How Mark Zuckerberg unleashed his inner brawler
José Lucas Costa da Silva peered over towards the warm up area for the Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition he was about to referee, faintly amused. It was early May 2023, and the 26-year-old martial arts instructor watched as one competitor in the high-school sports auditorium stretched and ran drills. He was wearing a white “gi”, a robe-like uniform, with some unusual accessories: sunglasses, a dark blue baseball cap and a medical mask. The man, whose name was listed as Mark Elliott, was a white belt, the beginner rank.
The tournament was taking place in Woodside, an affluent town close to Silicon Valley known for its sprawling estates enveloped by redwood trees. Da Silva, who is a jiu-jitsu black belt, sometimes trained the neighbourhood’s nerdy, deep-pocketed residents for a fee. When the time came, da Silva beckoned Elliott and his opponent over. Only then did Elliott take off his mask and shades. A buzz swelled in the hall, as people in the audience pulled out their phones to film. Da Silva noticed there were security guards in the periphery. “That’s when everyone realised he was there,” he said.
Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of the world’s largest social media company, Meta, had registered for his first official jiu-jitsu tournament under his first and middle names. He had been preparing for this moment since he got into martial arts during the Covid-19 lockdowns. In the years since, he had trained hard, hiring celebrity instructors to come to his Palo Alto mansion and his compound in Hawaii, working out each day. Now he was ready to show off the results.
Zuckerberg was spoiling for a fight. The day before, he’d suffered an egregious snub from Joe Biden’s White House, when he had not been invited to a summit of “AI leaders”, billed as a meeting of “companies at the forefront of AI innovation”. The CEOs of OpenAI, Alphabet and Microsoft had all been there. Zuckerberg felt personally aggrieved.
The ostentatious display of sportsmanship also marked a defining moment in Zuckerberg’s metamorphosis to red-blooded “Maga Mark”, as the 41-year-old has been nicknamed by some at his company this year. It has been a radical makeover. He is no longer the skinny arch-nerd in the anonymous grey T-shirts, nor the pallid corporate stiff of his Congress appearances. Hoodies have been swapped for shearling coats, gold chains and a $900,000 Greubel Forsey watch. The military-grade haircut is gone, in favour of a luxuriant ginger mullet.
It’s not just his appearance. Zuckerberg’s tone has shifted too. Two weeks before Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term in January, Zuckerberg announced that Meta’s moderation would be weakened and professional fact-checking eliminated. Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts would be slashed. Corporate America, Zuckerberg would tell the podcaster Joe Rogan, had been “culturally neutered” and workplaces needed more “masculine energy”. Following another podcast, Theo Von, a stand-up comedian and influencer, crowned Zuckerberg, long a fan of Caesar Augustus, the “emperor of the Broman Empire”.
Zuckerberg, the world’s second-richest man after Elon Musk, with a $242bn net worth, had already begun making overtures to the incoming administration. He co-hosted an event for Trump’s inauguration with major Republican donors and senior administration officials. He took multiple trips to the White House and to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s base in Florida, and bought a $23mn Washington DC property. Meta’s board added Trump allies. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, also a Meta board member, has been among Zuckerberg’s closest confidantes. Libertarian investor Peter Thiel is a mentor.
At one point, according to several people familiar with the matter, there were discussions about Zuckerberg taking a role as an adviser to the Trump administration, potentially on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. At events, Trump “loves introducing Mark around”, said one person who has observed them together. (When I requested an interview with Zuckerberg for this story, I was told he would be focusing on podcast appearances rather than the mainstream media.)
To chart this evolution, the Financial Times interviewed about 45 people, many of whom know or have worked with Zuckerberg and would only speak anonymously for fear of the impact on their careers. Some say he finally snapped and careered rightward after what he viewed as relentless attacks by activists, academics, the press and the Biden administration. We are, they say, witnessing a Revenge of the Nerds-style midlife crisis.
