The Redemption of Mark Zuckerberg
The Facebook mogul seems to have undergone a genuine transformation. Will anyone notice?
Near the end of Wes Anderson’s best film, 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums, the titular character, Royal, once a prestigious figure in the New York social scene, works as a bellhop for the Lindbergh Palace Hotel. After faking a cancer diagnosis to grift off his broken family while mired in debt, Royal is thrown out when his ex-wife’s new fiancé learns of his lies. With nowhere left to turn, Royal takes a gig running the elevator at the palatial hotel he once called home.
As much as any character in Anderson’s arc, Royal is the man who lost everything. When his forlorn son Richie visits him one day to confide a decades-long love for his step-sister Margot, Royal explains that he’s trying to become a new man by, for once in his miserable life, working an honest gig for his keep.
“I wanted to prove I could pay my dues and whatnot,” Royal says. “I just hope somebody notices.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t lose everything, but he lost enough to know the feeling. Though his business empire remains fully intact, Zuckerberg’s outward-facing profile has suffered magnificently in the decades since Facebook set the social media world alight. His image is so tarnished, in fact, that there is simply nothing Zuckerberg can do to convince his harshest critics that he has spent the needed years to improve his icy dork soul.
In the MAGA world, Zuckerberg is persona non grata. Despite President-elect Trump’s sudden supportive statements of Zuckerberg, his most faithful groaned upon learning of Zuckerberg’s multiple visits to Mar-a-Lago following Trump’s historic comeback victory in November. They rolled their eyes when it was revealed that Zuckerberg intended to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. They squealed with dismay when images of Zuckerberg (and Bezos) sat behind Trump at the Capitol Rotunda on Inauguration Day scrolled across the television. And they ran to X and Fox News to moan about Zuckerberg’s recent conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan, during which the Meta man’s ideas sounded like a true, reformed vision of the tech-center right.
In typical Rogan fashion, the pair spoke for nearly three hours. On almost every topic covered, Zuckerberg sounded clear-headed, independent, and positively freed of the secular liberalism that has been duly forced upon every man of his age. The change is so abrupt that left-wing outlets are lashing out at Zuckerberg, accusing him of slighting them in the most awful way—going red.
An open book with Rogan, Zuckerberg admitted his own fact-checking empire was “something straight out of 1984.” He threw the Biden administration under the bus, explaining that his team was subjected to repeated harassment from the Covid tyrants, and that he was too easily manipulated by their battle cry of authoritarianism. He confessed his company’s stance on vaccine censorship was wrong in its totality and committed to a new system that would take its cues from his competitor, X’s Community Notes, which seeks to find common ground among political divisions when checking the veracity of information. Then the 40-year-old from White Plains turned his attention to Trump, noting he was “optimistic” about the Don’s second chance at the Oval Office.
For MAGA, none of it was to be believed. This was the man, after all, who had used his unlimited capital to submarine Trump’s reelection bid in 2020. This was the man who had thrown them off social media platforms for protesting the masking of our nation’s children. This was the guy who until just yesterday was glumly looking down his smug nose at the peasantry shouting in vain across his networks. It certainly didn’t matter that Zuckerberg threw all caution to the wind with a string of new hires aimed concretely at appeasing the worries of Trump and his base. No matter what that pale technocrat said, there would be no peace.
Zuckerberg first hired the Republican operative Joel Kaplan as his chief of global policy. Then he named the Ultimate Fighting Championship boss and Trump ally Dana White to Meta’s board of directors. Zuckerberg could have hailed Trump in his interview with Rogan; he could have pledged fealty to the Catturds of the crybaby right. None of it would have mattered to Trump’s red-meat base. For them, Elon Musk, the video-game–playing, H-1B–loving South African who had spent the Christmas holiday banning critics and ripping verification badges from anyone who dared question his positions on immigrant labor and Israel, was the real vision of a new American freedom.
The reality of MAGA is that almost everyone who calls the populist front home has come and gone and come again. It’s the very nature of a movement that was doubted, maligned, and mocked by almost everyone under the big, hot American sun. Their new favorite, Musk, supported Obama, Hillary Clinton, and, in the most important election of the modern age, pulled the lever for Biden. The wealthiest man in the world turned away from Biden after Scranton Joe privately told the X-man that his products would not be rubber-stamped without government oversight.
