Mark Zuckerberg's Image Overhaul: From Tech Mogul to AI Visionary

Zuckerberg Augustus: Meta's emperor rebrands in new clothes

Mark Zuckerberg's new revamp is a far cry from the zip-up hoodies and suits emblematic of earlier eras of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is revamping his public image with new threads. With a trio of bold shirts worn in recent appearances, he's communicating that he came, he saw, he conquered and he will win again at any cost. The fits might be sick, but we would do well to beware. During a live, packed-auditorium podcast interview last week, the CEO of Meta wore a drop-shouldered black shirt reading "pathei mathos", Greek for "learning through suffering". At his 40th birthday party in May, he donned a black tee with the motto "Carthago delenda est," which translates from Latin to "Carthage must be destroyed." He wore a black shirt with black text that read "Aut Zuck aut nihil" during Meta's Connect product demonstration on Wednesday. The phrases together show him cycling through a condensed evolution of antiquity's politics. First, the ancient Greeks, then the early days of Rome as republic and finally, the full, pitiless glory of the Roman empire. We need not dwell on the first motto much, as it induces only quizzical anger. Has the head of the world's largest social network, a Harvard-educated man worth $196bn, suffered? He seems no wise Aeschylus, the father of tragedy who coined the phrase in the 5th century BC. Perhaps Zuckerberg has endured slings and arrows of the outrageous press as it criticized Facebook for fueling ethnic cleansing and the Capitol riot. His recent $10bn metaverse ambitions have flopped, and he has pivoted to AI with the rest of the tech world. That must have stung. But of the options to be or not to be Meta's CEO, he has stayed the course. The second phrase, "Carthago delenda est," originates from the Roman Senate. Cato the Elder, a Roman senator and historian around 200BC, repeated it at the end of every speech he made there. After two wars with Rome, Carthage, located in modern-day Tunisia, was to Cato the city's sworn enemy. Though few others considered it a threat, he nevertheless pushed for a final showdown. He got his war; Rome crushed Carthage in 146BC. The slogan connotes fixation unto monomania. Zuckerberg is locked in. He is communicating to rivals and investors alike that he will do anything to flatten his competition - copy the Instagram story format wholesale from Snapchat or Reels from TikTok; buy the world's most popular texting system, WhatsApp, for $19bn; box Apple out of the market for virtual and augmented reality devices. He says to users: he will use your personal data as he sees fit. That Zuckerberg is like this is well-known. Ruthlessness is his primary public personality trait. What is different now is the swagger and the ease with which he wears it. He looks cool, to be frank. The CEO created the Carthage shirt in collaboration with the designer Mike Amiri, a disruptive and successful American like Zuckerberg himself. Its boxy cut resembled less a Roman toga than a fighter's practice outfit, something the executive himself aspires to be with his hobby of mixed martial arts training. The aesthetic of a loose shirt and chain is geared towards the young, though the phrases of antiquity would seem to appeal to an older crowd. Either way, it is a far cry from the navy zip-up hoodies and tight gray shirts of his early days of Facebook, a non-style remembered for its lack of flair or individuality. Zuckerberg's focus, it seemed then, was on the code, not the body. Now the CEO of Meta is taking up space as himself. He's denied hiring a stylist, making the rebrand all his own. The refresh of Zuckerberg's image, however heavy-handed, has worked. The public has noticed he's not the same android who testified before the Senate with microbangs. He's grown out his curly hair to TikToker length and started sporting a chain regularly, an element of his style he A/B tested in product manager fashion. The internet thinks he's almost hot: An image of him altered to appear a bit more like a TikToker aping Drake went viral earlier this year. Against the ultra-online mania of styleless Elon Musk, Zuckerberg seems approachable. The third Latin motto seen on Zuckerberg's chest, "Aut Zuck aut nihil," translates to "Either Zuck or nothing," a play on "Either Caesar or nothing." According to Reuters, scholars associate two Caesars with the phrase: Roman dictator Julius Caesar, who may have said