But to others, this is not Mark 2.0. This is who Zuckerberg has been all along: hyperfocused on winning. The same guy who, as he founded a company that would change the world from his Harvard dorm room in 2004, wrote to a friend that the users who trusted him with their data were “dumb fucks”. Whose killer instinct led him to allegedly steal the core idea behind Facebook from his fellow Harvard students, the Winklevoss twins, and then to deftly cut his co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, out of the company. The same guy who used to shout “domination” at the end of staff meetings, as Facebook transformed into a global powerhouse with more than three billion users.
“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 chief technology officer, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, told me. Now, according to Boz, we are finally meeting the “authentic” Zuckerberg. “The public is seeing him more how we have, internally, since the beginning.” A former company insider agreed: “Mark was trying to keep his real feelings tight inside and put on a suit and cut his hair and be a good boy. But the whole time this was all one inch underneath . . . Then he said, ‘Fuck it. I might as well be the person I really am.’”
Zuckerberg’s pivot comes at a delicate moment for the founder and his company. The original Facebook feels desperately dated. Instagram has been losing ground to its rival TikTok, with its deep-pocketed Chinese owner. His much vaunted “metaverse”, an immersive virtual world he once preached would define the company, is a ghost town. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, in buying Twitter and stripping it of safety rails, has shifted the zeitgeist for other platforms, inspiring deep envy in Zuckerberg, according to multiple people who know him. Zuckerberg has become “unbelievably sensitive to not becoming irrelevant”, said Roger McNamee, an early investor turned critic. “Mark has obviously prioritised [Meta] over literally everything that could get in its way.”
Zuckerberg is investing billions upon billions into making Meta a global artificial intelligence powerhouse — pitting himself against Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and xAI in a race to develop new AI tools. In time, he wants to build futuristic headsets in a bid to outsmart Apple, betting that augmented reality will supersede mobile phones. But for his comeback to succeed, he will need the Trump administration onside as new regulations are drawn up. Wall Street is watching nervously. “You see his conviction. He’s investing in Reality Labs [Meta’s virtual and augmented reality arm], he’s investing in AI and putting all this money into the future,” said Bosworth. “This is the right thing to do and he will do it even in the face of criticism. Investors will thank him later.”
As chief executive and chair with majority control of the company, Zuckerberg is described by his colleagues as intellectually intense, even-tempered and detached. His presence can be marked by awkward silences and fixed stares. According to proselytisers, he constantly probes and tests ideas and will ask the next three people he meets about the last new idea he encountered to see if it holds true. Ambassador Robert Kimmitt, Meta’s lead independent director since 2020, and a former deputy Treasury secretary under President George W Bush, said Zuckerberg “works very hard every day to be a better CEO”, pointing to his recent decision to join the Business Roundtable, an association of 200 chiefs of big US corporations. “He’s the last of the founders standing . . . and he’s still as excited as ever about what he is doing.”
To his critics, Zuckerberg runs Meta like a medieval court, where he is king. Fealty is paramount, they say. Debates over his decisions can be performative. Those who step too far out of line risk being blacklisted. “People would fawn over Mark,” one former staffer said.
At the top is a tight and protective inner circle of executives whose lives and livelihoods have been tied up in the company since its early years. Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris Cox (one of the most well-liked executives) and the rambunctious Boz were among the first 15 engineers at the company, joining in 2005 and 2006 respectively. Javier Olivan, Meta’s chief operating officer, joined Facebook in 2007 after attracting Zuckerberg’s attention by creating a Spanish version of the platform in his spare time. Chief revenue officer John Hegeman also joined that year. “The top leadership owe their fortune and status to Zuckerberg,” said the media professor Siva Vaidhyanathan. “That’s an imperial way of being.”
To get to Zuckerberg, you have to go through Andrea Besmehn aka “Dre”, his longtime chief of staff who has navigated the different phases of her boss’s life — and the company’s — by his side. Colleagues say her superpower is being able to predict Zuckerberg’s mood, describing her as a “shadow COO” after Sheryl Sandberg left the company. Others call her fiercely controlling, preventing all but a select few from getting close to the boss.
