Growing up in Southeast London during the 1980s, image was important. The schoolyard was a proving ground where projecting competence, sanity, and toughness was paramount. You had to hold your own, and you couldn’t afford to seem weak. It all made life extremely tough on my gay older brother, sadly, although he was lucky enough to be big and strong enough to stand up for himself and his fascination for Latin and geraniums. (It’s an aside, this, but I often compare him to Tom Hardy’s NSFW performance as Ronnie Kray in the 2015 film about the East End gangsters, Legend — even though he’s a tenured University professor nowadays).
Authenticity was rigorously policed by your peers. If you tried to project a persona that didn’t align with “who you were,” you were instantly sniffed out, mocked, and dismissed as a fraud. I’m not saying Southeast London was a great place to grow up, either, or that people can’t change. You simply learn the lessons you learn from being who you are, and I learned mine early. Another of my school friends was the adopted son of the police officer mixed up in the murder, by axe, in a pub car park, of a man looking into police and press corruption at the time. He, too, later died when I was eight in mysterious circumstances.
“At least my dad didn’t shoot himself,” was a retort to the young man uttered by one of our mutual friends in a moment of playground prove-iness. We were not exactly nice boys.
Someone like Mark Zuckerberg would not have survived that scrutiny for a second. Here is a man who famously started his public life as a calculating, fleece-wearing college nerd, and who is now awkwardly attempting to reinvent himself as a chain-wearing mixed martial artist. My friends and I would have smelled the phony on him from a mile away.
The absurdity of Zuckerberg’s recent metamorphosis was captured brilliantly in a recent edition of the Oligarch Watch newsletter. As the publication detailed, the 41-year-old centibillionaire has embarked on a highly engineered aesthetic pivot. He has grown out his hair, traded his infamous hoodies for trendy luxury t-shirts, and draped himself in gold chains and a $900,000 watch. He has been photographed sitting cage-side at major fighting events. It is a deliberate image overhaul meant to align with what Zuckerberg himself described on a podcast as a new “masculine energy.” It’s cut from the same cloth as the ridiculous ‘alpha camps’ that promise to help lost men “CHANGE YOUR STORY & UNF**K YOUR LIFE.”
But beneath this superficial rebranding lies a profound truth about power and isolation. I recently read Careless People by Sarah Weinman, a former policy leader at Facebook, and her account makes something abundantly clear: Despite being one of the richest people in the world, Mark Zuckerberg suffers from being so wealthy, he is completely cosseted from the implications of his own decisions.
When Zuck decided to rename Facebook as Meta, it ended up being a catastrophic failure that burned through billions of dollars and was ultimately abandoned. Yet, because of the sheer scale of the company’s monopoly, the stock price didn’t really suffer. When your personal wealth grows by more than $180 billion in just a few years, the normal rules of consequence simply cease to apply to you. You can burn billions on a metaverse pipe dream, or pivot to a fabricated tough-guy persona, without anyone in your inner circle having the power or the courage to tell you no.
I don’t think that makes you tough, though. I think it makes you stupid. One of the reasons I remain close to many of my school friends is that if anyone does something stupid, we can trust each other to indelicately point that out. If you know Southeast London vernacular well enough, you’ll also know the single word we most often use to do that to each other.
“Don’t be such a ______,” we’ll say.
There’s ample research to back the value of this up, incidentally:
In 1982, Frans de Waal’s book “Chimpanzee Politics” helped popularize the term “alpha male.” The book is an account of power struggles within a colony of male chimps at a zoo in the Netherlands. De Waal, a Dutch primatologist who taught at Emory University and was a director at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, challenged a number of assumptions about nonhuman primates. He noticed that the leaders of the chimps he studied were not necessarily the strongest or most intimidating but, rather, the ones who excelled at coalition-building. They kept the peace impartially, often by protecting underdogs when conflicts arose. De Waal called his alphas the “consolers-in-chief.” —Charles Bethea, The New Yorker
The problem for Zuckerberg is that while his extreme wealth shields him from immediate financial ruin, the real-world harms caused by his products are finally catching up to him in the courtroom and in the California legislature. The tough-guy cosplay is ultimately a failing distraction from a company in crisis.
The contrast between his current standing and his past reputation is staggering. Back in 2016, a Morning Consult poll identified Zuckerberg as America’s favorite Silicon Valley executive, with 48% of voters viewing him favorably — making him appreciably more popular than peers like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. He even considered a run for president.
By last year, a Pew Research Center survey found that while 94% of respondents were familiar with him, an overwhelming 67% had an unfavorable view, marking a dramatic and disastrous swing.
