Zuckerberg Augustus: Meta’s emperor rebrands in new clothes

Mark Zuckerberg is revamping his public image with new threads. With a trio of bold shirts worn in recent appearances, he’s communicating that he came, he saw, he conquered and he will win again at any cost. The fits might be sick, but we would do well to beware.

During a live, packed-auditorium podcast interview last week, the CEO of Meta wore a drop-shouldered black shirt reading “pathei mathos”, Greek for “learning through suffering”. At his 40th birthday party in May, he donned a black tee with the motto “Carthago delenda est,” which translates from Latin to “Carthage must be destroyed.” He wore a black shirt with black text that read “Aut Zuck aut nihil” during Meta’s Connect product demonstration on Wednesday.

The phrases together show him cycling through a condensed evolution of antiquity’s politics. First, the ancient Greeks, then the early days of Rome as republic and finally, the full, pitiless glory of the Roman empire.

We need not dwell on the first motto much, as it induces only quizzical anger. Has the head of the world’s largest social network, a Harvard-educated man worth $196bn, suffered? He seems no wise Aeschylus, the father of tragedy who coined the phrase in the 5th century BC. Perhaps Zuckerberg has endured slings and arrows of the outrageous press as it criticized Facebook for fueling ethnic cleansing and the Capitol riot. His recent $10bn metaverse ambitions have flopped, and he has pivoted to AI with the rest of the tech world. That must have stung. But of the options to be or not to be Meta’s CEO, he has stayed the course.

The second phrase, “Carthago delenda est,” originates from the Roman Senate. Cato the Elder, a Roman senator and historian around 200BC, repeated it at the end of every speech he made there. After two wars with Rome, Carthage, located in modern-day Tunisia, was to Cato the city’s sworn enemy. Though few others considered it a threat, he nevertheless pushed for a final showdown. He got his war; Rome crushed Carthage in 146BC.

The slogan connotes fixation unto monomania. Zuckerberg is locked in. He is communicating to rivals and investors alike that he will do anything to flatten his competition – copy the Instagram story format wholesale from Snapchat or Reels from TikTok; buy the world’s most popular texting system, WhatsApp, for $19bn; box Apple out of the market for virtual and augmented reality devices. He says to users: he will use your personal data as he sees fit.

That Zuckerberg is like this is well-known. Ruthlessness is his primary public personality trait. What is different now is the swagger and the ease with which he wears it. He looks cool, to be frank.

The CEO created the Carthage shirt in collaboration with the designer Mike Amiri, a disruptive and successful American like Zuckerberg himself. Its boxy cut resembled less a Roman toga than a fighter’s practice outfit, something the executive himself aspires to be with his hobby of mixed martial arts training. The aesthetic of a loose shirt and chain is geared towards the young, though the phrases of antiquity would seem to appeal to an older crowd. Either way, it is a far cry from the navy zip-up hoodies and tight gray shirts of his early days of Facebook, a non-style remembered for its lack of flair or individuality. Zuckerberg’s focus, it seemed then, was on the code, not the body. Now the CEO of Meta is taking up space as himself. He’s denied hiring a stylist, making the rebrand all his own.

The refresh of Zuckerberg’s image, however heavy-handed, has worked. The public has noticed he’s not the same android who testified before the Senate with microbangs. He’s grown out his curly hair to TikToker length and started sporting a chain regularly, an element of his style he A/B tested in product manager fashion. The internet thinks he’s almost hot: An image of him altered to appear a bit more like a TikToker aping Drake went viral earlier this year. Against the ultra-online mania of styleless Elon Musk, Zuckerberg seems approachable.

The third Latin motto seen on Zuckerberg’s chest, “Aut Zuck aut nihil,” translates to “Either Zuck or nothing,” a play on “Either Caesar or nothing.” According to Reuters, scholars associate two Caesars with the phrase: Roman dictator Julius Caesar, who may have said it, and Cardinal Cesare Borgia, who said that Julius said it. “Caesar” can refer to the men themselves and their exploits – Borgia’s heartless quest for power inspired Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. The connotation of the slogan: a win-at-all-costs mentality, an intolerance of dissent, and absolute, unyielding power. Zuckerberg is cultivating an air of rising mightily above the fray, timeless as the emperors. He is, to himself, the architect of a digital civilization as enduring as Rome.

Meta’s corporate governance has always cast Zuckerberg as the supreme leader: he possesses just 13% of Meta’s stock but controls over 50% of the total voting power. With it, he wields complete and incontrovertible veto power.

The structure of Wednesday’s presentation makes a similar statement, one reminiscent of French king Louis XIV’s “L’État, c’est moi.” Zuckerberg remained onstage for the entire two-hour demonstration, and it was he alone who unveiled Meta’s newest product, still in development but clearly near to his innovative heart: Orion, an advanced pair of augmented reality glasses. He is Meta; Meta is him.

There is a third Caesar not associated with Zuck’s motto who nonetheless comes to mind: Augustus, who founded the Roman empire as such when he took the name Caesar and elevated himself to emperor in 27BC. He conquered Egypt, other parts of north Africa and most of Europe. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, spent their honeymoon in Rome – Chan joked that Zuckerberg took more pictures of statues of Augustus than of her – and named their second daughter August. Zuckerberg told the New Yorker in 2018: “Basically, through a really harsh approach, Augustus established two hundred years of world peace.”

There are pedestrian reasons for Zuckerberg’s stylistic rebrand. His company’s latest hardware product, the clumsily named Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, is a hit. Meta has also inked partnerships with major fashion houses like Balenciaga, Prada and Thom Browne to license clothes for digital avatars. For business reasons, he can’t be looking unfashionable.

Zuckerberg’s string of victories have also led Meta’s stock to an all-time high. It’s an apt time for a CEO to declare himself god-emperor, the embodiment of the empire without whom there is nothing. Back in 2018, as Facebook endured criticism for permitting fake news and election interference, his company had a “war room” to fight hate speech and misinformation. The command center failed to curb the cruelty of Facebook’s users and then was disbanded. Move fast, break things, as Zuckerberg himself has said many times. We would do well to beware that the CEO of Meta, with destruction already in his wake, is telling us that consequences matter little to him so long as victory is his, however he looks.