#435 Mark Zuckerberg's Empire

What I learned from reading Mark: A journey to the heart of history's largest nonterritorial empire by Jeremy Stern. Made possible by: Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Applovin: ⁠https://applovin.com⁠ Vanta: ⁠https://vanta.com/founders⁠ 0:00 — "For these, I set no bounds in space or time. I have given empire without end." — Latin verse from the Aeneid, recalled by Mark Zuckerberg 2:55 — "Carthage must be destroyed." — Mark Zuckerberg on Google 2:59 — Sean Parker observed "this kind of imperial tendency" in Mark. 3:35 — "Either a Caesar or nothing." (Zuckerberg's shirt) 4:25 — "What is it like to be one of the most powerful men in human history, who, by age 42 has secured a place in the books that'll be written about his era for centuries after his death?" 4:55 — "People call him arrogant. He's not. But time after time, his arrogance just turns into truth." 7:25 — "One day they will be out of office and eventually dead, while Zuckerberg, whose majority control of Meta's voting power makes his removal effectively impossible, could in fifty years still be ruler of his empire." 8:05 — "The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire." (The Dictator's Dilemma) 14:15 — "I think we all have a void in our lives, and the lucky ones find something that fills that space to make us more optimal, to make us a better human being. Mark filled the void with fighting." — Zuckerberg's MMA coach 16:40 — "There have been too many things that I've tried to build and then have been told, 'Nah, you can't really build that,' by the platform provider. At some level, I'm just like, 'Nah, fuck that.'" — Mark Zuckerberg 18:05 — "Meta's capital expenditure this year will exceed the military budget of every country on Earth except the United States, China, and Russia." 18:15 — "This is how it is for him; there is no stopping. He is not like the others of his vintage, who all at some point abdicate, or sell, or are overthrown." 20:15 — "I'm never going to stop." — Mark Zuckerberg 31:15 — "Mark is the fucking Terminator. He's actually not an asshole. He's not a miserable fuck. His source of advantage is he's never happy. He just doesn't fucking stop." — A researcher at a competing AI lab, who formerly worked at Meta 39:55 — "This is who I am. I love this. I didn't set out to build a company. I just love building things." — Mark Zuckerberg 40:35 — "You can't take this away from him. He wouldn't be him if he stopped."

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So this episode is going to be a little different. It's not on a book, but it's on this excellent long-form profile of Mark Zuckerberg that my friend Jeremy Stern wrote. The name of the profile, the title of the profile is called Mark, and the subtitle is "A Journey to the Heart of History's Largest Non-Territorial Empire." And the piece opens with Jeremy interviewing Mark Zuckerberg's parents, and he says, "There they are, the Zuckerbergs. They look you in the eye and they don't break contact. His dad is a ham, his mother is shy. I don't know what I expected them to be like, but for whatever reason, this wasn't it." So they talk about what Mark was like as a child. His dad says, "He didn't stand out as the bright one in the family. If anyone, I would guess our middle daughter, Donna, was considered the nerd or the smart one in the family."

• 0:44Speaker 00

  His dad continues, "We just had four really bright, successful kids. We're equally proud of all of them. Mark just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was a perfect confluence of his passion." And then his mom hits on something that you and I talk about over and over again. You see this in these biographies that you and I talk about, and usually there's some kind of passion or interest that they have. True interest is revealed early, usually in childhood. And so his mom says, "I think people who have a passion are the luckiest people in the world." And so then Jeremy asks Zuck's parents where their signs and says, "Yes, perhaps there were some. In nursery school, he became so possessed by a one-week unit on outer space that he employed the teacher to extend the unit to a month, to which she relented at the insistence of a four-year-old.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  By the time he was six, his incessant demands for logical explanations of rules and step-by-step justifications for consequences that he expected his parents to prepare before laying down the law." And it was this habit that Zuck had when he was six that they thought he was actually going to become a lawyer. So by the time he was 12, he's already writing computer programs, he's building games. There's also this time when he was 12 and a virus crashed the computer game he'd built, but he did not back up. He was devastated, and he declared through tears that not only would he rebuild the game from scratch, but he'd find new ways to optimize it. He'd make the game better and faster this time, and god damn it, he would never forget to back up his work again." This is also one of the most fascinating parts about the story, is it gets into Zuck's

• 2:11Speaker 00

  kind of fascination, or maybe even obsession, with the Roman Empire and with Augustus. So this game when he was 12 says, "The game was set in the Roman Empire. The player would conquer the world, one territory at a time. Perhaps that was a sign, too." This through-line continues, "In high school, he excelled at Latin. Nearly a decade later, he still recalled the Latin verse for Jupiter's Decree in the Aeneid." And this is the quote, "For these I set no bounds in space or time. I have given empire without end." At Harvard, one of the first websites that Mark built was a class study tool for the art history course called Rome of Augustus. At early crisis Facebook meetings to fend off threats from Google, Mark would end his speeches by declaring, "Carthage must be destroyed."