During the pandemic, Zuckerberg’s insularity became more pronounced. He created a “pod” with some of his closest lieutenants and associates, including Hegeman and Susan Li, the chief financial officer who joined the company in 2008. This clique moved between his properties in Lake Tahoe, California, Montana and the Hawaii compound, which sometimes hosted Meta’s “small group” offsites, where about 25 top executives and product heads gathered to strategise in meeting rooms with floor-to-ceiling views of the ocean on one side and rolling hills on the other. In their downtime, guests could partake in watersports and, of course, jiu-jitsu.
In Hawaii, the Meta board gathers once a year, in December, with Zuckerberg typically hosting a lively dinner the night before the fourth-quarter formal meeting, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Lately board meetings have focused on AI and AI infrastructure investment and talent, with members openly debating, said one board member. New additions to the board have trended rightward. Zuckerberg has gradually shed Democratic heavyweights, including former White House chiefs of staff Erskine Bowles and Jeffrey Zients, Netflix chair Reed Hastings and former American Express chief executive Kenneth Chenault.
In their stead are new faces such as the bruising Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) chief executive Dana White, a close friend of Trump’s, who in 2023 made a public apology after a video surfaced of him slapping his wife. Dina Powell McCormick served as a deputy national security adviser to Trump during his first administration, and is close friends with the wife of Joel Kaplan, a slick Republican operative who was recently made Meta’s high-profile global affairs chief. Andreessen, a longer-serving board member who underwent his own transformation from Democrat to Trump acolyte, has become one of Zuckerberg’s closest political confidantes, according to people familiar with the matter. When it comes to relaxing moderation efforts or other overtures to Trump, one former staffer said: “They’re going to tell him to go faster and [be] more aggressive.”
The latest additions to the board in April this year included Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison, a good friend of Zuckerberg’s who attends founder retreats with him. Zuckerberg appears to be “keeping it in the family”, one former staffer noted. “The transformation of the board is what worries me the most,” said another insider, citing the shift to a group “consisting more of friends [and] fellow founders”.
In January, when Zuckerberg announced Meta’s pivot on moderation to focus on policing only “illegal and high severity” material such as terrorism and child abuse, he acknowledged the changes would mean Meta “is going to catch less bad stuff”. It was the culmination of weeks of clandestine planning with a tightknit team including Kaplan as well as Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer and a former state department legal adviser during the first Trump administration. The Trump transition team was notified privately in advance of the changes becoming public, according to people familiar with the matter.
Some allies see the shift as a welcome return to the political centre. “We’re returning to a very practical era of politics, which I think to some degree has been very liberating for us,” Bosworth said. This means Meta can focus on its core expertise — building products — and be vocal solely on the issues where the company is aligned with the government, he added. “If you are going to build a product for everyone, you can’t get caught in the culture wars.”
Inside Meta, however, there was fallout. For years, staff had faced disapproval, even vitriol, from friends and acquaintances. Liberal-leaning employees who had worked to bolster content guardrails or project the company as “positive” for democracy, were left reeling. “The amount of pressure you were under to defend the company, on public stages, with the press, at dinner parties…” said one former senior executive. For Zuckerberg to so theatrically align himself with the Maga movement and the “manosphere” — a constellation of anti-woke, alpha male influencers — seemed like a total break from his image as a supporter of social justice. In interviews, current and former staff used language such as “grieving”, “horror” and “betrayal” to describe how they felt.
Only a handful of executives dared to speak out at a leadership meeting in Menlo Park, just days after Zuckerberg’s comments about masculinity on the Rogan podcast, according to multiple people familiar with the blowback. Zuckerberg’s response was cold. According to one person with knowledge of the conversation: “He basically said: ‘If you don’t like it, tough shit.’”
