Seeing Silicon: All new macho, MMA-trained Zuckerberg is nerd kryptonite
Why Meta’s CEO and majority shareholder Mark Zuckerberg is revamping himself and his company to become more macho. And, what it means for the Silicon Valley.
A month ago, in a podcast with Joe Rogan, Meta CEO and majority shareholder, Mark Zuckerberg, said American companies needed more “masculine energy”. “We’ve swung to a spectrum where masculinity is bad and toxic,” he said to Rogan, adding that a culture that celebrates aggression has its own merits. “Having a thing I can do with my guy friends, beat each other a bit, it’s all good,” he added, saying the corporate world was becoming “culturally neutered”. And implying he was going to save it.
This statement was in quick succession of Zuckerberg’s rapid revamp of himself, his values, and his company in the past few months. The transformation began right after the US election results in November 2024 when Zuckerberg flew to Mar-a-Lago and joined Donald Trump’s coterie of tech boys, donating $1 million to his inauguration fund. That wasn’t very surprising, considering Google and Apple CEOs also visited Mar-a-Lago.
Zuckerberg went a lot further. In January 2025, his company announced that content moderation restrictions will be overhauled in Facebook and Instagram, and they will be replaced with ‘community notes’ like those on Elon Musk’s social platform X. He also completely shut down fact-checking on the social media platforms he owns, dramatically reducing the amount of censorship on its platforms. In February 2025, Zuckerberg announced he’s killing off the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and laid off approximately 3000 employees, about 5% of its workforce, warning the rest that they were to prepare for a tough year ahead.
In the last few months, Zuckerberg has changed not only his beliefs (or his publicly stated beliefs), but also his looks to align with this new idea of machoism. For two decades he was pale and scrawny with tightly cropped hair donning jeans and fitted t-shirts, commenting his work was too important to spend time thinking of styling.
In the last year though, this father of three girls, has amped up his street cred by bulking up through MMA training, getting some sun, adding a curly mop to his head, and dressing in relaxed street-style clothes. He has also opted in to wear flashy gold chains with medallions. In the process, he has also veered from slightly left to right, perhaps his way of increasing his “masculine energy”.
The nerd is long dead
According to Meta AI, traditionally, masculinity is defined by traits like physical strength, toughness, control, dominance, authority, heterosexuality, virility, aggression, and competition. “Would you call Mark Zuckerberg masculine in the traditional sense of the word?” I prompt the AI. “Zuckerberg’s leadership style and public persona don’t conform to traditional masculine stereotypes,” it answers.
Meta AI perhaps remembers the old-style Zuckerberg and reminiscences the nerdy leadership of another era. There was a time long ago in the Silicon Valley when engineers were inspired by nerds who came armed with an understanding of technology and liberal dreams of changing the world. When Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard, he was a quintessential nerd – starry eyed, creating a platform for people to become friends. There was something about that decade.
And then, that dream gave way to endless ambition and a need for software to eat the world and social media became a toxic place that encouraged addiction and helped more authoritarian governments to win. The rise of Big Tech and billionaires running them, in some ways, was the downfall of the utopia-dreaming nerd. These technology companies encouraged a stronger, more aggressive, even toxic kind of leadership – which soon became a part of the Valley’s ethos.
Being macho helps the bottom-line
Today’s Valley has alpha, overtly aggressive, hyperbole, no-apologies tech leaders embodied by billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, or more recently Sam Altman. And Zuckerberg, a CEO and one of the richest people on the planet, is finally transforming into this prototypical tech bro.
Zuckerberg in 2025 is a very different billionaire from the one who had stood in front of Congress, chastised in 2016, when the Cambridge Analytica controversy broke out, remaking his company’s image to protect its users and advertisers through stringent content moderation policies. He’s a different Zuckerberg from the one who banned Trump from Facebook and Instagram for two years in the wake of the Capitol attack in 2021.
In 2025, the 40-year-old billionaire sports a $900,000 Greubel Forsey watch, buys a 387-foot megayacht (the largest in the world) and gifts his wife a custom-made Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT minivan. He accepts an MMA match challenge from Musk (still to happen), and builds a doomsday bunker in a Hawaii (another favourite thing for billionaires to do). He also throws a lavish gala for his wife’s 40th birthday, cosplaying like Benson Boone in his Grammy performance, wearing a star-spangled blue deep-cut jumpsuit and singing on top of a piano.
He’s the tech bro who aligns himself to the new macho leadership ethos – the swashbuckling bully, the ruthless, expletive-spewing autocratic ruler – that’s riding everything from corporate to politics, across the world. Just like the president in his country and his billionaire peers.
Machoism, he is convinced, will give him more ROI. And in the current world of authoritarian leadership style, he’s not wrong. Meta’s recent changes in content moderation led to a flood of gore, violence on Instagram Reels a week ago. The company apologised, putting it on a rogue algorithm. It barely made a blip in the stock of the company. The rollback of content moderation and killing of DEI policies in January 2025 gave him way more: The Meta stock rose almost 24% from December to February 2025, making him worth $211 billion worth in March (before the last week market massacre brought it all crashing down).
Looks like machoism not only gets politicians elected, it also swings the market in favour of companies and billionaires. The nerd is dead. And Zuckerberg, the ever-pragmatic tech titan, knows this. He has finally shed his nerd mask and donned a new macho one, to get respect from his employees, his peers, his president, and most importantly, the stock market.
Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area. Her fortnightly column will reflect on how emerging tech and science are reshaping society in Silicon Valley and beyond. Find her online with @shwetawrites. The views expressed are personal.