Rise to Fame
TheFacebook launched on February 4, 2004. Within two weeks, half of Harvard's student body had signed up. He'd already tested the appetite with Facemash, a hot-or-not site that got him in trouble with the school and proved he had a read on what people actually wanted from the internet: to look at each other. He dropped out that spring and moved the company to California. The Winklevoss twins came for him next, claiming he'd stolen their idea. They settled for around $65 million in cash and Facebook stock, which still looks like a terrible deal for them in hindsight. He was reportedly the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 23.
In the Spotlight
Meta posted $164.5 billion in revenue for 2024, with 3.35 billion people using its apps daily. That's the easy part. The harder story is January 2025: he ended fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration, and rewrote Meta's content policies on immigration and gender identity. He framed it as a 'cultural tipping point.' Critics called it something else. The FTC antitrust trial opened that April, and he was among the first witnesses called. He's also committed to spending $60-65 billion on data centers in 2025 alone, an AI bet so large it's already forcing layoffs.
Side Notes
He took up BJJ during the pandemic and turned it into a competitive obsession. He trains with UFC champions, built an octagon at his Hawaii ranch, and has won gold medals in competition. Meta formally disclosed his combat sports as an investor risk factor in its 2023 annual report, alongside extreme sports and recreational aviation. When he summoned senior executives to Hawaii and pushed them to spar with him, former Meta president Nick Clegg described being mounted by him as 'too intimate to feel comfortable.' The company filed him as a physical liability. He seems to think that's a feature, not a bug.