Luis Granena
A few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg guested on Joe Rogan’s podcast, one of the most listened to in the world — it has about 11 million listeners, the vast majority of whom are men — and also a controversial space that has hosted various variants of deniers and breeding ground for Wild Right conspiracy theories. In three hours of conversation, the founder of Facebook – today’s meta – had time for everything. To resell his idea of the metaverse, which he’s struggling to bring to fruition, while also pivoting his public image to wrap it in Silicon Valley style.
Before Rogan, who was a taekwondo champion, Zuckerberg left his image of a nerd who learned to program at age 10 with an Atari computer and went to Harvard for classical studies – one of his daughters is named August, due to his obsession with Emperor Augustus – , and sold himself, in the words of Bloomberg columnist Max Chafkin, “as a martial arts-obsessed gym rat, a tri-sport collegiate athlete, and a jiu-jitsu aficionado.” Zuckerberg, who was based at Exeter Academy, the famous boarding school where he attended high school, affirmed that he liked nothing more than “fighting with his friends” because it’s so “primitive,” and that he never does will watch TV as this is a “beta activity”. That is, something inappropriate for the alpha male he wants to be.
Just two days later, as if to reinforce the idea, he posted some pictures on his Instagram account of him practicing mixed martial arts. Several champions, such as Ireland’s Conor McGregor, congratulated him on his style.
Zuckerberg, who turned 38 in May, lives between his homes in Palo Alto, Lake Tahoe and Hawaii with his wife, doctor and philanthropist Priscilla Chan (they met at a party in 2003 and married in 2012) and their two daughters. This week they announced that they are expecting the third. Over the past decade, the guy who started Facebook to rate college girls’ physiques has cultivated an image of the familiar man and toned down that of the young genius with communication difficulties, portrayed in The Social Network (2010), a film , whom he hates to see is considered “harmful”. But now he seems fed up with the memes, with his image surfing with his face completely covered in sunscreen, like a mime artist riding the waves, and the jokes about his robotic appearance when he was in front of the Facebook irregularities Senate appeared elections United States generals in 2016.
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Luis Granena
He wants to be perceived as a testosterone leader who has also transferred his new style to his company management. In July, he warned in an internal message to Meta’s nearly 78,000 employees that they will have to work harder with fewer resources and that their results will be subject to closer scrutiny. “I think some of you will decide that this place isn’t for you anymore and that self-choice is fine with me. Realistically, there are people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” he wrote, using rhetoric that was a far cry from the California good-naturedness of the last decade, when tech company campuses competed to sell themselves as creative playground havens. The new boss Zuckerberg speaks like the HR manager who had to act as a bad cop in front of an ERE.
“Meta loses a lot of money. Despite this, it is strange that he feels that he must carry out this notion of masculinity, because those who really have the upper hand do not need it,” point out authors from Proyecto Una, a group that traces traces of patriarchy on the Internet of the book Leia, Rihanna & Trump: How Feminism has Transformed Pop Culture and How Machismo React with Terror (Descontrol Editorial). In fact, Zuckerberg has fallen to the 20th richest man in the world (he was third) and has lost $71 billion so far this year, more than half of his personal fortune.
Lynn Horton, a sociologist at the University of Texas and author of Men of Money: Elite Masculinities and the Neoliberal Project (Rowman & Littlefield), points out via email that the founder of Facebook/Meta (and owner of Instagram and WhatsApp ) this isn’t the only titan in Silicon Valley to dove into a rebrand (an identity or brand redesign). “The media hasn’t stopped commenting on Jeff Bezos’ transformation from linnet to stud since his divorce,” he says. The founder of Amazon and currently the world’s richest man wears shirtless chests and is keen to win the space race of the rich.
“The industry’s billionaires cultivated this cliché of the madman, of the loser who wins in the end (…). Zuckerberg and Bezos also promoted a whiter and more trustworthy image to avoid greater scrutiny over their business practices,” Horton said. Instead, “we’ve now seen some of these billionaires gravitate toward a model of masculinity that emphasizes the body, assertiveness, and heterosexual prowess,” he says.
According to Horton, this change in style from Zuckerberg and Bezos, which is often attributed to their respective midlife crises, doesn’t fundamentally change the factors. It’s just another way of depicting an indissoluble marriage, that of patriarchy and the financial elite.
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