Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed himself “the most well-known person of my generation” in an email with another tech billionaire who was urging him to start a makeover.
The millennial Facebook founder made the boast to Peter Thiel in 2020 when Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and Silicon Valley’s longest-standing conservative voice, told him he needed to change his image. The email correspondence came to light when Facebook’s parent company, Meta, was sued by the attorney general of Tennessee, the Washington Post reported.
Thiel wrote to Zuckerberg, then 36, to say, “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.”
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Zuckerberg replied, “Finally, I think there’s also some distinction between me and the company here. This is likely particularly important for how I show up because I’m the most well-known person of my generation.”
Being the most well-known member of his generation would make Zuckerberg more recognizable than Taylor Swift (whose concerts he has attended with his family), Kate Middleton, Lionel Messi, and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un. He is indisputably richer than any of them, recently becoming only the fourth person ever to be worth more than $200 billion, according to Forbes.
The email from Thiel did prompt a radical change in Zuckerberg, Since 2020, the Harvard drop-out, a married father of three, has grown out his hair, gained a new physique and radically changed his fashion choices, ditching his traditional jeans, unadorned T-shirts and crumpled hoodies.
He now posts ripped selfies, collects $150,000 watches and wears designer T-shirts with classical quotes. In a podcast interview in September he wore a baggy T-shirt printed in Greek with the phrase “pathei mathos,” meaning “learning through suffering.” One T-shirt, which he wore to launch Meta’s new products at its annual conference in Menlo Park, California, in September, said “aut Zuck aut nihil,” Latin for “all Zuck or all nothing.” At his 40th birthday party in May, he sported a black T-shirt with the motto “Carthago delenda est”; Latin for “Carthage must be destroyed,” a phrase used by the orator Cato to drum up support for the Third Punic War, which ended in the brutal wiping out of Rome’s most significant rival in 146 B.C.
In September as he recorded a podcast, the multi-billionaire wore a T-shirt with Greek lettering that said: “Learning through suffering.”
Laure Andrillon/Reuters
Zuckerberg was backstage at a UFC300 event in Las Vegas to greet professional fighter Max Holloway. A new physique and fandom is one of the major parts of his makeover.
Cooper Neill/Zufa/GettyAmong his new designers of choice are Alexander McQueen, who provides “loud luxury” designs, while he has been spotted in a sheepskin coat in South Korea. And he has become a competitor in mixed-martial arts as well as a regular at professional events.
The full-body makeover has been apparently matched by shifting political views. Zuckerberg once appeared alongside President Barack Obama and donated money to social justice causes, and in 2020 gave hundreds of millions to help elections in the U.S. during COVID.
The old-look Zuckerberg was also happy to be seen with Democratic politicians and donate to apparently progressive causes.
Jim Young/ReutersSince then he has become a libertarian telephone buddy for Donald Trump, whose post-assassination attempt fist-pump he called “bad-ass”; he has also said that he will stay out of the 2024 election in a groveling letter to Republicans that echoed many MAGA talking points; and has overseen his companies rolling back restrictions on political speech on his platforms, which had included a ban on politicians lying. At the same time, he restored Trump’s accounts which Meta had banned after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
