Until recently, Mark Zuckerberg’s most iconic public appearance may have been the image of the young startup founder sweating through his hoodie onstage while journalist Kara Swisher grilled him at a tech conference in 2010. But Zuckerberg’s reputation as someone averse to the hot seat began a couple years earlier, on 60 Minutes.
In the segment, anchor Lesley Stahl tells a 23-year-old Zuckerberg he’s replaced Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as the tech exec that “everyone is talking about.” In response, the CEO of Facebook says nothing, his face placid. “You’re just staring at me,” says Stahl. “Is that a question?” Zuckerberg shoots back. Cue the voiceover: “We were warned that he can be awkward and reluctant to talk about himself.”
Zuckerberg, now a 32-year-old dad with one daughter and another on the way, has evolved considerably in the intervening decade. He hired speechwriters. He spruced up his uniform from Valley schlub to monochrome minimalism. He took on a series of annual self-improvement challenges that made him into a “lifestyle guru” for some male tech workers, according to the New York Times Style section. (The paper said his announcements “sometimes have the feel of software upgrades,” but disciples admire Zuckerberg’s ability to reinvent himself “as a better human being.”)
“One of the things I’ve noticed over the years, he has improved his EQ,” Swisher told BuzzFeed News. (EQ is shorthand for emotional quotient, a popular rubric for measuring interpersonal skills in Silicon Valley.) “He was super, super awkward to talk to and he knew that he had a problem and he was fully aware. He cared about changing it.” He may even have challenged himself to improve. “I’m really shy, I should learn not to be so shy! I can see him saying that,” Swisher said.
Now, Zuckerberg is even leading the charge for Silicon Valley tech CEOs who, post-election, have committed to leaving their bubble and interacting with the American public. He’s actively inserting himself into unfamiliar situations. This time around, however, Zuckerberg has cut out the media middleman. He’s communicating with people through his own platform, where he has amassed 88 million Facebook followers. And he’s not just talking to them about Facebook — he’s talking to them about himself.
The most obvious example of the new and improved Zuckerberg is his 2017 personal challenge: to travel to all 50 states and talk to “folks” about their lives and concerns for the future. Four months in, he is making good time on his vow. He’s already visited an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, sampled BBQ in Baton Rouge, and petted a baby longhorn ("so cute") at a rodeo in Ft. Worth. Oftentimes the themes of these visits coincide with those in the 6,000-word letter that he posted in February arguing in favor of building a global community (and Facebook’s role as the “social infrastructure” underpinning all of it). After every trip, Zuckerberg posts earnest dispatches on his Facebook page, including images taken by the former Obama photographer who now accompanies Zuckerberg on his travels. A communications staffer also comes along to gather details, like the names and quotes that pepper the humanizing anecdotes that make up his posts. The whole thing makes for what one former Obama aide told BuzzFeed News is “definitely an Obama-esque approach.” (Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, went with a slightly different comparison onstage at South by Southwest last month: “I don’t understand why he sounds like a senator in his fourth term. Like, just talk, man! Don’t be so afraid.”)
It is indeed tempting to see Zuckerberg’s listening tour, manifesto, and newly folksy demeanor as an attempt to beta-test a presidential bid — perhaps for 2020, the same year he turns 35. After all, Facebook’s platform has been known to launch a political career or two. Denials from Zuckerberg — including telling BuzzFeed News in January that he had no plans to run for president — have been laughed off.
“I don’t understand why he sounds like a senator in his fourth term. Like, just talk, man! Don’t be so afraid.”
Facebook declined repeated requests to interview Zuckerberg on this topic (no surprise given the company’s zero-tolerance policy on acknowledging its own self-interest). But the CEO of a $400 billion company doesn’t schedule 30 action-packed trips in one year, with a small content production staff in tow, just to lend folks an ear. Facebook is a leviathan and, as its leader, Zuckerberg has plenty of reasons to benefit from a whistlestop tour without ever running for office.
If you think of Zuckerberg as a startup CEO, positioning himself like a fourth-term senator doesn't make sense — but it does if you think of him as the head of a 14-year-old nation-state called Facebook. At a time when Silicon Valley’s influence rivals Washington, DC's, Zuckerberg is using the framework of a political campaign (and its mix of the personal and the professional) to build a playbook for the modern-day CEO-statesman.
“Every single wealthy business person or billionaire has got to be watching Trump and thinking, 'I can do that and I have a lot of good ideas,'” said Swisher. “I’m not sure [Zuckerberg] knows what he’s doing yet. He’s very very well meaning, at least compared to most people. He wants to find out if there’s some way to fix the damn thing.”
In classic Facebook fashion, however, Zuckerberg has launched this political campaign without really taking a political position. (How else did he become the new poster CEO for civic engagement without ever disclosing who he voted for?) Where candidates want to win over citizens to push through policies and ideologies, CEOs need soft power to smooth the way for their ideas and products. The listening tour and manifesto are an opportunity for Zuckerberg to strengthen his relationship with his 1.8 billion constituents.
“He wants to build social capital and he knows he can’t do that if he has the nerdy-guy track record,” a former Facebook executive told BuzzFeed News. A guiding phrase inside Facebook is “preserving optionality” — Stanford-speak for keeping your alternatives open. The same philosophy drove Facebook to place bets on every promising new technology platform from virtual reality to artificial intelligence: Zuckerberg has turned setting himself up to succeed into a science. And now, with the relatively recent formation of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — the philanthropy-focused LLC to which he and his wife have pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook shares, worth an estimated $45 billion — he is at the apex of his influence, with few signs of stopping. Zuckerberg has every reason to win your likes, and he’s built a remarkable apparatus to do it.
Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook / Via facebook.com
Zuckerberg’s sprint across the United States comes at a portentous moment for tech, and for Facebook.
Katie Jacobs Stanton, a former Twitter executive who also worked as director of citizen participation under Obama, told BuzzFeed News that after years of measuring success on growth rates, monthly active users, and the efficiency of hiring fewer employees, the industry is looking around and wondering how it got here. “It’s Silicon Valley growing up. After 10 to 15 years of thinking we were making the world a better place, [the events of the past year] have brought about some soul searching. We're in our adolescence stage — optimistic, naive, and perhaps a bit awkward,” she said.
At Facebook in particular, “everyone at that company is stinging from the post-election fallout,” said the former Obama aide. “Not just sensationalism or hyper-partisanship, but mainstreaming the alt-right and right-wing populist resurgence.” Right now, Zuckerberg needs public goodwill to protect the idea that his product is a tool for connectivity and not misinformation, mass surveillance, or censorship. Add to that Facebook’s stranglehold on the media and the $18 billion online advertising market, and suddenly the term “antitrust regulation” sounds like more than just a quaint European custom. Lately, even the word “platform,” which once made it easy for tech companies to evade accountability, is starting to sound sinister. The New York Times recently argued that companies like Facebook, Google, and Uber are largely responsible for “rehabilitating the concept” of a monopoly in their endless drive to dominate.
At the same time, Silicon Valley’s pseudo-statesmen are coming to occupy an odd place in the cultural firmament as quasi-celebrities and sherpas to our uncertain future.
“Never before have we had a time when we are so viscerally connected to company leaders,” Brooke Hammerling, a high-profile public relations executive and the founder of Brew PR, told BuzzFeed News. “My parents were never like, ‘I love the founders of my refrigerator company!’” In this case, “people who have never met Mark Zuckerberg call him Zuck. They spend their lives in these platforms and apps. That’s why it’s so important for the success of that company. He’s their public face.”
Margit Wennmachers, a PR guru and partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which is also an investor in BuzzFeed, said that Zuckerberg has to deal with an added layer of complexity because he’s synonymous with Facebook. “You end up being very associated with all the features and all the bugs,” she said. Thanks in part to Zuckerberg’s own creation, anyone with an online following can be a self-styled pundit. But unlike, say, a B-list actor tweeting about geopolitics, people actually want tech moguls to weigh in. Virtue signaling has become as much of a duty for a modern-day Silicon Valley CEO as writing a mission statement or releasing diversity numbers (even if the virtue is superficial and the diversity numbers are low).
That personal connection with chief executives of consumer-facing companies comes with higher expectations. Perhaps to preempt social media scrutiny, tech CEOs and venture capitalists have been eager to volunteer themselves as socially conscious tribute over the past few months, treating Trump’s presidency as a second chance to make a good impression. Zuckerberg’s contemporaries are already copying his moves: “Many of us leaders have been inspired to speak up more recently,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told Forbes India during a recent trip to the subcontinent. “We preside over a huge community of people, and policies and the way people live together have an impact. When we design our community, we think like politicians legislating for their constituents.” Last month, John Zimmer, the CEO of Lyft, made the dynamic sound even more intimate, describing his ride-hailing software application as a “better boyfriend” to consumers. “We’re woke,” said Zimmer, whose company is financed by the venture capital fund founded by top Trump adviser Peter Thiel (who also happens to be a Facebook board member).
So before headlines accuse Zuckerberg of finally asphyxiating the media industry or dictating what your kid gets to learn in school (CZI is helping to build personalized learning software that's already being used by 20,000 students), why not bank some family-friendly pics of him posing with a shrimp boat captain or walking around the campus of a historically black college? Billionaires and tech titans “who successfully influence politics and policy have a public persona of being relatable and not seeming like they’re soulless,” the former Obama aide explained. It can only help Zuckerberg’s cause if he “doesn’t just seem like some automaton when he’s trying to lobby Congress, but has a family and beliefs.”
And as any modern influencer knows, there’s no better lobbyist for Mark Zuckerberg’s personal brand than those closest to him: his brilliant, compassionate wife Priscilla, his adorable daughter Max, and their mop of a dog, Beast. Much like a lifestyle blogger, Zuckerberg uses his Palo Alto home as the backdrop for his posts as often as his instantly recognizable glass-walled conference room at Facebook’s headquarters, referred to internally as the Aquarium. “People trust people more when they get a sense of them as human beings,” said Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and a longtime friend and mentor of Zuckerberg’s.
It’s a new twist on the old saying: If the CEO is not (overtly) selling the product, he is the product.
Even his philanthropist buddy Bill Gates is participating in the performative fun. Zuckerberg recently posted a Saturday Night Live–style promo of himself and Gates in which Zuck aims to build up hype for his upcoming Harvard commencement speech. (“They know we didn’t actually graduate, right?” Zuckerberg quips, billionaire to billionaire, to lighten the mood.)
When this strategy is at its best, Zuckerberg conflates the personal and the professional seamlessly. It’s a new twist on the old saying: If the CEO is not (overtly) selling the product, he is the product.
At Facebook’s F8 developer conference in April 2016, Zuckerberg used his own life as a way to explain the importance of 360-degree video. “When I was a baby and I took my first steps, my parents wrote the date in a baby book,” he said. “And when my daughter Max takes her first steps hopefully later this year, I want to capture the whole scene with a 360 video.” Eight months later, in December, Zuckerberg posted a 360 video that he had teased of Max walking. “We’re connected to him on an emotional level,” said Hammerling of the video, adding of course that it “showcased the technology in such a beautiful way.”
