradition of Quiz Bowl, and the teams are divided up. For most of dinner, one of Zuckerberg’s daughters paces around the grass while reading a paperback; she’s promised herself that she will finish it by nightfall and doesn’t wish to be distracted by food. Before Chan brings out a blueberry cobbler, the kids are squealing and jumping off a water trampoline into the lake.
I steal a glance at Zuckerberg, who is relaxed and smiles easily; unlike elsewhere, it is not the face of a man shackled or stranded in any ultimate sense. I think of his account of Augustus. There was something poignant in it, in the involuntary collusion between his interpretation and his memory to ease the legacy of his adopted ancestor, to humanize him. I wonder whether I’ll have my own desires to do the same with him.
“Here, I want to show you something,” Chan tells me, holding a laptop. We go inside and sit on a couch. She opens the computer and shows me one of her daughter’s Google Docs and Replit accounts. “She’s quite limited, because Mom doesn’t let her build things that are open to the internet,” says Chan. “Like, she wanted to build a dating site. That was a no. But I wanted to show you some of the things she has built.”
We take a look. There is a novel she wrote, a mermaid fever dream. There is a blog, the Daily Craziness, where she writes more mermaid stories, and a book review of
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
. There are AI-generated motivational theme songs about conquering her fears. There is a podcast, the latest episode of which is called “Is Romance Appropriate?” There is an audiobook library, where she narrates books she likes. There is a GeoCities-like website and a FarmVille-like game, and several apps she’s vibecoded, including a messaging app. There are business plans for how to market and sell these things.
“Does Mark have them build stuff on computers?” I ask, as Chan closes the laptop.
“Not really,” she says. “He didn’t tell her to do any of this.”
“Is it that she’s trying to be like dad?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “It’s been all on her own.”
“It’s very cute,” I tell her. “But so why are you showing me this?”
“I’ve known Mark for 23 years,” she says. “Around year 18 or 19, I said to him, ‘Aren’t we tired? Can we be done? I’m tired. You’re tired. It’s been a hard run. We’ve gotten through a hard chapter. Let’s call it. There have to be other chapters in our life.’
“And he said no. He said, ‘No, this is who I am. I love this. I didn’t set out to build a company. I just love building things. I love being at Meta, because I still get to create things.’
“Until she got a little older, I didn’t understand it,” Chan says, tapping the laptop. “Now I see her. She just has a desire to build things that is innate, that we didn’t teach her. It just came. She’s delighted by the idea of bringing something into the world. If I tried to take this stuff away from her, it would be like cutting off her arm.
“It wasn’t until then that I realized: Oh my God. It’s Mark. After 23 years, I get it now.
“You can’t take this away from him. He wouldn’t be him if he stopped.”
Jeremy Stern
is the editor-in-chief of Colossus.
Latest Release: Tcl/Tk 9.1.0 (Sep 29, 2026)
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3. On the subsequent screen, click the “Add to Home Screen” to add this app to your iPhone.
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