it, and Cardinal Cesare Borgia, who said that Julius said it. "Caesar" can refer to the men themselves and their exploits - Borgia's heartless quest for power inspired Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince. The connotation of the slogan: a win-at-all-costs mentality, an intolerance of dissent, and absolute, unyielding power. Zuckerberg is cultivating an air of rising mightily above the fray, timeless as the emperors. He is, to himself, the architect of a digital civilization as enduring as Rome. Meta's corporate governance has always cast Zuckerberg as the supreme leader: he possesses just 13% of Meta's stock but controls over 50% of the total voting power. With it, he wields complete and incontrovertible veto power. The structure of Wednesday's presentation makes a similar statement, one reminiscent of French king Louis XIV's "L'État, c'est moi." Zuckerberg remained onstage for the entire two-hour demonstration, and it was he alone who unveiled Meta's newest product, still in development but clearly near to his innovative heart: Orion, an advanced pair of augmented reality glasses. He is Meta; Meta is him. There is a third Caesar not associated with Zuck's motto who nonetheless comes to mind: Augustus, who founded the Roman empire as such when he took the name Caesar and elevated himself to emperor in 27BC. He conquered Egypt, other parts of north Africa and most of Europe. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, spent their honeymoon in Rome - Chan joked that Zuckerberg took more pictures of statues of Augustus than of her - and named their second daughter August. Zuckerberg told the New Yorker in 2018: "Basically, through a really harsh approach, Augustus established two hundred years of world peace." There are pedestrian reasons for Zuckerberg's stylistic rebrand. His company's latest hardware product, the clumsily named Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, is a hit. Meta has also inked partnerships with major fashion houses like Balenciaga, Prada and Thom Browne to license clothes for digital avatars. For business reasons, he can't be looking unfashionable. Zuckerberg's string of victories have also led Meta's stock to an all-time high. It's an apt time for a CEO to declare himself god-emperor, the embodiment of the empire without whom there is nothing. Back in 2018, as Facebook endured criticism for permitting fake news and election interference, his company had a "war room" to fight hate speech and misinformation. The command center failed to curb the cruelty of Facebook's users and then was disbanded. Move fast, break things, as Zuckerberg himself has said many times. We would do well to beware that the CEO of Meta, with destruction already in his wake, is telling us that consequences matter little to him so long as victory is his, however he looks.

You Are Not Prepared for How Mark Zuckerberg Is Dressing Now

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and longtime CEO of Meta-formerly-Facebook, is wearing chains. He's growing his hair out. He's wearing oversized t-shirts emblazoned with his favorite classical expressions -- the latest of which, donned this week by the CEO to deliver the keynote speech at Meta's annual Connect conference, featured the phrase "aut Zuck aut nihil." For those less familiar with niche Roman sayings, that's a take on the infamous expression "aut Caeser aut nihil," which translates to "either emperor or nothing." If that sounds at all foreboding to you, your intuition would be correct: the phrase has historically been invoked by ambitious political actors seeking supreme rulership -- that, or nothing. Meta Connect is the company's annual developer conference, where the tech giant shows off its latest and greatest innovations. This year's event has unsurprisingly centered on Meta's efforts to dominate the AI space, as well as a buzzy new prototype for holographic augmented reality glasses, dubbed "Orion." The glasses are still pretty clunky, though not nearly as ungainly as Apple's Vision Pro goggles. But according to Zuck, they're a "time machine" into the future. "These glasses exist, they are awesome," Zuck told the crowd, "and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting." (The ultra-chunky frames also added a special level of eccentricity to the billionaire's outfit during the appearance.) On the one hand, the thick-rimmed AR glasses, designed to add a virtual layer of reality over the real world in real time, are a bet against smartphones and existing