In 2015, Zuckerberg, then aged 31, wrote an open letter to his newborn daughter, promising that within her lifetime he hoped to help “eliminate poverty and hunger”, provide “basic healthcare” to all and “build inclusive and welcoming communities”. He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were pouring millions of dollars into social justice causes. Facebook’s chief operating officer Sandberg had published Lean In, a best-selling book that would come to define western corporate feminism. She was a committed Democrat with deep connections to the party.
In April 2016, with Trump running for president, Zuckerberg made a speech that seemed a retort to Trump’s divisive rhetoric. “Instead of building walls, we can help build bridges. Instead of dividing people, we can connect people,” he said. A year later, with Trump installed in the White House, Zuckerberg went on a nationwide tour, prompting speculation that he had his own political ambitions for 2020.
Yet despite his avowed idealism, Zuckerberg cut a villainous figure in the court of public opinion over the next few years. Facebook’s early “move fast and break things” corporate strategy faced criticism in the wake of major privacy lapses. The platform was accused of creating “filter bubbles”, amplifying hate speech and boosting misinformation in a bid to juice user engagement and profit. Revelations that Russian operatives had weaponised Facebook with “fake news” in order to interfere in the 2016 US election led some liberals to blame Zuckerberg for Trump’s rise, as did the news that the data of 87 million users had leaked to Cambridge Analytica, an analytics group hired by Trump’s campaign. Zuckerberg and Sandberg earned a reputation for a hubristic “deny and deflect” approach to handling these crises. Zuckerberg was called to hearings in Washington DC multiple times.
As president, Trump, who used social media to berate his enemies, presented a unique problem. At first, Zuckerberg tried to avoid having Facebook moderators touch any presidential posts. But in 2021, in the wake of Biden’s electoral win and the January 6 storming of the US Capitol, Facebook suspended Trump’s account. Zuckerberg said at the time that Trump had wielded the platform “to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government”. Democrats urged tighter policing of the platform, arguing Facebook was partly to blame for the events of January 6. Republicans complained they were being censored.
After Biden took office in January 2021, Zuckerberg’s status in Washington tanked. During his campaign, Biden had urged the company to overhaul its decision not to fact-check political advertising. Unlike Barack Obama and Trump, Biden never met with Zuckerberg as president, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Zuckerberg spied an opportunity for a refresh during the pandemic, according to multiple people around him at the time, building new tools and an information hub during lockdowns. But his inclination to prioritise free speech over moderation would soon become a flashpoint with a White House trying to battle a so-called “infodemic” of online conspiracies about the disease and the vaccine. Standing on the South Lawn in mid-July of 2021, Biden openly accused Facebook of “killing people”. Meanwhile, senior advisers to Biden including Robert Flaherty held regular calls with Facebook policy staff to discuss misinformation, moderation and other issues. In particular, said one former Biden administration official, the White House felt Facebook was being misleading about the depths of the misinformation problem and what they were doing to solve it.
According to some Facebook staff involved in the conversations, these demands were untenable and encroached on company policies. But when Facebook employees attempted to push back, the mood became explosive. One person involved in the conversations described the Biden officials as swearing and shouting. “They were pressuring us, and Mark was concerned about influence.” The interactions would later be scrutinised by a Republican-led congressional investigation into alleged censorship by Big Tech. Another former Facebook insider privy to the conversations shot down the idea that the Biden staffers “bullied Zuckerberg into feeling anything” as “ridiculous”, adding that it was no worse than the criticism and demands the platform would get from Republicans for alleged censorship. “The idea that this was Mark Zuckerberg’s Maga moment — I mean, get real,” the Biden administration official said.
Insiders said Zuckerberg felt he was making a host of concessions, to politicians, staff, the public. He had increased transparency around Facebook’s policies, introduced new privacy protections and set up an “oversight board” to preside over the most tricky moderation debates. All this was costing Meta precious dollars — and still the criticism did not relent. He was miserable, frustrated and hitting a wall, according to people close to him. “Despite — or in some cases because of — these actions, Facebook had united left and right in hostility,” said one adviser to Zuckerberg. “There was a psychological toll,” said another person who worked with him, “of going from a potential presidential hopeful to being told he had destroyed democracy.”