Vice President J.D. Vance was also once a bitter critic of the man he now serves, comparing Trump to Hitler in the run-up to the 2016 election. Of the millions who now proudly boast their MAGA bona fides, how many have remained from the first moments Trump descended the escalator in 2015? Yet for Zuckerberg, who appears to hold no animosity despite suffering constant abuse from his right-wing critics, there may never be peace. The whole affair says more about the contentious and unrelenting nature of Trump’s sanctimonious base than it does of Zuckerberg, who by all accounts has done nothing but confess the sins of his past while bettering the man he is today.
Contrary to criticisms leveled by the left-wing press, Zuckerberg has yet to grovel at the foot of Trump. And despite his bro-talk therapy session with Rogan, clearly aimed at reforming his sullied image within a certain sector of the American right, it isn’t in Zuckerberg’s nature to beg for the soft right limelight that has drawn Musk like a moth to the flame.
After all, it wasn’t Zuckerberg who rented out a $2,000-a-night cottage in the wings of Mar-a-Lago following Trump’s reelection in order to cozy up to Trump. It wasn’t Zuckerberg clamoring for the creation of a new government agency to—combat new government agencies. It certainly wasn’t Zuckerberg who was caught on camera clamoring for attention while poorly imitating Trump’s infamous YMCA dance during a New Year’s Eve party at White House South. And it wasn’t Zuckerberg who was forced to remedy a self-inflicted wound on Inauguration Day after throwing up what can best be described as a Roman salute. That was all Musk.
It’s impossible to not draw comparisons and contrasts between the robber barons of our tech age. One, a foreigner whose climate alarmism helped bootstrap his fledgling electric car company empire via well-timed handouts from the American taxpayer. The other, an American technocrat whose soulless eyes and impassive face oversaw a business built on friends and families sharing lives spent gazing into a blue abyss. The sucking sound we can all faintly hear emanating from both men’s biographies is the music of our new American enterprises, which empty the pocketbooks and souls of our people without remorse.
For those who have astutely followed the arc of these two men, however, selling Musk as the based Kekius Maximus begins and ends with the realization that his shift to the political right seems less an introspection of the soul and more the kind of ruthless business decision a man is prone to take when he notices the tea leaves swimming in a new direction. It’s really no different a motivation than that of Zuckerberg, who has cleverly counted the chips and thrown in his lot with those he sought to silence only a few short years ago. The only difference: One is hailed and the other goaded.
“In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot,” the American author Mark Twain elegantly wrote. “In any civic crisis of a great and dangerous sort the common herd is not privately anxious about the rights and wrongs of the matter, it is only anxious to be on the winning side. In the North, before the War, the man who opposed slavery was despised and ostracized, and insulted. By the ‘Patriots.’ Then, by and by, the ‘Patriots’ went over to his side, and thenceforth his attitude became patriotism.”
Twain foresaw all the tech moguls, from Musk to Zuckerberg to Bezos, 150 years before their inception. The ghost of Mark Twain was likely nodding along as each of the men, all of whom were harsh Trump critics at one time or another, took their seats behind the 47th president in the Rotunda at the Inauguration. He correctly predicted the predicament that haunts the American right. At its core, a pro-people, anti-establishment political movement helmed and entrusted by the most anti-people, pro-establishment figures of our time.
Musk does deserve some small bit of credit. He correctly read the winds of change sooner than most of his counterparts, and for that he has been crowned God-king by his most ardent supporters (and himself). Zuckerberg’s path, however, has been one in the quiet wilderness. When two paths emerged, when no one was watching, Zuckerberg routinely, and with little notice, took the road less traveled.
The first inkling of Zuckerberg’s impending arc to the cultural and political Right began in the most unconventional of places—the Octagon. In a post to Instagram in May of 2023, Zuckerberg shared a photo of himself standing on a UFC mat with his arm raised in celebration. “Competed in my first jiu jitsu tournament and won some medals,” wrote the Meta man. Joe Rogan, speaking of Zuckerberg’s political shift following the pair’s interview in January, credited Zuckerberg’s newfound interest in fighting, and specifically jiu-jitsu, with his turn away from the machinations of liberalism.