• 2:56Speaker 00

  All-hands meetings would end with him shouting, "Domination." Sean Parker, Facebook's early president, warned Mark that shouting domination could one day be cited in an antitrust suit, and Sean Parker later observed that Zuck had this kind of imperial tendency in him. "In more recent years, Zuck periodically mused in public about the really harsh approach Augustus employed before establishing 200 years of world peace." This is a direct quote from Mark. "That didn't come for free." He's talking about Rome's first emperor who turned it from a republic into an empire. "He had to do certain things," Mark said. At the company's flagship annual conference in 2024, Mark wore a shirt with the words, "Either a Caesar or nothing." Mark's wife Priscilla Chan joked that on their honeymoon in Rome, his constant pursuit

• 3:41Speaker 00

  of Augustan sites and statues made the emperor their third wheel. The names of their three children are Maxima, August, and Aurelia." And so Jeremy Stern is a fantastic writer, because he's going back, so it starts with him interviewing the parents, then he goes into Mark's fascination with Augustus, and he brings, he weaves this, he does this constantly throughout the piece and in all his pieces. Highly recommend reading all the pieces he's writing on entrepreneurs and investors these days. I think he is the best in the world at what he's doing right now. But what he does back here is like, we start with talking about interviewing Mark's parents, then we go into this fascination with Augustus, then he brings it back into, you almost forget, the storytelling is so amazing in this piece, you almost forget that where we are, we're actually in a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg's parents. And so he says, "This is the question that I came here to ask.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  What is it like for one of the most powerful men in human history, who better or for worse, has by age 42 secured a place in the books that'll be written about his era for centuries after his death, to be your child?" And this goes on for quite some time, but I want to pull out some of my favorite highlights here. "It's complicated," his mom says. "It's very, very complicated," his father agrees. "But he knows what people need and want, sometimes even before they know it. I mean, people call him arrogant. He's not. But time after time, his arrogance just turns into truth." And then there's this excellent line that anybody with kids will understand. Zuck's dad says, "You will experience it one day, too, when your children eclipse you."

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Karen nods and waits for her husband to finish, then she comes alive. "She shifts her posture back towards me with a tender but firm gaze. I can tell you how it is for me as a mother. This is my child." "The Eye of Sauron is how her child's longtime lieutenants have referred to the unblinking, sometimes unnerving silences he involuntarily imposes when preparing to answer a question or make a point. I see it now, I think." So she continues, "Things have been written and said about him that are so untrue from such an early age. I wish that sometimes the people who do that would reflect on what it must be like to fabricate stories or create their own imaginary scenarios of what this person is like. I sometimes really wonder if anyone has ever sat back and thought, this is a real person.