“Send me location” Zuckerberg typed in big white letters on his Instagram story, before hitting send. Several days earlier, Musk had learnt that Zuckerberg planned to launch Threads, a rival to his social media platform, X. Musk joked he was “up for a cage fight if he is lol”. Deadly serious, Zuckerberg took up the challenge.
For a moment, in the summer of 2023, the prospect of a real-life billionaire brawl seemed real. Musk said on X he’d been in contact with the Colosseum in Rome about hosting the event. In the end, it didn’t happen, with both sides blaming the other for the no-show. But Zuckerberg had entered his merciless era. “He’s unleashing this inner 14-year-old that never graduated from college,” said David Evan Harris, a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley, and a former Meta staffer. “In training at Facebook they tell you to bring your ‘authentic self’ to work. Finally, it feels like Mark brought his authentic self.”
Zuckerberg had long been an assiduous hobbyist, each year publicly setting a different New Year’s goal. Among them: wearing a tie every day, learning Mandarin and killing his own meat. He has dabbled in a variety of sports including running, fencing and hydrofoiling while holding the American flag. But by 2023, staff had noticed a more consuming obsession with MMA, particularly Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which is often likened to a chess game due to its focus on strategy and foresight, where fighters grapple, pinning each other into painful positions until one “taps out”, or surrenders.
That year, Zuckerberg adopted a strict regimen, working out with weights or training on the mat in the mornings. He hired celebrity fighters such as “Crazy Dave” Camarillo, who trained Keanu Reeves for the action thriller John Wick, as instructors. He started regular amateur grappling fights with executives in his circle including chief revenue officer Hegeman and Tom Alison, head of the Facebook app. He posted photos of himself posing topless alongside legendary fighters Israel Adesanya and Alex Volkanovski.
Helping broker his foray into the world of mixed martial arts and the UFC, the MMA’s gargantuan promotion company, was Melinda Davenport, a former communications executive at Meta. Davenport was responsible for moderating the weekly all-hands meetings where Zuckerberg would take questions from staff. Colleagues say her role was to “humanise him”, though others found the sessions increasingly stage-managed.
Davenport was also a big UFC fan who personally knew its CEO, Dana White, and would travel to watch professional fights alongside Zuckerberg and Chan, according to people familiar with the matter. Zuckerberg soon became an admirer of the brash, foul-mouthed White, whose appointment to the board upset liberal staffers but who insiders say is already offering impressive marketing advice to the company. “Nothing turns you into a libertarian quicker than jiu-jitsu,” Rogan would later tell Zuckerberg on his podcast.
Some senior executives rolled their eyes at Zuckerberg’s latest hobby. To them, it looked like a time-consuming distraction from the task at hand: guiding the social media platform through an advertising slump and navigating what the unexpected advent of generative AI might mean for the company.
The huge success of ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022 saw OpenAI’s chatbot become the fastest-growing consumer software application in history by January 2023. Zuckerberg had risked becoming a laughing stock after rebranding Facebook as Meta in late 2021, betting that the future of social media would be users logging into an avatar-filled “metaverse”. The vision was a flop, failing to land with consumers. “Nobody in Meta even believed in it, even in senior leadership,” one former staffer said. Internally, it was a joke. In mid-2022, when Zuckerberg’s account shared a screenshot of his cartoonish metaverse avatar, it was met with public derision. Zuckerberg struggled to get over it, according to those familiar with the incident. Months later, Meta was trailing behind rivals OpenAI, Google and Microsoft as generative AI emerged as the far more consequential technology.
Some people interviewed for this story believe Zuckerberg was seeking a new tribe in the machismo-dominated UFC world. For years, the Facebook founder had been routinely mocked and memed as robotic, creepy or lame — for sweating on stage and lathering his face with white sunscreen while surfing, for the bizarre livestreams he posted of himself smoking meat. All the more jarring was the cachet that had been amassed by Musk among Silicon Valley’s nerds and moneymen. Some staffers believe Zuckerberg was frustrated that Musk was seen as a visionary innovator, while he did not receive the same credit. “He saw that Elon Musk was popular among the tech bros,” said one former insider. “There was a push to make him cool. The core of the Social Network movie is true — he just wants people to like him.”