“Nothing turns you into a libertarian like jiu-jitsu,” Rogan stated. “Nothing turns you into a person who values hard work, discipline, and struggle like jiu-jitsu. Because of the exposure of character on a level that, like, there’s nothing else like it. You expose character in a way that’s almost impossible, even with other martial arts.”
Zuckerberg further ingratiated himself with the UFC community when he was photographed working out with champions Israel Adesanya and Alexander Volkanovski only months later. Zuckerberg, shredded from head to toe, looked every bit the part next to two of the toughest men on the planet. Outside the Octagon, Zuckerberg has shown a keen eye for fashion, donning gold chains and crafting his own Roman-inspired clothing line with the help of the Los Angeles–based fashion designer Mike Amiri. Zuck’s super-long, super-wide t-shirt line features a number of Greek and Latin phrases, including “pathei mathos,” which translates to “learning through suffering.”
Zuckerberg’s public testimony was further laid bare throughout his recent, hours-long chat with Rogan. In perhaps the most startling revelation of all, Zuckerberg took dead aim at the Girlboss complex, suggesting that masculinity had been unduly carved out of the professional work experience and that its removal had created an inorganic power structure that emphasized the feminine above all else, including the practical.
If any of the tech moguls have suffered the severe fate of (un)popular opinion, it has been Zuckerberg, who was depicted as a ruthless, conniving, backstabbing despot in David Fincher’s 2010 biographical drama film The Social Network. That tainted legacy has followed Zuckerberg for the better part of 15 years, as an entire generation came to know him as the friendless slime who snaked the Winklevoss twins before ultimately snaking his friend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. The bit about the Winkelvoss twins was coated in fantasy—Zuckerberg barely knew the twins outside their sordid legal battles. And Saverin, whose character is essentially ripped off by fictional Zuckerberg, later clarified that “the movie was clearly intended to be entertainment and not a fact-based documentary.”
The screenwriter Aaron Sorkin went to great lengths to craft an enjoyable film, one in which the narrative finds its villains and heroes. Zuckerberg, clearly the arch-villain, has spent the better part of a decade mending the social wounds created in the gap between the film’s perceived character and the actual man he has sought to become. That man, to the surprise of those who haven’t followed the tech titan closely, is one who cares deeply about his family and his nation.
A day after Facebook launched its IPO in 2012, Zuckerberg married his college sweetheart, Dr. Priscilla Chan. The pair met at a party during her freshman year at Harvard University in 2003 and have been together ever since. The couple have three children; there has never been so much as a whisper of infidelity about the two. Compare that with the notoriously wandering eyes of his competitors, and Zuck comes across as downright angelic. Early in 2024, Zuckerberg gifted his wife with an aquatic themed sculpture in her honor and nodded to his antique interests in the caption: “Bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife,” wrote Zuck.
As with almost every action he takes, Zuckerberg was derided and mocked: for the sculpture, for his hair, for his chains, and for what appears to be a genuine interest in jiu jitsu and fashion. While Musk stands accused of paying for the video game achievements he so eagerly boasts about on X, and as Bezos flaunts his lingerie-modeling sidepiece-turned-fiancée without shame in front of the American people, there was Zuckerberg on Inauguration Day with his wife of 13 years, beaming with a well-earned confidence. The Zuck had finally, somehow, implausibly, come around.
Watching the whole scene play out, the New York Times was firmly convinced. After Zuckerberg’s visits to Mar-a-Lago, friends and associates told the paper in early January that Zuckerberg’s rightward political and cultural shift is genuine. The PayPal founder and right-wing philanthropist Peter Thiel showed no apparent reservations when he extended an invitation for Zuckerberg to attend a party he threw the Saturday before Trump’s inauguration. And then there’s Trump, the man who moves the needle more than any figure in today’s conservative politics.
Trump, the transactional president, is convinced in the only way he requires. Besides hosting the Meta man repeatedly at Mar-a-Lago, Trump made sure to feature Zuckerberg prominently among other top tech talent seated at the Rotunda on Inauguration Day. If Trump can move on, why not his followers as well? Only time will tell. For now, the testimony of Mark Zuckerberg will have to suffice, for those willing to hear it.
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