• 5:53Speaker 00

  It has been really brutal," she says. "I mean, how would you feel if your child was subjected to this kind of scrutiny?" And so Jeremy asks to follow up, "Do you wish he'd stop?" And his mother responds, "I always said to him, just do this only as long as you can find happiness within it. It has to bring you joy." One of my favorite parts in the piece that comes later is Mark emphatically says, "I will never stop." So then the story transitions to another setting, and it says, "Mark Zuckerberg is suspended in midair by an NCAA Division One wrestling champion who is slamming him to the floor. Zuckerberg has spoken in public about his affinity for the masculine energy of MMA fighting as a counterbalance to the neutered or emasculated corporate world and America's society writ large.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  He decided to give up his lifelong habit of sleeping in late in order to hit people and get hit three mornings a week." Says, "For 23 years, the single fact dominating every moment of every room he's been in is that he is Mark Zuckerberg. It's been true, not just at Meta, but in his congressional testimonies and court proceedings, at Taylor Swift concerts, and the Prada runway show at the Milan Fashion Week, at dinners with friends, and birthday parties of his daughter's friends. It's been true even in his meetings with heads of state, including his own commander chief, to whom it must occur, as they've tried at various points to squeeze and threaten and blame him for everything, from electoral outcomes to ethnic cleansings.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  That one day, they will be out of office and eventually dead, while Zuckerberg, whose majority control of Meta's voting power makes his removal effectively impossible, could in 50 years still be ruler of his empire. Today, that empire has 3.6 billion users and a market cap of $1.6 trillion." It is not a normal situation for a human being to be in, let alone from the time they are 19 years old. 300,000 years of evolutionary biology do not furnish a man in this position with the keys to easily access other people or reality. Yet for all the ways in which Zuckerberg's life is statistically anomalous, the conundrum he's in is ancient. And the conundrum they're referring to is the dictator's dilemma.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  The idea is simple and intuitive. The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything, from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet through fear or awe or self-preservation, those people often become less willing to tell him what they think he doesn't want to hear, leaving him increasingly insulated from reality even as the consequences of his decisions become larger and as the barriers to believing one's own bullshit fall away. And then there's some great historical examples of this dictator's dilemma. Thus, in the spring of 1941, there were no officers left with the courage to implore Stalin after he scoffed at the intelligence that a German invasion was coming.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  For three years, the Great Leap Forwards mass famines were reported up to Mao as record harvests. It was the self censorship of JFK's advisers during deliberations on the Bay of Pigs that popularized the term groupthink. The Shah of Iran was protected by his court from indications of a coming revolution until it was already too late. Henry Ford ignored warnings that the Model T was dying until the market was dominated instead by General Motors. Afraid of their volatile superiors, middle managers at Nokia in 2007 downplayed the appearance of the iPhone. The list of great statesmen in many ways is a list of figures obsessed by the dictator's dilemma.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Lincoln, for instance, installed himself in the War Department's telegraph office in order to read field dispatches raw as they came off the wire before subordinates could filter them. Churchill retained the frank and combative Allen Brooke as his top military adviser and built a private statistical office whose job was to cross check every ministry's report. Kennedy, who learned from the Bay of Pigs, absented himself from the National Security Council sessions during the Cuban Missile Crisis so that his personal magnificence wouldn't affect the debate. Warren Buffett called Charlie Munger his abominable no man for the rate at which he vetoed his ideas, for which Buffett was ultimately grateful. As emperor, Augustus called on senators at random to stifle premeditated remarks,

• 10:12Speaker 00

  periodically rotated his advisory council, and tolerated libel and jokes at his own expense. He ran three censuses of Roman citizens, kept his own ledger of the empire's legions and treasuries, and instituted Rome's first carrier carriage system so that, like Lincoln, he could interrogate a direct source of information before anyone could corrupt it. Augustus reigned for 40 years and died in his bed. According to the nearly three dozen people I interviewed for this story, Zuckerberg is hyper aware of the dilemma's potential, which is to say paranoid. He is a micromanager and a voracious consumer of data, aware that any chief's inner circle is most incentivized to act as courtiers. He frequently engages direct reports of his direct reports and the subordinates of

• 10:57Speaker 00

  the reports' reports. He is known for inviting outside experts and commentators to visit him and argue about his decisions. He often accepts personal blame in public for the mistakes of others, perhaps in part because he accepts the reality of Meta, which they accept too. He is the company, and the company is him. Before we get back into this, I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that, and they do this by using first principles thinking. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%.

• 11:41Speaker 00

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• 12:26Speaker 00

  15 years, since before Facebook's IPO in 2012. Some were even around in 2006, when nearly all of Facebook's management team quit after Zuckerberg, who was only 22, rejected their pleas to take an offer from Yahoo to buy the company for $1 billion, forever establishing a central tenet of the company's culture. In the face of opposition, Zuckerberg is right. Others are people who long ago came to terms with the fact that they cannot do what he does, and that despite his many mistakes and missteps, he is in a class all by himself. Many are men and women with lives and livelihoods they never dreamed of, and they owe it all, all of it, to him. They may simply be too grateful, men in his position have often worried, to attempt