In October 2022, Musk swooped in and bought Twitter, soon cutting staff and moderation policies. The moves went largely unchallenged by politicians and regulators. “The ground shifted when Elon bought Twitter,” the former insider said. “There was a sense of — why are we wasting so much time and money? Elon really proved the point.” On November 4, Musk fired about half of Twitter’s workforce, the day after Meta’s share price hit its lowest in seven years. Days later, Zuckerberg announced the first of many rounds of bruising lay-offs, later declaring 2023 a “year of efficiency”.
Then came the threat of incarceration. Back on the campaign trail in July 2024, Trump warned on his own social media platform, Truth Social, that, if re-elected president, he would “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time”. He singled out Zuckerberg, adding: “We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” The attack referenced around $400mn in donations Zuckerberg had made to support local election infrastructure in the 2020 race, which Republican critics now deemed politically motivated. Zuckerberg was shocked by this reaction, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation, assuming that election infrastructure would be viewed as non-partisan. A bipartisan government commission later reviewed the donations and concluded unanimously that they were apolitical.
Zuckerberg began openly kowtowing to Trump. In July, after an assassination attempt on Trump, Zuckerberg called his fist-pumping defiance in the face of a shooter “badass”. “On some level as an American, it’s, like, hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight,” he said. A month later, he publicly accused the Biden administration of pressuring Meta to “censor” certain content “including humour and satire” during the pandemic. At an interview with the hosts of the Acquired podcast in September 2024, Zuckerberg went further, saying he’d misread the political environment over the past 20 years: “I think one of the things that I look back [and] regret is, we accepted other people’s view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for.”
Zuckerberg has also wrested back control from some employees he considered overly entitled, according to people familiar with his thinking. Bosworth concedes Zuckerberg “has less patience today than he used to” with staff demonstrating skills gaps. In other words, people need to be ready for the job or find a different one, he said. While Meta’s salaries remain the best in the market, dubbed “golden handcuffs”, the company recently slashed equity-based awards for the bulk of its employees and has told managers to rank more staff as “below expectations”, according to people familiar with the matter, prompting speculation that more lay-offs are coming.
Some leaders at Meta have begun quietly carrying out wellness checks on their teams to assess how they are faring. “Maybe the ‘dumb fucks’ guy is the same guy?” a former senior executive said. “It’s gone from ‘lean in’ to ‘fuck off’.”
When Zuckerberg hyperfixates on a new project, executives joke it’s like being under the penetrating gaze of the Eye of Sauron. Today, those working on generative AI are feeling that pressure, with Zuckerberg consumed by his AI ambitions. Zuckerberg is the micromanager, deep in the weeds on every aspect of the products and their development. He messages at all hours of the day and night, asking questions or requesting additions. Meetings scheduled for one hour turn into three-hour marathons. When a competitor emerges with any edge, Zuckerberg demands to know why. Last week, Meta announced a $15bn investment in data-labelling start-up Scale AI. It is also hiring Scale’s co-founder Alexandr Wang, as Zuckerberg has begun personally recruiting staff for a new “superintelligence” team to develop artificial general intelligence.
“If you say to Mark you want two features for launch, he will say four features,” said one person familiar with the situation. But, they warned, the generative AI team is “making changes in a reactive fashion based on what a CEO wants”. The temptation in this breathless, pre-regulation era to cut corners and overlook safety and ethical questions is compelling. “The words ‘safety’ and ‘responsibility’ are bad words” given the heated AI competition and Trump’s censorship allegations, the person said.