devices. In the billionaire's imagined future, we don't call our friends or loved ones over FaceTime, or work via multiple physical monitors. Instead, with his glasses, it's all projected in front of us. But when Zuck makes grandiose claims about Meta's innovations powering the future, he isn't just talking about the future of hardware or wearables -- at least, not in a vacuum. Speaking not only to Orion but also to Meta's various VR projects and fast-moving AI efforts, the swashzuckling, jiu jitsuing CEO declared that he and Meta are constructing humanity's social future. "All of this comes together to build what I think is going to be the future of human connection, and the next generation of computing platforms," Zuckerberg told the Connect crowd. "In every generation of technology, there is competition of ideas for what the future should look like -- and at Meta, we are trying to build a future that is more open, more accessible, more natural, and more about human connection." In other words, by his own admission, Zuck is explicitly in competition with Silicon Valley foes to establish dominance in a new technological landscape that would continue to define how humans engage with each other and with the world at large. Of course, describing a pair of neat new glasses or Dame Judi Dench-voiced AI assistants -- you can also opt for AI John Cena or AI Nora "Awkwafina" Lum if you so choose -- as the "future of human connection" is sanctimonious, and certainly not a mission statement that Meta and its leader have ever shied away from. Still, technological advancement and the tools that define a moment in human history have always played a role in our interpersonal relationships, social norms, and politics -- a role that Meta's social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram didn't originate, but have undeniably filled. Now the wealth that Zuckerberg and his company amassed in the process is being funneled into the billionaire's new vision for the next version of the web and the technology that powers it. And should Meta win out over competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft -- well, leading tech centibillionaires are probably the closest thing we have to emperors, so aut Zuck aut nihil, indeed. And yet, at the exact same moment, Zuck's Ceaser pitch comes amid moves by the CEO to step away from the political sphere. As recent reporting from The New York Times reveals, years of finding himself and his platforms at the center of political controversy and scandal have left the billionaire wanting to disentangle his image from anything that is or could be construed as a partisan political effort. That includes endorsing any candidate for president in the 2024 election cycle, even though one of those candidates -- guess who -- is threatening to send Zuck to jail over false accusations that the Facebook founder colluded to interfere with the 2020 election (as multiple legal reviews have shown, there's no evidence to support the notion that the 2020 election was in any way stolen, rigged, or interfered with by Zuckerberg or anyone else.) "I've made the decision that, for me and for the company, the best thing to do is to try to be as nonpartisan and neutral as possible in all of this and distance ourselves from it as much as possible," Zuckerberg told The Verge's Alex Heath this week during their annual Connect interview. "Maybe it doesn't matter on our platforms, whether I endorse a candidate or not, but I don't want to go anywhere near that." It doesn't feel like a stretch to say that the billionaire's increasingly hypebeast-y wardrobe is reflective of his wish to disengage. This isn't the clean-cut, sweater-wearing, democracy-threatening tech oligarch of the Cambridge Analytica days. This is Cool Mark! Chill Mark! Likable, apolitical, definitely-not-causing-any-problems Mark! But Zuck's powerful place in national and global politics isn't just inherent to his wealth; after all, his alleged stepping back from politics is more or less a classic Libertarian arc. Political power is also inherent to his products, which of course are avenues -- healthy or not -- for politically-charged ideas, discourse, and action. You can't seek to mediate humanity's social world for eternity, and not take on or make decisions about any of its messier, more volatile parts. Maybe the "aut Zuck aut nihil" shirt was an attempt at irony. But its message is ironic because of how much truth there is to it -- and Zuckerberg, meanwhile, wants everything both ways.

