Everyone, it seems, has a price. A number at which point morals, ethics, and beliefs go out of the window, flying off into the void and never returning. But what if you have unlimited money? What if there is literally no number on Earth that can improve your status?
That is when it becomes one thing in particular: power.
Ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the top-level tech companies have seen their leaders inch closer to the president with such alarming regularity that it makes you think whether or not they’re studying Trump’s inner workings as clues to get ahead in their own quasi-human robot building campaigns.
‘The public is seeing him as we have since the beginning’
Zuckerberg is no different. He was spotted at Trump’s inauguration in the front row seat, alongside Bezos (Amazon), Cook (Apple), the guy who owns Google (nobody remembers his name), and future-BFF-turned-sales-assistant Elon Musk.
“A culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits,” he mused to Rogan back in February, putting himself firmly in the running as the top tech bro. He missed out on Elon and the South African was instead given a lukewarm, three-legged stool next to Trump’s Oval Office throne, but nevertheless, his workers at Meta had already embraced his right-wing shift and run with it.
Over the past few months, high-level staff at Meta have quietly started referring to Mark Zuckerberg as “MAGA Mark”, a striking departure from the more ironic “Eye of Sauron” moniker associated with his early days as a regular human being. This revelation comes from a Financial Times investigation, which sheds light on an internal culture shaken by what some employees see as a jarring shift in their CEO’s identity.
“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.”
“The whole time this was all one inch underneath,” one anonymous insider said. “Then he said, ‘f*** it. I might as well be the person I really am.’”