Zuck Around and Find Out: Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s MAGA-Masculinity Crisis

Mark Zuckerberg has gone from Donald Trump’s enemies list to the Mar-a-Lago guest list in less than a year’s time, and enjoyed a prime seat at the inauguration with his fellow tech titans. On this episode, host and Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones, as well as executive editor Claire Howorth and Hive editor Michael Calderone, trace Zuckerberg’s transformation of Meta alongside the Facebook cofounder’s own style upgrade and desire for more “masculine energy” in the corporate world. Will Zuckerberg survive—and perhaps, even thrive—in a second Trump term?

But first, let’s rewind a bit: Zuckerberg, now 40, became a nationally known entity in his early 20s, around 2004, when Facebook first launched. He initially presented as an awkward but anodyne boy wonder beating the drum of disruption and innovation. Much of the “lore around him,” Jones notes, was later “cemented” by his dramatis personae in the 2010 film The Social Network. “Here’s this guy who feels a little bit shut out. He wants to get the girl. He wants to be in the cool clubs at Harvard. And he starts this social network, in part to create a space where he is in charge and can sort of profit from other people connecting,” she says. “But if you give Zuckerberg the benefit of the doubt and you say, all right, well, he really wanted to connect people. He also ends up representing the arc of the internet…from this very optimistic place where you’re going to hang out with your friends to something that’s way more dystopian and cynical.”

Of course, Facebook itself played a major role in shaping that negative perception. During the 2016 election, Russian operatives used the platform to spread divisive and misleading election content in order to aid Trump’s campaign. A year later, the platform was heavily criticized for failing to clamp down on hate speech that helped fuel a genocide in Myanmar. The hits kept coming: In 2018, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica surreptitiously harvested Facebook’s user data for the purpose of political advertising, raising major concerns about social media’s role in undermining user privacy and elections. And then there was the notorious release of the “Facebook files,” in which whistleblower Frances Haugen alleged that the site knowingly harmed teen mental health and did virtually nothing by way of remedy. (Meta has said they are committed to providing teens with a safe online experience.)

Over the years, scandals like these eventually chipped away at Zuckerberg’s image as a relatively harmless, hoodie-wearing whiz kid, and recast him as just another cold, calculating billionaire. But what, exactly, accounts for his MAGA-morphosis? Calderone, for one, has two running theories: One involves Sheryl Sandberg, who, as chief operating officer of Facebook until 2022, apparently rankled Zuckerberg by creating a culture of diversity and inclusivity at Facebook. The other theory has to do with Zuckerberg’s belief in “free speech”; the entrepreneur has long bristled at concerns that his platform amplifies misinformation and hate speech, and has sought to abdicate responsibility for limiting either.

Needless to say, with the return of Trump, who has railed against all things DEI, Zuckerberg appears to be feeling more at peace with himself than ever. He now regularly dons baggy black tees, gold chains, a quasi-mullet, and not to mention an entirely transformed body thanks to a rigorous workout routine and a love of Brazilian jiujitsu. As for Meta, the CEO donated heavily to Trump’s inauguration, single-handedly ended the platform’s fact-checking program, and installed UFC CEO Dana White as a member of the board. “He’s talking about bringing more masculine energy into the company,” Calderone explains. “This is a company where the majority of employees are male, so it’s not just about bringing men into it, it’s about bringing a certain type of energy, and his frustrations with corporations becoming more ‘neutered.’” “He’s talking not just about his own personal experience with working out and training and fighting, but something that Meta is lacking, or something that Meta or corporations in general have kind of veered away from.”

Zuckerberg’s latest displays of machismo might attract a lot of attention. But, as Howorth argues, they hardly guarantee an outsize influence in Trump 2.0. “I think he’s peaked. His influence is on the wane. Threads? Users are down. WhatsApp? Users are down. Instagram engagement is declining. Facebook users are dropping among young people,” she explains. “Those are not thriving business markers and he’s behind in the biggest game of all, which is AI. So yeah, I can see he’s despo. Pressure’s on. And, you know, he’s got a bad perm.”