• 13:10Speaker 00

  too frequently or stridently to play the role of rescuing him from the isolation of his position, from the consequences of letting his relationship to reality slip for even a moment, even if he is forever probing for ways to escape the dilemma. Even when it means he will get punched in the face. And then this is what I meant earlier. It's like you start with this scene where, okay, we have Mark. He's in the air, he's being slammed, talks about his affinity and his love for MMA and for fighting, and the fact that he's doing it every day. He wakes up, and this says three times a week. I heard that he does it every day for two hours as soon as he wakes up. But then he brings us back into the scene. Jeremy Searne, the writer, brings us back into the scene, says, "The bell rings and the fighters reshuffle.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Before the bell sounds, he lands an overhand right on Zuckerberg's chin." And then we talk to, we see Jeremy talking to Zuckerberg's MMA coach about like, okay, what is this fascination like? What do you think that Mark's getting out of this? He says, "I think we all have a void in our lives, and the lucky ones find something that fills that space to make us more optimal, to make us a better human being. Mark filled the void with fighting. I think he does like the element of danger. If you go left when you should have went right, you will get punched in the face." And so then we get to Zuckerberg's example of this maxim that you and I have talked about many times. It appears over and over again in his biographies. I think most of his history as entrepreneurs are obsessed with control. Maxim is essentially control the land upon which your business is built.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  If something is critical to your business, you want to control it. One of the central tensions of, I think, Zuckerberg's career, and obviously this piece, is the fact that he does not actually hold the land upon which his empire is built. And so Jeremy does a great job of describing that. It is a truism that while Zuckerberg is sovereign within his imperial court, he's immune to control by shareholders or his board, he does not actually hold the empire's territory. He did only once, back when Facebook was a desktop site on the open web. But when the smartphone appeared, he lost his ground and never gained it back. The early trauma of having nearly missed the switch to mobile apps, scrambling during the 2012 IPO to rebuild Facebook and its advertising business around a platform shift that he didn't see coming or initially understand, has never left him.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Although the Facebook app's eventual conquest of mobile more or less made Apple's App Store, the App Store in turn made Facebook. And this is a great line. And Zuckerberg does not like being made. Many of Zuckerberg's ventures ever since have been puzzling to outsiders. These ventures can also be understood as attempted jailbreaks from Apple and other competitors, a determination to regain and hold his territory. Thus, over the last 15 years, Zuckerberg explored building a Facebook phone. He tried to replace the Android Home screen with Facebook Home. He launched the internet.org and its free basic service to deliver Facebook through carrier deals in India and other markets where Apple barely existed. He tried building Libra, a cryptocurrency, to facilitate payments.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  He bought Oculus VR in the hopes that virtual reality headsets would replace the smartphone the way smartphones replace personal computers. Each has been a tunnel Zuckerberg dug to escape the prison of his competitors. And then there's this great quote from Zuckerberg himself. "One of my things for the next 10 or 15 years is I just want to make sure we can build the fundamental technology that we're going to be building social experiences on," he told Jensen Huang at a conference in 2024. In the course of explaining his investment in building foundational AI models, back to this quote, direct quote from Zuck, "There have been too many things that I've tried to build and then have been told, nah, you can't really build that by the platform provider. At some level, I'm just like, nah, fuck that." End of the quote by Zuckerberg.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  And back to this fact that he is a singular lived experience. I got to spend a few days with Zuck, and one of the things I told him that I want him to do is come on the new show. I was like, listen, you have a singular experience. There's nobody else even remotely close that has achieved and lived through what you've achieved at your age. I've read every single book on the history of Facebook. None of them are good. And what is missing is this conversation of like how you think about building your business, how you think about building product, how you think about recruiting. I want to create the podcast episode that I think is, one, desperately needed, and intense, and two, intensely interesting to me. And the reason I bring that up right now is because this next paragraph goes into this singular experience that Mark Zuckerberg, that is living now, that is operating now at this time in history, has gone through, has experienced. Listen to this.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Zuckerberg achieved his species warping goal of networking billions of human beings in real time through social media by age 30. By 32, he built the most unstoppable entertainment and advertising business in history. By 42, his products are used by one out of every 2.3 people currently breathing, more than the total number of humans that existed in 1965. Annual revenue runs well above $200 billion, and Meta's capital expenditure this year will exceed the military budget of every country on Earth except the United States, China, and Russia. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp each have more monthly active users than the number of living adherents to Christianity.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  And to me, this is one of the most important parts. He is not like the others of his vintage, who all at some point abdicate, or sell, or are overthrown, or appoint a regent to face the music instead and recede into varying types of billionaire afterlife. Not for him. 200 years of peace will not come for free. You have to do certain things. You wake up, you hit people, you pay them to hit you. Then it's another subpoena and another lawsuit, then a product review until 3:00 a.m. There's another whistleblower with a book deal. Here comes another Aaron Sorkin movie. You're behind on AI. No one respects social media. Testify, pay the settlement, build personal superintelligence, put it in the apps, put it in the sunglasses. I mean, that is just incredible writing and an incredible story.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  And it goes back to, again, think about the subtitle of this profile, "A Journey to the Heart of History's Largest Non-Territorial Empire." And so then Jeremy, at this point, is at an event for Meta's AI glasses, and he's watching Zuck be interviewed, and he picks it up right here. It says, "Prompted by the interviewer, Zuckerberg discusses the glasses. He believes they are the vindication of his bet dating back to 2014, when he acquired Oculus for $2 billion and began working in virtual and augmented reality, a division of the company that convinced him to rename the whole thing from Facebook to Meta by 2021, and which to date has burned through approximately $90 billion."

