Half a year in, it seems like Mark Zuckerberg's right-wing turn — which came complete with a woo-woo midlife rebrand — is still going strong.
Faced with the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office, Zuckerberg conveniently molted out of his pseudo-progressive skin and into a darling of the manosphere. He's since appeared on shows like Joe Rogan to complain that US business culture needs to "regrow its manhood," because American capitalism is "culturally neutered."
"A culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits," he mused to Rogan back in February.
Zuckerberg is no stranger to unflattering nicknames by his underlings — who could forget his employees calling him the "Eye of Sauron"? — but his latest moniker of "MAGA Mark" might hit hardest so far.
That's from a recent profile by the Financial Times, which interviewed 45 people who know or previously worked with Zuckerberg and posed an intriguing question: is this all a midlife crisis, or is MAGA Mark who Zuckerberg has been all along?
"When he was 19 years old, I think he had an idea in his head of what a CEO was supposed to be like and he was trying to be that, especially in public," Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth told the FT. "The public is seeing him more how we have, internally, since the beginning."
Another insider concurred, saying Zuckerberg "put on a suit and cut his hair" in an effort to "be a good boy."
"The whole time this was all one inch underneath," the anonymous insider told the financial newspaper. "Then he said, 'f*** it. I might as well be the person I really am.'"
This corroborates earlier reporting from 2024, when insiders told the press Zuckerberg harbored right-wing libertarian views, as the CEO's cynical front began to show. That narrative, of course, runs counter to the view that Zuckerberg was a darling liberal simply figuring out what he believes in a new political era.
Regardless of which camp you fall into, though, the reality is that it doesn't really matter.
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