For Mark Zuckerberg’s fortieth birthday, his wife gave him a Photoshoot.
Zuckerberg gives the camera a wicked smile as he sits in the middle of a carefully designed recreation of his childhood bedroom. He’s appropriately childlike (a lava lamp, a participation trophy, a white stuffed dog), but the setting foreshadows the force of technology and cultural change that Zuckerberg would create. Among thick tomes on C++, Java, and Windows 95, we see a framed sepia-toned photograph of what appears to be a young Zuckerberg, posing in his desk chair in the same way he is now: with one arm draped over the back of his desk. office. chair, the other hanging over his outstretched legs.
This series of photographs, inspired by various phases of the CEO’s life, evoke how far Zuckerberg has come: once a scrawny kid learning to code, he is now one of the richest men in the world… but that’s not it. the main conclusion that the public took away. the photo. Instead, they beg the question: Does Zuck have The trickle?
For the first time in his life, Zuckerberg looks too cool for all the retro tech paraphernalia. A thick gold chain hangs around his neck, but it’s not long enough to cover the large gothic-style text on his graphic t-shirt: Carthage delenda esteither, Carthage must die.
Zuckerberg’s sudden change in style is notable: for about thirteen years he has worn the same one. gray shirt and jeans in most public appearances, because of course he focuses on such important issues that are beyond the understanding of us laymen, who are not as rich as him, because we simply spend too much time dressing. In April, when Zuckerberg published a instagram reel Regarding the updates to the Meta AI assistant, viewers focused on Zuckerberg’s chain of frat boys, rather than the intricacies of the Llama 3 model. Someone doctored a photo from Zuckerberg’s video and added a beard on his face, and it went viral, because he looked surprisingly good! And now, the top comments on the video implore him to grow his facial hair.
In a recent high profile wedding in india, Zuckerberg wore a beaded suit by Alexander McQueen, which he followed the next day with a luxurious organza shirt by Rahul Mishra, one of India’s top designers. The shirt is so intricately embroidered that its cost is listed as “price request” online, as if it were a freshly caught lobster at an upscale restaurant. Wearing his dazzling tiger-clad shirt, Zuckerberg was photographed alongside Bill Gates, whose attire would be permitted under my elementary school’s dress code.
Zuckerberg’s clothing choices may seem frivolous, but they impact how the public perceives him and his business. That’s not something to take lightly when you’re the CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world, especially one that has long been criticized. child safety Problems and addictive design. If Zuckerberg suddenly becomes a hot MMA fighter instead of a fool who profits from our personal data, could that suave style protect him from scrutiny?
“Personal style is a communication tool,” Amber Venz Box, fashion blogger turned shopping platform founder. LTK, he told TechCrunch. “We have spoken and written communication, we have body language and we have ‘drip’; our appearance communicates a lot about us and influences how people feel about us.”
This is not the same man we saw looking ghostly and droopy-eyed as he testified before Congress about Facebook’s potential to undermine the electoral process. Just remember two years ago When we all clowned around on that photo of Metaverse Zuck in front of the Eiffel Tower? And now we thirst for his non-existent beard? Zuck’s brilliance happened as quickly as we stopped caring about Horizon Worlds. Now, he is a amateur MMA fighter WHO humble on Instagram about running a 21-minute 5K. He no longer looks like the kid who was bullied in high school, but more like the kid who would bully.
“Maybe he stopped caring,” said Avery Trufelman, a podcaster and fashion historian, told TechCrunch. “It’s like Taylor Swift after the Reputation era.”
Trufelman’s comparison of an abnormally powerful computer expert and a record-breaking pop star may seem far-fetched, but in an era when technology companies control our attention for hours on end every day, the CEOs of technology are a type of celebrity.
Mainstream celebrities, like Swift and Beyoncé, rarely speak to the press. There’s no need. Instead, fans analyze the lyrics for secret messages as if they were Talmudic scholars poring over ancient texts. It’s not much different from the techies who listen to Meta’s quarterly earnings calls and study the weird insights we get about how Zuckerberg talks about his empire.
“That’s what fashion discourse has become: image decoding or armchair psychology,” Trufelman said. “Should it matter that much? I don’t know. But I think, especially for big, intimidating public figures, this is one of the few open windows we have into their inner workings, so we’re trying to use it as much as we can.”
Zuckerberg didn’t just use that Carthage delenda est shirt because it looks cool. The phrase is a nod to the CEO’s early days as a budding startup founder, who reminds us in his photo shoot that he slept in a basic room with a mattress on the floor until Facebook reached 100 million users (of course, I could have done it). He had just gotten a bed frame and some light decoration secondhand, but then he couldn’t glamorize his sigma grinding in an eventual photo session for his 40th birthday).
The hostile nature of his former bedroom, as well as its nod to the destruction of Carthage, position Zuckerberg as a rebel against the tyranny of legacy tech companies. According Business InsiderZuckerberg made the statement Carthage delenda est on Facebook in 2011, when Google launched Google+, which was then believed to be a Facebook killer. Zuckerberg put his team in “lockdown mode” – another “was” depicted in his photo shoot, to use the Swiftian term, where he worked tirelessly with his team to crush his competitors.
This Latin phrase comes from the ancient Roman politician Cato the Elder, who concluded all his speeches with a call to defeat Carthage. But Rome wasn’t exactly the loser during the Punic Wars, and neither is Zuckerberg: the republic was victorious in all three wars, but it wouldn’t rest until Carthage was completely annihilated. That’s a slightly more violent saying than “move fast and break things,” but of course, Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. It worked.
Zuckerberg’s desire to establish himself within the history of American business is evident in his photo shoot. In one photo, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is eerily present, sitting in a small chair next to Zuckerberg in a model of the Harvard dorm where he launched Facebook.
The image is disturbing. Gates is dressed as if he were about to go for a run: he is wearing a hoodie, gym shorts, Adidas sneakers and tube socks. Zuckerberg, sitting in a higher chair, appears to be welcoming the tech icon. At this point, Zuckerberg is richer than Gates.
Zuckerberg always seemed to understand that he can’t take Meta’s dominance for granted, nor can he become complacent about his place in the company: the board is set up so that Mark can never be ousted against his will. The bloodthirsty slogan on his t-shirt still applies: Right now, Meta’s biggest competitor, TikTok, is fighting for his life.
Meta is riddled with reminders that it’s hard to stay on top forever; Just look at his massive stock drop in 2022, when it became clear that Zuckerberg’s big metaverse plans weren’t as inevitable as he made them seem. One such reminder is embedded in the entrance to the company’s corporate campus. When the company first set up shop in Menlo Park, he kept the entrance sign for SunSystems, the lot’s previous tenant. The company simply turned the sign around and gave it a Facebook “thumbs up,” intentionally leaving the SunSystems logo visible from behind.
“I always thought it was very poetic to keep those reminders of empires rising and falling, and clearly, Zuck has this.” Ozymandias mentality,” Trufelman said. “I think he definitely sees his place in the realm of history.”