Mark Zuckerberg: the 'nerd' who wants to be an alpha male

Luis Granena

as a guest

, one of the most listened to in the world —it has some 11 million listeners, the vast majority of whom are men— and also a controversial space that has hosted different varieties of deniers and given pabulum to conspiracy theories of the wild right.

In three hours of conversation, the founder of Facebook —the current Meta— had time for everything.

To re-sell his idea of ​​the metaverse, which he is having a hard time putting in place, and, incidentally,

his public image, to put it Silicon Valley style.

Before Rogan, who was a taekwondo champion, Zuckerberg left behind his image of a

who learned to code at age 10 with an Atari computer and studied Classics at Harvard —one of his daughters is called August, because of his obsession with Emperor Augustus— , and sold himself, in the words of Bloomberg columnist Max Chafkin, “as a gym rat obsessed with combat sports, a college athlete who played three sports, and a

”.

Zuckerberg, who grew up fencing at Exeter Academy, the famous boarding school where he attended high school, assured that there is nothing he likes more than "fighting with his friends", because of how "primitive" it is, and that he will never watch TV because that's a "beta activity."

That is, something unbecoming of the alpha male he aspires to be.

Just two days later, as if to underline the idea, he posted some images on his Instagram account in which he was seen practicing mixed martial arts.

Several champions, such as the Irishman 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, physician and philanthropist Priscilla Chan (they met at a party in 2003 and married in 2012), and their two daughters.

This week they have announced that they expect the third.

Over the past decade, the guy who founded Facebook to rate the physiques of college girls has cultivated an image of the family man, softening that of the communication-impaired boy-genius seen on

(2010), a film that he detests and considers "hurtful".

But now he seems to have tired of the memes with his image surfing with his face completely covered in sunscreen, like a mime riding the waves, and of the jokes about his robotic appearance when he appeared before the Senate for the irregularities of Facebook in the elections. United States Generals in 2016.

Luis Granena

He wants to be seen as a testosterone leader who has transferred his new style even to his business 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 come under greater scrutiny.

“I think some of you will decide that this place is no longer for you and that self-selection is fine with me.

Realistically, there are people in the company who shouldn't be here,” he wrote, using rhetoric far removed from the California good-naturedness of the past decade, when tech company campuses vied to sell themselves as creative-play havens.

The new boss Zuckerberg speaks like the head of human resources who has had to act as a bad cop before an ERE.

“Meta is losing a lot of money.

Even so, it is strange that he considers that he has to

this idea of ​​masculinity, because those who truly have the upper hand do not need it”, point out from Proyecto Una, a group that tracks traces of patriarchy on the internet, authors of the book

(Descontrol editorial).

Indeed, Zuckerberg has fallen to the 20th richest man in the world (he was once third) and lost $71 billion, more than half of his personal fortune, so far this year.

Lynn Horton, a sociologist at the University of Texas and author of

(Rowman & Littlefield), points out via email that the founder of Facebook/Meta (and owner of Instagram and WhatsApp) is not the Silicon Valley's only titan undergoing a

.

"The media is buzzing about Jeff Bezos's transformation from linnet to stud since his divorce," she says.

The creator of Amazon and currently the world's richest man sports chestless shirts and is very interested in winning the space race of the rich.

"The billionaires in the sector cultivated that stereotype of the weirdo, of the loser who wins in the end (...) Zuckerberg and Bezos also promoted a whiter and more reliable image to avoid greater control over their business practices," according to Horton.

Instead, "now we've seen some of these billionaires veer toward a model of masculinity that emphasizes the body, assertiveness, and heterosexual prowess," he says.

According to Horton, this shift in style by Zuckerberg and Bezos, often blamed on their respective midlife crises, doesn't fundamentally alter the factors.

It is just another way of presenting an indissoluble marriage, that of the patriarchy and the financial elite.

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