The year is 2010. Mark Zuckerberg's platform has grown from being a site for ranking how attractive people at different universities are, to becoming Facebook with 500 million users. In an interview with Wired magazine, Zuckerberg says:
What I really care about is the mission, to make the world open.
Two years later, Facebook acquires the image platform Instagram. Another two years later, the messaging service Whatsapp and the virtual reality company Oculus VR.
In 2021 – right in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic – Zuckerberg changes the name of Facebook's parent company to Meta to signal the shift towards building the "metaverse". An investment in a virtual reality that just a year later is described to cost "billions of dollars per year", according to American CNBC.
In November 2022, Chat GPT is launched and the tech world drops everything to try to compete with the Open AI product that creates a paradigm shift for large parts of society.
"It's my job"
Fast-forward to 2025 and Zuckerberg defends himself in an inquiry with the American competition authority FTC. No, he means, the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp were not made to neutralize competing platforms:
It's my job. I need to understand what's happening, and push our teams to act quickly, he says according to the news agency AP.
The battle against FTC is expected to take months, but it's not the first one with political undertones that Zuckerberg has been involved in.
During Donald Trump's first presidential term, Zuckerberg shut down Trump's account on Facebook and Instagram. The argument then was that the risks "simply are too great" with Trump and the disinformation he spread.
Trump responded by suing Meta, and later threatened to throw Zuckerberg "in prison for the rest of his life" if Meta's boss "does something illegal" when it comes to the 2024 presidential election.
"Masculine energy"
After Trump's election victory, Zuckerberg had dinner with him and donated a million dollars to the inauguration ceremony.
In early 2025, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would discontinue external fact-checking, in line with what had already happened on Elon Musk-owned X. At the same time, Zuckerberg did an interview with the controversial and popular podcaster Joe Rogan. There, Zuckerberg says that he thinks society and corporate culture have become "castrated" and that the "ruthless" version of him that people have seen after he started with martial arts is the "real" one.
Masculine energy, I think, is good. A culture that accepts aggression a bit more has its own positive value.
