On Mark Zuckerberg and the tech bro glow-up

A vibe shift is taking place among Silicon Valley’s tech overlords. 

The first sign arrived back in April when an AI image of a bearded Mark Zuckerberg went viral on social media. This was shortly followed by another viral video of the Meta CEO last week, where he was talking about the newest release of Llama, his open-source AI model. Most noticeable, however, was Zuck’s appearance – gold chain and swag ensemble, a Gen Z head of curls, and of course, the much-memed tan line. After a succession of questionable market choices – like Threads and the billion-dollar metaverse flop – it appears that Mr Steal Your Data has been on a mission to steal the public’s affection, with recent stunts including posting a video of himself hydrofoiling in a tux with an American flag and a beer on grid, to working on his gains in the gym to a soundtrack of Green Day’s “Look Ma, No Brains!”. Internet-fluents might point out that Zuck’s glow-up draws parallels to the sort of transformations witnessed in TikTok’s looksmaxxing communities. No longer glassy-eyed, his strangely satisfying facial expressions even evoke that of sigma male blueprint Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, whose extreme self-care routine has inspired hundreds of thousands of teens online to follow in his footsteps. 

Not so long ago, Zuck was better associated with being a semi-human robot from the uncanny valley, as bland and sanitised as Meta’s servers. There’s even a much-memed clip of him staring blankly into the camera while smoking meats in his backyard, which I highly recommend revisiting. For the longest time, his fashion taste consisted solely of the same grey t-shirt and a pair of blue jeans – likely inspired by Steve Jobs’ anti-fashion (he reportedly told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he had enough black turtlenecks to “last the rest of my lifetime”). 

“I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” said Zuckerberg about his uniform in a 2014 interview. “I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.” While this might’ve floated in the early days of Facebook circa 2007 – back then, wearing a hoodie to a board meeting was seen as risque – the same look pasted into the context of post-sans serif, millennial minimalism made him the prime target for online trolls. Remember the widely-mocked and horrifically bland Horizon Worlds metaverse debut in 2022, featuring Zuck’s baby-faced avatar strolling out onto camera with absolutely zero swag, and even less imagination. 

Yet his recent rebrand (OS update?) indicates that the tides are turning among California’s tech elite. Now, the Steve Jobs era of millennial minimalism – the pared-back Patagonia fleece and the Frutiger Aero drip – has been replaced with Gen Z rizz – a likeable dude next door who goes to the gym and eats a carnivore diet, who’s into MMA and speaks to camera like a former Supreme bro who now makes TikTok videos on how to max out your aura. Online, he shares his favourite designers – stealth wealth brands like Todd Snyder and Vuori – adopting a mainstream influencer attitude. It all feels very nice and agreeable, which is to say, very good for business. 

As the liberal face of tech elites, positioning Zuckerberg as the tech bro next door makes him stand out against his competitors such as Elon Musk (the two had planned a kind of gladiator-coded cage fight last year until Musk’s own mum intervened to say no). Musk’s free-speech contrarianism has gone full-on tech villain, including stunts such as marching onto red carpets in a satanic suit of armour, and literally building a device that’s meant to hack people’s brains. There’s also Jeff Bezos, who’s transformed himself into some hetero-cringe, jacked-up cowboy shooting off into space in a dick-shaped rocket. Another tech bro making headlines is Bryan Johnson, the billionaire trying to biohack himself to immortality by draining the blood of his teenage son and hosting ‘Dont die dinners’ with the Kardashians. In comparison, Zuck is just some normie guy, albeit one who has been accused of stealing your personal data and selling it off for profit. 

But don’t be fooled, Zuck might’ve lost his Julius Caesar haircut, but he still seems to be thinking about the Roman Empire (tech domination). In one recent post, he wears a black tee with a gothic font that reads ‘Carthago delenda est’, which translates to ‘Carthage must be destroyed’, a phrase famously attributed to Roman historian Cato the Elder, and was used as a rallying cry within Facebook in 2016 back when it was competing with Google. Now, gearing up to release his own open-source AI to rival OpenAI, there’s presumably a lot riding on this rollout, which means showing users his own new and improved model. Bearded Zuck’s got a whole lot more dank memes on the horizon.