Inside the bro-ification of Mark Zuckerberg

The crowd of software-makers and social media influencers at Meta’s headquarters celebrated Zuckerberg’s own expansionist agenda — gasping, applauding and holding up their phones to record snippets of the CEO’s plan for Meta to dominate “the future of human communication.”

Printing ancient battle cries on Italian cotton may be an innocuous flex, but it’s part of a transformation that has quietly remade Zuckerberg’s public image, attracting the same generation of start-up guys who once idolized Elon Musk.

Meta’s founder has swapped tense encounters with mainstream media in favor of friendly chats with popular podcast hosts, sitting for three interviews with computer scientist Lex Fridman, two with anti-woke Joe Rogan and one with pop scientist Andrew Huberman since 2022.

A onetime proponent of liberal causes, whose philanthropic LLC gave millions to local governments to help run the 2020 election during the pandemic, Zuckerberg has since backed away from donations that could appear partisan. Still, he called Donald Trump a “bada--” for his response to an assassination attempt in July. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another,” he wrote in an August letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

And he has abandoned his closet full of gray hoodies and fitted crew-necks for a style upgrade, showcasing gold chains, unruly curls, and “loud luxury” wedding fits by Alexander McQueen. Zuckerberg acquired a sizable high-end watch collection seemingly overnight and a UFC featherweight physique carved from mixed martial arts matches, reflecting a more conventional masculinity ascendant in the tech world.

His conference shirt appeared to be part of a series Zuckerberg created with menswear designer Mike Amiri, showcasing what the CEO has called his “favorite classical sayings.” Items from his personal collection include the phrase “patha mathos,” Latin for learning through suffering, and “Carthago delenda est,” Latin for “Carthage must be destroyed,” a popular motto within Facebook when the social network was at war with Google Plus.

Despite failed attempts to burnish his reputation in the past, Zuckerberg’s new aesthetic and acerbic asides have played well on the podcast circuit and onstage, helping the 40-year-old billionaire transform himself from a dorky, democracy-destroying CEO into a dripped-out, jacked AI accelerationist in the eyes of potential Meta recruits.

“I don’t apologize anymore,” Zuckerberg quipped at a taping of the podcast “Acquired” in September, eliciting laughter from the crowd. “We’ve noticed,” responded one of the hosts.

Meta declined to comment.

That unapologetic stance has also won over Silicon Valley insiders hungry to turn the page on a politically tumultuous chapter for the technology industry.

Tech investor Brianne Kimmel, founder of the early-stage venture capital firm Worklife Ventures, said Zuckerberg’s personal evolution has been well-received.

“[It’s] resonated with a younger generation in terms of style and presentation,” she said. “There’s a cool factor that didn’t exist before, and now male tech CEOs have a playbook to achieve similar results.”

But the model is available only to a certain set of entrepreneurs. “Male leaders … want to show up cool and culturally relevant,” Kimmel added. But for female tech founders, “we’re still at a point where we want to be credible, but we’re not allowed to be overly confident.”

Meta’s decision to open source its AI models, allowing developers to use and modify them without paying the company, has earned Zuckerberg a new level of street cred among rank-and-file Silicon Valley founders, who might have previously considered Meta a gatekeeper to their success.

“Zuckerberg is ruthless as both a leader and an executive, but in his heart, he’s just a start-up guy who wants to be cool with the nerds,” a former Facebook executive said.

Now he’s won their accolades.

“He’s living his best life,” added the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.

A pseudo-political campaign

Zuckerberg’s longtime mentor Peter Thiel encouraged the CEO to rework his image in a 2020 email, in part to help the company appear relevant to younger audiences.

“As the head of the most successful Millennial tech company, it makes more sense for Zuckerberg to present himself as ‘Millennial spokesperson,’” rather than “Mark as a Baby Boomer construct of how a well-behaved Millennial is supposed to act,” Thiel wrote in an email that was disclosed in a lawsuit filed against Meta by the Tennessee attorney general.