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Zuckerberg is convinced that the glasses are one of the payoffs. He says that they are the ideal form factor for AI that can see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day, and also overlay information on the world and conduct agentic live sessions from ambient contexts. For example, he says he recently wore them while baking with his daughter in the glasses without being asked, told him he was messing up the recipe. And then this is one of my favorite parts, which I mentioned to you earlier. The interviewer asked Zuckerberg, why don't you stop? He says he isn't wired to stop. Zuck says, I'm never going to stop. I can get obsessive. And before we get back into this, I want to tell you about AppLovin. One of my all time favorite quotes is from the book Zero to One. In that book, Peter Thiel writes, he says, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed

• 20:26Speaker 00

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• 21:10Speaker 00

  of spend per day and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. And then I want to tell you about Vanta. Vanta, Vanta, Vanta. Vanta helps your company prove you're secure so more customers will use your product or service. Vanta is an AI powered security expert that scales with you. The more your business grows, the more complex your security needs get, and that complexity turns into chaos. Vanta tames that chaos for you. Vanta automates compliance, continuously monitors your controls, and gives you a single source of truth for compliance and risk. So whether you're a fast growing startup or an enterprise company, Vanta fits easily into your existing workflows.

• 21:53Speaker 00

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• 22:38Speaker 00

  is because you see this in the biographies that you and I talk about every week, right? You see this like evolution and struggle and falling and failing and then figuring out and then building and these unexpected turns. And obviously, he's going to go down as one of history's greatest entrepreneurs. Like, look at the business he's built, you know, and he's still in his early 40s. But we get to see this live. This is almost like it's like a live episode of Founders that's going on right now. I find it very interesting. And Jeremy does a great job right here of essentially describing like the last, let's say, 10 to 14 years of the history of the company that he created in his career. Every few years, despite the plodding survival and expansion of his empire, Zuckerberg is pronounced dead. There was the mobile crisis following the IPO in 2012,

• 23:23Speaker 00

  when Facebook was declared an overvalued website whose audience had moved to a platform it couldn't monetize. And Zuckerberg was considered in over his hoodie. He was considered too immature to run a public company. Then there was the mass exodus of teens to Tumblr and then Snapchat between 2013 and 2017, leaving Facebook to die as the next MySpace. After Snapchat rejected a $3 billion acquisition offer, I talked to Evan Spiegel about this. He says the number is much bigger than 3 billion, by the way. And after Zuckerberg was mocked as overpaying in a panic for Instagram and WhatsApp. Then there was a political crisis of 2017 to 2020, when Facebook broke democracy. The FTC sued it for allegedly maintaining an illegal monopoly, and the company suffered what was then the biggest one day loss in market history.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  They dropped $120 billion in one day. Then there was the most recent period between 2022 and 2025. Users decamped for the algorithmically superior TikTok. Apple's ATT threatened to obliterate Meta's mobile ad business. Zuckerberg lit billions of dollars, I'm sorry. Zuckerberg lit tens of billions of dollars on fire in pursuit of the metaverse and promised to do the same on an even bigger scale with AI. Yet after every period, Zuckerberg somehow managed not only to survive, but to emerge with his position strengthened, having conquered more than he previously held. This is incredible. By the end of 2013, he built one of the two most profitable mobile ad businesses in the world.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  By the end of 2017, he crushed Snapchat by copying its killer innovation with Instagram Stories. By the end of 2020, the widely predicted death of Facebook was revealed as a fantasy as the number of daily active users had grown during each quarter of political scandal. Advertisers never left, and Facebook paid the FTC a $5 billion privacy settlement. By the end of 2025, he survived the TikTok threat by cloning it with Reels, circumvented Apple's ATT by rebuilding ad targeting with large AI models, beat the FTC's attempt to break up the company, and saved cash by weathering mass layoffs. When Meta hit a record market cap of nearly $2 trillion,

