Zuckerberg's Employees Have a Wild New Nickname for Him

Half a year in, it seems like Mark Zuckerberg's early 2025 right-wing turn — which came complete with a woo-woo midlife rebrand — is still going strong. [maybe woo-woo isnt the best fit, just makes me laugh + i think it fits w his gi] 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 conservative 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 […]

Jun 21, 2025 - 19:20

Zuckerberg's Employees Have a Wild New Nickname for Him

While some argue that Zuckerberg's simply experiencing a midlife crisis, others say the public is now seeing the man he's been all along.

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.

Zuckerberg's staggering wealth puts him beyond the whims of surface-level partisan politics. His company amounts to nothing less than a globe-spanning empire — a Dutch East-India Company for the digital era. And like the colonial merchants of yore, Zuckerberg protects Meta with an iron fist.

"The top leadership owe their fortune and status to Zuckerberg," media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan told the FT, describing a syndicate in which executives perform rituals of fealty under fear of being blacklisted. "That's an imperial way of being."

Indeed, Zuckerberg's ruthless accumulation of wealth has had many brutal consequences throughout the world. Meta has played a central role in crises like the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, the breakdown of human rights in Ethiopia, and the systemic censorship of Palestinians.

Ultimately, it's hard to believe there's much at the core of Zuckerberg beyond a bottomless hunger for adoration and obscene wealth. So we'll probably keep seeing similar rebrandings for the rest of his life — even though the new Mark remains much the same as the old.

More on Zuckerberg: Mark Zuckerberg's Wife Is Shutting Down a School for Low Income Families

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