Hail Zuckus Maximus! The master of the metaverse is finally sorry ... for ever being sorry | Marina Hyde

Mark Zuckerberg is embracing both AI and full-on imperial monomania. As for petty gripes about elections and teen mental health, so what? The good news is that Mark Zuckerberg has become bored of looking like an answer to the AI prompt "efit of a teen villain". The bad? While the Meta overlord has grown out the Caesar hairstyle that has sustained him since 2016, he is now leaning in to open imperial monomania. This week's Meta Connect conference saw Mark take the stage in a T-shirt reading Aut Zuck Aut Nihil. Either Zuck Or Nothing. The original was Aut Caesar Aut Nihil and was enthusiastically adopted as a motto by one of the worst Borgias (tough field) ... but look, I'm sure it's ironic. Mark's such a gifted ironist. We'll get to the magic glasses and AI feedspam he was pushing at this week's event in a minute - but before we do, let's recap. Easily the most significant thing Mark Zuckerberg has said this year was that he isn't sorry any more - in fact, that he wished he'd never said sorry for most of what he'd ever said sorry for. I paraphrase only slightly. A couple of weeks ago, Zuckerberg appeared on stage for a podcast and called Facebook's willingness to offer stakes-free apologies for things he wasn't to blame for - like election manipulation or the effect of social media on teen mental health - "a 20-year mistake". "And I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle," he reflected, "before our brand is back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place." Please: imagine the force Meta could be if only it hadn't been held back by extremely intermittent synthetic contrition. The upshot is that we might never again hear Mark drone all those Facebook phrases for sorry - "we will learn from this", "we know we have more work to do". That said, the counterpoint to his soz-regret is that they've played quite well for him. Sure, every now and then he's had to pitch up to Congress for hearings which are always described as "tense", heated", "fiery" and even "stunning". But these have repeatedly proved themselves nothing more than the theatre of futility. Not one federal law has ever been passed to regulate Meta, or the other big tech firms. So the occasional few hours in Washington for a besuited "my bad" has been the price you pay for being the world's most powerful oligarch, selling the lives of 3 billion monthly users via a platform that has incentivised hate, then ... can you not just pay it? Apparently not any more. Of course, you may be one of those who feel trepidation at the idea of living in a world where Mark Zuckerberg is no longer minded to take responsibility for things. In which case, he has another world to sell you: the metaverse. Like so many of the tech titans, Mark really does offer an end-to-end service: they make the world worse, then they claim to be leading the escape. Elon Musk with his Mars aspiration, Jeff Bezos with his space programme, Zuckerberg with his virtual knock-off of the real world whose landmark upgrade is that he controls it absolutely. That would certainly appear to be its sole advantage. For a man seemingly without a cultural hinterland, perhaps it's no surprise that the fantasy world Zuckerberg's firm has come up with is a place of such utter conceptual dreariness. We are forever being told that the metaverse is a place where you can shop, have meetings, do real estate deals, attend conferences ... I mean, honestly. Just add "answer infinite email" and you really have simulated paradise. We aren't quite there yet, Mark admitted this week - honestly, it's just round the next corner - but in the meantime he'd love to show you some augmented reality glasses and a cheaper VR headset then the one he asked you to buy last time. Also, now people don't post so much on Facebook and Instagram any more, he is going to start gradually pumping their feeds with personalised AI images that have been created by Meta AI. Mm. Ideally, we will eventually eliminate the need for any human posters at all. Or as the Meta founder prefers it: "We are trying to build a future that is more open, more accessible, more natural, and more about human connection." Go on. "Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology." Historically, of course, there has always been another way to feel truly present with another person, which is to be truly present with another person. But this is not what the emperor would wish for his citizens. He prefers the world atomised, mediated via his machines. One of the most lunatic moments at his event saw Zuckerberg call an affiliated creator on stage, but then proceed to have a conversation with an AI chatbot version of the creator on a giant screen, while the genuine article stood like a lemon on stage just watching. Watching this eerie spectacle, I was reminded of what Mark once said to a Facebook employee whose job eventually became functioning as his ghostwriter. Kind of a flesh-and-bones AI (very 1.0). She had asked him what he meant by the three-word essay prompt he'd given her - "companies not countries". "I think we are moving to a world in which we all become cells in a single organism," Zuckerberg replied, "where we can communicate automatically and can all work together seamlessly." Oof. Well, there you go. Who could fail to be happy that a guy who thinks this is now only sorry that he was ever sorry.