• 25:35Speaker 00

  he'd done it while refusing investor demands to cut spending on his Reality Labs division where the metaverse lived. The serial underestimation of Zuckerberg as too vulnerable, derivative, or incompetent of the durability of his core constituencies and sources of advantage, of the undislodgeable nature of his personal power, of his grinding unsentimentality of the past, of his desperation to survive, and his willingness to absorb ridicule and retaliation is not only an equally apt description of his Roman spirit animal, it is also perhaps a better way to understand his attempts to win AI. And over the next few pages, this is a great description

• 26:19Speaker 00

  because if you think about all the tech companies that were founded either at the same time as Facebook or slightly before, I don't think any of them, save for one or two, are founder led anymore. And I hope you read this entire profile because I think it does a great job of illustrating how powerful a founder led company can be, especially one as unusual as Meta. The fact that he started, that Zuck started this when he was 19, that he's got 20 years of accumulated experience and he's just getting started. Now that he's behind Anthropic and OpenAI, it's easy to forget that prior to 2024, Zuckerberg had been hovering around the frontier of AI for over a decade. Dating back to 2006, Facebook had been the leader in machine learning, which it used to power its newsfeed, targeted ads, and face recognition.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  By 2013, after trying and failing to acquire DeepMind, Zuckerberg recruited legendary AI researcher Yann LeCun to start Facebook AI Research, called FAIR, which over the next 11 years became one of the top corporate research labs in the world. Then it talks about when Meta released Llama 3.1. It was near the frontier, but by the time they released Llama 4 in April 2025, they were far behind. I'm skipping over that part to get into his reaction to this, which is again, the power of a founder led company. Thus, in his first board meeting after the release of Llama 4, he announced a plan of regime change. The 11 weeks that followed demonstrated the sheer power of his position as the indeposable head of a galactically resource rich empire.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  He subsumed FAIR into a new organization, MSL, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and reset the market on compensation for top AI recruits to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars per head. He paid $14.3 billion for a stake in Scale AI and installed its founder, Alexander Wang, as Meta's head of AI. He recruited ChatGPT co-creator, former GitHub chief, superintelligence co-founder, and picked off dozens of other defectors from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Less than three months after the release of Llama 4, in other words, Zuckerberg had dumped the previous decade plus of his AI people and strategy, recruited new leadership, new chief scientists, new core researchers,

• 28:26Speaker 00

  and announced a new capital expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars. And so then what Jeremy Stern does, he spends a few days in the Bay Area. He seeks out a number of Zuckerberg's competitors specifically in AI, and he's just asking their opinions on Zuck's strategy, what he's doing, like, what do you think? And he says, I'm apparently the first to ask them to steel man the outcome in which Zuckerberg, in light of his long history, survives and expands. And so he is now saying, because most people are like dismissive. He's like, oh, you know, he doesn't stand a chance. We're going to smoke him or whatever the case is. He's like, okay, well, let's set that aside, that that's what you believe. But like, you know, this guy has a history, like we just covered in the past few pages, of everybody saying he's dead, he can't come back from this.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  And he just rises and keeps going forward over and over again. So give me the scenario in which he actually wins in AI. And this is what they say. AI is not, in fact, God. Instead, it does math and solves a limited set of problems humans face and is otherwise simply useful and cool. Anthropic, and to a lesser extent, OpenAI, have trouble ever accepting this fact. Zuckerberg does not. He has not spent a decade comparing his company to the Manhattan Project, and thus, he's not above pushing the frontier of AI to help people book airline tickets, make dinner reservations, and edit photos. He will use it to drive down the cost of serving his users to zero and to drive up his revenue by improving ads.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  He will use cash from the ad business and his ownership of data centers, chips, and other infrastructure that Anthropic and OpenAI have to pay to rent to undercut them on price. The potential install base for his AI is 3.6 billion people who don't care whether a given model is six months behind the frontier. If AI commoditizes, then Anthropic and OpenAI go to zero and value accrues instead at the complements Meta already dominates, like distribution, attention, personalization, and commerce. If it doesn't commoditize, then at least he is not his competitor's prisoner the way he's been with Apple. And all he has to do is remain within six months of the frontier, which he's already close to. Heads, he wins.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Tails, he wins. And so that is the end of the section where Jeremy Stern is getting the steel man in which the, you know, the outcome in which Zuckerberg actually wins in AI. And then he follows up after they're telling him this. Do you think there's a chance that this happens? I ask. Yes, is how I'd prayer phrase their answers. Another question. Do you think this is his wager? Probably. Would you be willing to bet that he fails? Probably not. And then this gets into the quote I already mentioned earlier. I'll be honest, I used to work at Meta. A researcher at a competing lab tells me, they have lots of problems and there are so many ways it could go haywire. But Mark is the fucking Terminator. He's actually not an asshole, which is interesting. He's not a miserable fuck, but his source of advantage is he's never happy.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  He just doesn't fucking stop. The world thinks that people out here in tech and AI are pretty soy, but you actually have to be pretty fucking tough and aggressive, just in a classic masculine sort of way. And Mark's still the alpha of that. I am not hoping they get to a place where we compete with him. So then when we get towards the end of this profile, we have another sit-down interview between Jeremy Stern and Mark Zuckerberg. And this is a direct quote from Mark Zuckerberg. I think for some of them, it's like a trauma, he tells me. When asked how he experiences the canonical moments in his life, not as public artifacts, but as his own memories. Mark says, it's imprinted. It's not this subtle thing.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  I think part of what keeps memories alive is revisiting them, because these are important moments in the company's history. They just come up a bunch. I think there are probably more subtly important things that happened in our history that just weren't fitting for stories. And those have probably been more forgotten over time because you just don't talk about them. This is what I was mentioning earlier. I just don't think there's this great documentation of the company history from the founder's perspective, which I'd love to get out of Mark. Going back to more quotes from Mark on this. Early on, whenever I communicated in public, people were like, oh, you're like super robotic or whatever. So I'm like, all right, I hate this. This sucks. Then I got really insecure about it, he says. And it wasn't super critical, at least at the time, for me to get it right. But acting as a public figure was either a no positive feedback or even a negative

