Until pretty recently, if you thought of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, you’d probably come up with a flesh-and-blood automaton whose mission to connect the world turned into the upending of political systems and poisoning of our information environment — not to mention that weird metaverse side project. Accusations that his platform helped get Donald Trump elected in 2016 led to a series of scandals that the company struggled to effectively respond to — at least until another billionaire rose to take his crown.
By July 2023, some of Zuckerberg’s detractors were ready to give him a pass because they’d found a new enemy. That month, Meta launched Threads, its competitor to an increasingly right-wing and conspiracy-filled Twitter/X. Zuckerberg’s opportunistic move to take advantage of Twitter’s struggles under its new owner was recast by some of Elon Musk’s newfound critics as a political move to show that Meta was different. All of a sudden, a company with one of the worst reputations in tech was being positioned as something of a liberal darling.
Zuckerberg’s new fans wanted to see him as Musk’s foil — the better social media baron — despite history showing that they were two sides of the same coin. The billionaires even played into the supposed rivalry by suggesting they were going to physically fight each other, as robotic Zuckerberg morphed into a mixed martial arts enthusiast. When he unveiled a more muscular build, alongside baggy shirts and gold chains a little later, segments of social media went wild, and it seemed like his days of being one the most hated corporate executives in Silicon Valley were behind him. But Zuckerberg was never who those newfound Musk haters wanted him to be.
In 2023, Meta had lifted its…
Auteur: Paris Marx