This general distrust came home to roost recently when Meta was hit with two devastating jury verdicts. Juries, as any good viewer of legal dramas knows, are reliable arbiters of public sentiment as much as ruthless interpreters of the law.
In Santa Fe, a jury sided with the New Mexico attorney general, accusing Meta of enabling child sexual exploitation and misleading the public about the safety of its products. The state’s Democratic attorney general, Raul Torrez, successfully argued that Meta’s products were intentionally designed to be addictive and marketed to young people. Following a jury decision ordering Meta to pay $375 million in damages, Torrez noted that the company knew the risks but hid them from the public because “profit always got the vote from senior executives inside the company, including Mr. Zuckerberg”.
A day later, in Los Angeles County Superior Court, another jury found Meta liable for knowingly designing Instagram in ways that led to addictive behavior, causing severe harm to a young woman who used the platform as a child. This verdict was particularly damning for Zuckerberg because he personally took the stand to defend his company. This was a critical moment for the CEO to project the competence and leadership his new image is supposed to convey. Instead, he argued vaguely that Meta is in “a better place” (aren’t we all, Mark?) and does not make addictive products. Jurors were unconvinced, finding his answers inconsistent and noting how unprepared Zuck seemed on the stand. The arrogance of a man who has never had to answer for his mistakes was laid bare before a jury of his peers, with one juror telling NPR that they delivered the verdict because “we wanted them to feel it, we wanted them to know this was unacceptable.”
That arrogance extended well beyond the CEO’s disastrous testimony; it infected the company’s entire public relations strategy. During the Los Angeles trial, Meta’s legal and PR teams went on the offensive, attempting to blame the 20-year-old plaintiff’s mental health struggles on a turbulent home life and a poor relationship with her mother. The PR team actively sent reporters repeated updates from the trial highlighting the young woman’s familial issues, suggesting that Instagram offered a “helpful respite from the real world.”
This was a catastrophic and morally bankrupt communications strategy. Deflecting blame onto a young victim is unconscionable, especially when the public already knows the truth. In 2021, whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed internal research showing that Meta’s algorithms promoted eating disorders and self-harm, with company researchers openly admitting, “we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” Despite this, Facebook spent the next year studying ways to entice even more preteens to use its platforms. The Los Angeles jury saw right through Meta’s victim-blaming, holding the company liable for $4.2 million in damages due to knowingly addictive design features — like an endless, slot-machine-like churn of targeted content and beauty filters that alter users’ faces with whiter teeth and smoother skin.
Beyond the courtroom failures, Zuckerberg’s attempt to reinvent his image has also included a transparent and desperate political shapeshifting. During the Obama years, he was quick to emphasize liberal social ideals, and in 2018 he appeared repentant before Congress, profusely apologizing for his company’s role in data privacy violations and election interference. Today, the apologetic tech whiz is gone. He recently terminated Meta’s independent factchecking and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. He has complained about government overreach, accused the Biden administration of bullying Meta into censoring posts (which were spreading dangerous misinformation during the COVID pandemic), and actively fostered a friendly relationship with Donald Trump.
This political pandering has failed to win over anyone. His shift to the right hasn’t fully convinced conservatives; he remains 26 points underwater with Republicans, 60% of whom view him unfavorably. Meanwhile, 76% of Democrats also hold an unfavorable view of him. By trying to appease shifting political winds, he has alienated everyone and left himself without a strong base of support.
This isolation is resulting in severe legislative backlash. Elected officials from both parties are now highly willing to target Meta’s bottom line. States like Utah, California, and New York are pushing laws to restrict addictive algorithms targeting children, while Senators Ted Cruz and Brian Schatz have introduced a federal bill to prohibit children under 13 from using social media altogether. Public sentiment is firmly against Zuckerberg’s empire; shortly after Australia passed a law banning children under 16 from social media, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 59% of American voters—including strong majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents—would support a similar law in the U.S.
Ultimately, Mark Zuckerberg’s extreme makeover is a masterclass in how not to manage public perception. You can put on all the gold chains you want, buy a million-dollar watch, and sit cage-side at MMA fights, but it won’t change the underlying reality of the harm your company has caused. In the schoolyards of Southeast London, we knew that true toughness and competence had to be authentic. Superficial rebranding can never fix systemic, deeply rooted reputational damage. When your business model is fundamentally flawed and your leadership is completely insulated from consequence, the public will always sniff out the phony. We might even use a nasty word or two to describe him.
Matt Davis is a strategic communications consultant.