• 32:47Speaker 00

  feedback cycle for me. What I learned is, I don't need to do that. And when I do, it's not super helpful. So whatever, I'm just going to keep my head down. And then in the middle of this, he talks about the advantage he has over his competitors in AI. Because the company was profitable early on and has always been under his complete control, he could afford his natural instinct to tune out external criticism and focus instead on, quote, "this pretty deep need I have for internal cohesion." This is what Mark says about that. "A lot of people probably care about public perception more than I do, but I probably care about team cohesion more than most other people do, which means that it weighs on me more. So at times when it's not strong, it probably stresses me out more.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  My main tool in the world is sitting down, building a team, and methodically improving something over a long period of time. It's not a very sexy process." I'm going to pause in the middle of Mark's quote. He's describing his main tool, one of his main advantages. To me, when I read that, I don't read, I don't think about Mark Zuckerberg. I think about Steve Jobs describing the advantage that Bill Gates had when he was had to, had to compete against Bill Gates head to head. So let's go back to this. "My main tool in the world is sitting down, building a team, and methodically improving something over a long period of time. It is not a very sexy process. But also fundamentally, because of that architecture where I don't need to raise money, I don't have to convince a lot of other people along the way." He keeps going into this.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  This is one of the most fascinating parts of the profile. "He contrasts it with Sam Altman and Elon Musk, whose companies were both capital-intensive and unprofitable early, and thus, for a time, had to be memed into life." Direct quote from Mark here. Now, the question is, how much did that situation turn them into what they are versus how much did it just select for them? "I think there's probably both some feedback loop where doing it built their confidence and built their skills at being public figures, but they also had some fundamental skill at being able to do it. They probably also like it more. I think some people have that deep need to be liked externally by people they don't know, and I don't have that. Maybe that's a disadvantage, because I think to some degree you want that.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  It probably actually does matter what people who don't know you think. But I think to some degree, doing it is so hard that you only really go out of your way to do it at an excellent level if there's some part of your psychology that needs it. I don't need that, and they may." And then Jeremy follows up responding to what Mark just said. "I note that Elon is not particularly good at speaking in public, but that he is fully himself, which makes him free in a way that Zuckerberg is not. All of Elon's bottomless flaws are right there on the surface level for everyone to see, which is why millions of people hate his guts, but also why millions of people get to feel like personal stakeholders in his dreams. Whereas Zuckerberg is an easier mark, Elon's lack of concealment paradoxically makes him