Zuckerberg seemed receptive. “Finally, I think there’s also some distinction between me and the company here,” he replied. “This is likely particularly important for how I show up because I’m the most well-known person of my generation.”

Zuckerberg’s recent overhaul is hardly the first time the CEO has attempted to recast his image.

As one of the few founders still leading the company he created more than two decades later, Zuckerberg has an image that is closely tied to the public perception of Meta. Public relations staffers have closely monitored the link, even polling users to assess their thoughts on the CEO, according to two former Meta executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings and conversations.

In the wake of the 2016 election, as details emerged about Russian efforts on Facebook to sway the election, Zuckerberg embarked on a rehabilitation. He announced a “listening tour” to all 50 states in 2017 to better understand folks outside Silicon Valley’s filter bubble.

During the pseudo-political campaign, professional photographers captured Zuckerberg on the assembly line of a Ford factory, stopping by an opioid addiction treatment center in Ohio and ordering barbecue in Baton Rouge.

The company also made dramatic changes to appease its critics. It hired thousands of content moderators to filter toxic posts, lobbyists to schmooze with skeptical regulators and policy experts to review the company’s rules on acceptable speech.

Still, Facebook was innately tied to the image of a contrite Zuckerberg, pale-faced in the congressional hot seat in 2018, sporting a suit and his close-cropped Caesar haircut as he fielded questions from lawmakers.

When scrutiny on the company and its CEO didn’t diminish, Meta embarked on a new strategy.

It shuffled executive responsibilities, distancing Zuckerberg from the more controversial aspects of his job. He took over as the company’s chief storyteller, introducing new products, while Sheryl Sandberg took the lead communicating about Meta’s business. Global Affairs President Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister of Britain, was put in chargeof fielding questions about politics and regulation.

The company saw long-form podcasts with large audiences and a select few members of the tech press as key places to tell Meta’s story, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings and conversations. Part of the goal was to pitch Zuckerberg to an audience he cares about: early adopters and potential new employees.

“There’s an ego element. We all want to be popular,” one of the people said. “[But] there’s a recruiting benefit. You want to be seen as a company that the tech bros want to come work for.”

He has also taken some cues from Musk.

When pressed by Fridman last year, Zuckerberg praised the X owner for introducing mass layoffs at the company, focused on reducing managers. That year, Zuckerberg would similarly lay off thousands of workers, creating the “optimal ratio” of engineers to nontechnical workers.

“Certainly, his actions led me, and I think a lot of other folks in the industry, to think about, ‘Hey, are we, are we kind of doing this as much as we should?’” Zuckerberg said. “Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of these same principles?”

A rightward trend

Zuckerberg has not backed a presidential candidate, while other tech heavyweights have endorsed Trump in recent months, including Musk, investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and Sequoia partner Doug Leone.

But much of hisrhetoric on politics has trended rightward. In July, Zuckerberg praised the former president for how he handled the shooting at his rally, saying it’s why “a lot of people like the guy.” In the August letter to Jordan, Zuckerberg criticized the Biden administration, saying it was “wrong” in 2021 when it “repeatedly pressured” his company to take down some covid-related misinformation — agreeing with a long-standing Republican talking point.

Zuckerberg has backed up the new political approach with policy changes. Over the past two years, Meta has allowed politicians to lie about election rigging in advertisements and users to opt out of the company fact-checking posts in their news feeds; and it has stopped labeling some falsehoods from politicians around voting — policies that had been condemned by some conservatives.

Zuckerberg has argued that Meta is simply evolving. If the early days of the company — then called Facebook — were just about getting it to survive, then the past 10 years have been about working through the thorny political questions facing social media platforms, he told two former employees at a recent event.

While those efforts aren’t done, Zuckerberg said, he thinks the company has already put in “a ton of work to do the things that we need to do.”

Now, “that’s allowed us to pivot more to just offense and doing more kind of proactive awesome things,” he said.