On the technological front, Meta has been slipping this year, causing frustration internally. It has extended the deadline for rolling out its flagship Llama large language models recently, and was sent scrambling by impressive advancements from smaller Chinese rival, DeepSeek. But Zuckerberg’s advocates warn never to bet against the boss. Being the Big Tech group to launch the largest open source AI models in history, Zuckerberg hopes to make Llama the universal standard. Meanwhile, he can wield what no other company has at such scale: a social graph, or gargantuan network of users’ connections, and the trove of data that comes with that.
In Zuckerberg’s vision of the future, many of our friends and much of our content will be AI-generated, and mundane tasks such as shopping will be handled by AI. Meta’s own code will be written by bots and its AI research and risk management will be conducted by them. Apple iPhones and Google’s Android will be replaced by Meta-made wearables running on Meta-made software. “Meta is trying to transition from being a social media company to an AI company,” said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook public policy director. “If he is successful, it cements his power for another 20 years. Mark will have — and the decision he makes will have — huge implications for politics, for our news environment, the entertainment environment and how we live our lives in general.”
Securing this legacy will come down, in part, to how Zuckerberg is received by an increasingly transactional Trump administration, which can influence other governments and the regulation-heavy EU. “Having the ability to convince world leaders to let the AI industry regulate itself is job number one for Zuckerberg as a diplomat,” said Vaidhyanathan. In meetings with Trump at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, Zuckerberg has emphasised the importance of the US dominating on open source AI versus China, according to several people familiar with these discussions.
Both David Sacks, the tech investor who has been appointed Trump’s AI tsar, and Sriram Krishnan, another investor who is Trump’s senior policy adviser for AI, tweeted celebrating the launch of Llama 4. Brian Baker, a longtime Republican strategist first retained by Zuckerberg personally in 2021, has become a key liaison between Meta and the White House, according to people familiar with the matter, leveraging relationships with Trump’s campaign manager turned White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller.
Zuckerberg is “trying to triangulate and find the space where the company’s interests overlap with the administration”, said one person who has worked closely with him. Meanwhile, Trump’s bromance with Musk blew up spectacularly this month, paving the way for Zuckerberg to emerge as America’s number one “broligarch”.
Others in the Trump camp are not convinced, according to DC lobbyists. Steve Bannon, Maga’s early conceptualiser, continues to insist that Zuckerberg “can’t be trusted”. Zuckerberg’s failed attempt earlier this year to negotiate a settlement on a potentially devastating antitrust case from the Federal Trade Commission, which could see Meta broken up, looked like a sign of his inability to resonate. The trial is ongoing.
“Until we actually see changes that are lasting and real and permanent, we’re not going to believe it,” said one senior Senate aide.
Some of Zuckerberg’s staff and advisers question whether their boss’s wholehearted embrace of Trump is wise, given that Trump will probably not be in the White House four years from now. “If there is a new administration, what is he going to do?” said one former senior staffer. “Pretend that the past six, seven months didn’t happen? Everybody knows, inside and outside the company, that he kissed the ring.”
Zuckerberg won one fight on that day in Woodside, the referee da Silva said. Then he lost a second one. His opponent pinned him down and began choking him. Zuckerberg let out a guttural rasp, indicating that he was losing consciousness. “I can’t forget his eyes,” da Silva recalled. “You know, when someone is looking towards you but they’re not looking at you?”
Da Silva ended the match, calling it in the other fighter’s favour. When he’d recovered, Zuckerberg loudly disputed the loss. Afterwards, Meta put out a statement stating that “at no point during the competition was Mark knocked unconscious”. Da Silva stayed steadfast: “I learnt it’s possible for anyone to make a mistake. Of course, he is an expert on what he does; I am too.” Jiu-jitsu, he said, is about being smart and tactical rather than strong. When an opponent can find a potentially infinite combination of grips around your body, you must anticipate which pivot will give you the upper hand. “You need to find where you need to fix a problem in order to obtain power . . . Maybe Mark had to fix a bug.”
Hannah Murphy is an FT tech reporter. Additional reporting by Alex Rogers and Joe Miller in Washington DC, and George Hammond in San Francisco
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