When Mark Zuckerberg spoke with podcaster Joe Rogan for three hours on Friday, he mentioned his renewed support for newly elected President Donald Trump only in passing, almost as an afterthought.
“He just wants America to win,” the 40-year-old Meta executive said, before quickly moving on to expound on the importance of neck strength in mixed martial arts, the merits of the bow and arrow for wild boar hunting and he worries that Western society has been ’emasculated’.
Zuckerberg’s acknowledgment of his service was so brief that you could be forgiven for thinking it was unremarkable.
But in reality, it represents a dramatic conversion for a man who has seemingly transformed from a proud tech nerd in the good graces of the Democratic establishment to a MAGA soldier on the front lines of the war for free speech.
In fact, the metamorphosis of Zuckerberg’s company and his public persona suggest that he may be in a redesign phase.
Could this be Zuck 2.0?
Signs of the change were first visible in late November, after the presidential election, when Zuckerberg boarded a plane bound for Palm Beach, Florida, and was recently re-elected to Trump’s “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago.
It was a bold decision considering that just three months earlier, in August, Trump had loudly threatened the Facebook co-founder with jail time, warning that Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in jail” if he tried to interfere with the 2024 elections. election.
Mark Zuckerberg spoke with podcaster Joe Rogan for three hours on Friday about the importance of neck strength in mixed martial arts, the merits of the bow and arrow for wild boar hunting and his concerns that Western society has been “emasculated.” He only mentioned his renewed support for President-elect Donald Trump in passing:
Indeed, Zuckerberg’s Facebook is accused of meddling in the 2020 election by suppressing early reporting on Hunter Biden’s ‘Laptop from Hell’, which exposed the First Son’s prolific drug use and ties to foreign companies and governments came to light.
Zuckerberg was likely trying to mend his relationship with Trump, which deteriorated further after Facebook and Instagram, also owned by Meta, banned the 45th president from their platforms in the wake of the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol. (Trump’s account has since been restored.)
Zuckerberg may have been inspired by the apparent success of another tech billionaire who rose to the top of the nascent MAGA regime to become Trump’s “First Buddy”: Elon Musk.
Musk, 53, and Zuckerberg have long been archrivals, to the point that they spent most of 2023 publicly challenging each other to an MMA-style “cage match.” Ultimately, Zuckerberg called it off because he concluded that his rival didn’t mean it.
But now critics say Zuckerberg has realized that to succeed under Trump, he better fall in line like Musk. “We will be working with President Trump,” Zuckerberg said in a shocking announcement on Instagram on Tuesday.
In the most shocking move yet, Meta took a page from the Tesla CEO’s playbook on Friday by disbanding the entire DEI team and ending equity and inclusion programs at the company, effective immediately. (Musk calls the slavish liberal commitment to diversity one of the symptoms of the “woke mind virus.”)
In his personal life, Zuckerberg also seems to have embraced Musk’s eccentricity.
On the eve of his 40th birthday in May, he underwent an extraordinary aesthetic rebrand, leaving many wondering if he was having a midlife crisis. The self-proclaimed nerd who wore the same gray shirt, hoodie and same jeans for thirteen years turned into a trendy Silicon Valley bro with long curly hair, a tan and a new streetwear wardrobe.
On the eve of his 40th birthday in May, he underwent an extraordinary aesthetic rebrand, leaving many wondering if he was having a midlife crisis. The self-proclaimed nerd who wore the same gray shirt, hoodie and same jeans for thirteen years turned into a trendy Silicon Valley bro with long curly hair, a tan and a new streetwear wardrobe. Pictured here with Joe Rogan
The metamorphosis of Zuckerberg’s company and his public persona suggest he may be in a redesign phase.
The change was captured during a photo shoot at his birthday party, given to Zuckerberg by his wife Priscilla Chan.
Zuckerberg was depicted sitting in several carefully staged, strikingly bizarre miniature models of all the places he has lived throughout his life, from his childhood bedroom to his freshman dorm to his Facebook office.
In one particularly disturbing photo, Microsoft founder Bill Gates sat with Zuckerberg in his mini-dorm room, but the camera angle and seating arrangement made Zuckerberg loom ominously over Gates, who appeared to have been shrunk to the size of a child.
Regardless, the statement was clear: look how far Zuckerberg has come and how much he has changed.
Now he is rarely seen without one of his thick gold chains. In recent months, he’s adopted the classic Imperial aesthetic, wearing shirts that read “pathei mathos,” Greek for “learning through suffering,” and “Aut Zuck aut nihil,” which translates to “all Zuck or nothing at all.”
As one technology journalist said of Zuckerberg’s appearance at a Meta event in September, “He no longer looks like the kid who was bullied in high school, but rather the kid who would do the bullying.”
Then there are reports that he is building a 5,000-square-foot “Doomsday bunker” beneath his $270 million compound in Hawaii, which he denied, claiming it was “just a small shelter.” Not to mention the gigantic, larger-than-life statue of his wife that he gave her as a gift for her 39th birthday, saying he was “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife.”
Zuckerberg also threw himself into his hobbies, building an octagon for MMA practice in his backyard. “I want to do one pro or competitive MMA fight and then I think I’ll go back to jiu-jitsu,” he told Rogan on Friday, brimming with enthusiasm.
When it came to the slaughter of wild pigs, he became philosophical. ‘I usually use a rifle because it’s so much more efficient. Your success rate is so much higher,” he said, though he admitted, “my favorite is the bow and arrow, which feels like the most sporting version of it.”
President Barack Obama and Zuckerberg wave after their speech at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at Stanford in June 2016
Among the series of reforms he announced this week are many that mirror changes Musk recently made on X (formerly Twitter): getting rid of third-party fact-checkers, overhauling community standards to allow more controversial speech creating and moving content moderation teams from California to Texas
Both hunting and MMA fighting have helped him feel more masculine, he said, expressing concern that much of Western society and corporate America has become “neutered or emasculated.”
There is a need to return to masculinity, he asserted. But as Zuckerberg seems to be telling it, he’s had an epiphany.
Even he has ended up on the wrong side of Meta’s censorship policies. A Facebook post he made about a knee injury he suffered while sparring was flagged as possible medical “misinformation” in November and suppressed by the algorithm. The incident, we are told, prompted him to launch an investigation into Facebook’s censorship.
Among the series of reforms he announced this week are many that mirror changes Musk recently made on X (formerly Twitter): getting rid of third-party fact-checkers, overhauling community standards to allow more controversial speech creating and moving content moderation teams from California to Texas.
Meta also made some significant leadership appointments, adding Dana White, Trump cheerleader and CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, to Meta’s board of directors and promoting Joel Kaplan, a former deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush, to head of global policy.
“The whole point of social media is basically giving people the ability to share whatever they want,” he told Rogan. “It goes back to our original mission to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”
Over the past year, Zuckerberg has shown that he is willing to change almost everything, from the way he runs his companies to his appearance.
We now see the MAGA-friendly version of Zuckerberg.
But it all begs the question: who will he become next?