• 35:44Speaker 00

  harder to hit. It somehow makes sense that Elon is the man who builds rocket ships to escape Earth, whereas there's always been something dissonant in Zuckerberg as the man who connected billions of individuals in a web of their own self-expression." That is just excellent, excellent writing. "I can tell the interviews are wearing on him. He doesn't like doing this. He pauses every so often to express doubt that he's explaining something as well as he'd like to. He at times seems frustrated that the world doesn't just take his passion for building things and empowering people at face value, but also vaguely aware that it can't." And actually, this is my takeaway from studying him or from speaking to him. It's like, I just think he just, he's obsessed with building things. He, he talks about it, I skipped over some of this part of the profile.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  I hope, again, I hope you read the entire thing. But he's been building things since he was, you know, eight years old. He's been building things on the computer since he was probably 10 or 11, or maybe even before that. And I think the result of what we see with Meta today is just like, he started building this when he was in Harvard at 18 or 19 years old, and he just never stopped for over two decades. And so at this point in the profile, Jeremy is still sitting with Mark Zuckerberg, and we see Jeremy's inner monologue as this interview continues. He says, "I wonder if it's even possible for a man in his position to have real friends. I wonder why he's allowed me to intrude and inspect him like this. Does he care at this point to be understood? Does he now think about things like legacy with several decades in power potentially still ahead of him? I despair of getting a raw answer and ask instead, in an oblique sort of way, about history." And then Zuck goes back to Augustus.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  "I think in some ways, he's seen as sort of brutal," he says of Augustus. "But to me, the most important contribution he made was basically teaching society that you didn't have to always be at war. Before Augustus, the definition of peace was the temporary period of time during which your enemies were subdued before you had to defeat them again." Maybe there is some truth to that in the grand scheme of things, but he had to rewire the economy too, instead of having this massive standing army to convince people that they could build things and that having this trade-based economy rather than a pillage-based economy was going to be a positive something. It is interesting to look back at history, because it seems like that would have just been an obvious thing that people understood all along. But no, it wasn't.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  It took this act of leadership and courage, someone who everyone thought was probably wrong, but he was like, no, we should do this. And then the last scene in the profile, we are taken into Zuck's family home in Lake Tahoe. Jeremy Stern is spending all the time with Zuck, his wife, his kids, his in-laws. And this is probably my favorite part of the entire piece, and a great ending to this incredible profile. And it's this conversation that Jeremy is having with Zuck's wife, Priscilla Chan. And she says, "Here, I want to show you something." And she hands Jeremy a laptop. And it is opened to her daughter's Google Docs and Replit accounts. And Priscilla says, "She's quite limited because mom doesn't let her build things on the open internet. Like, she wanted to build a dating site. That was a no.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  But I wanted to show you some of the things that she has built." We take a look. There's a novel she wrote. There's a blog. There's a book review of Where the Mountains Meet the Moon. There are AI-generated motivational theme songs about conquering her fears. There's a podcast, the latest episode of which is called, "Is Romance Appropriate?" There's an audiobook library where she narrates books she likes. There is a GeoCities-like website and a Farmville-like game and several apps that she's vibe-coded, including a messaging app. There are business plans for how to market and sell these things. "Does Mark have the kids build stuff on computers?" I ask. "No," she says. "He didn't tell her to do any of this." "Is she trying to be like her dad?" I ask. "No," she says. "It's been all on her own."

• 39:28Speaker 00

  "This is very cute," I respond. "But why are you showing me this?" And Priscilla responds, "I've known Mark for 23 years. Around year 18 or 19, I said to him, 'Aren't we tired? Can we be done? I'm tired. You're tired. It's been a hard run. We've gotten through a hard chapter. Let's call it. There have to be other chapters in our life.'" And Mark said, "No. He said, 'No, this is who I am. I love this. I didn't set out to build a company. I just love building things. I love being at Meta, because I still get to create things. And until our daughter got a little older, I didn't understand it. Now I see her. She just has a desire to build things that is innate, that we didn't teach her. It just came.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  She's delighted by the idea of bringing something into the world. If I tried to take this stuff away from her, it would be like cutting off her arm. It wasn't until then that I realized, oh my God, it's Mark. After 23 years, I get it now. You can't take this away from him. He wouldn't be him if he stopped." And I think that's the most important line in the profile. You can't take this away from him. He wouldn't be him if he stopped. And that is where I'll leave it. This is an excellent, excellent profile. I hope you read the entire thing. I will leave a link down in the show notes. That is 434 books, our book-length profile's down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.