Matt Van Horn on Mark Zuckerberg

“Colossus just published a 10,000-word profile of Mark Zuckerberg (months with him, his parents, his MMA coaches, and his rivals). The thesis: he’s a Roman emperor running the largest empire in history from inside a prison, and he will never, ever stop.

🦷 His dad, “the painless Dr. Z,” says “He didn’t stand out as the bright one in the family.” Middle daughter Donna was the nerd. At 12 he wrote ZuckNet in Atari BASIC in two days so the dental office wouldn’t have to drill wires through walls. A year before AOL Instant Messenger existed

🏛️ The Rome thing is not a bit. He still recites Virgil’s “I have given empire without end.” Early crisis meetings vs Google ended with him shouting “Carthage must be destroyed.” Friday all-hands ended with “Domination!” Honeymoon in Rome, Priscilla says Augustus was the third wheel. Kids: Maxima, August, Aurelia. Conference shirt: AUT ZUCK AUT NIHIL

👁️ His longtime lieutenants call his silences “the Eye of Sauron.” His mom, on 20 years of coverage: “It’s been really brutal. This is my child.”

🥊 He trains 3 mornings a week with UFC champ Merab Dvalishvili and an NCAA wrestling champ. Merab demoed a kick and knocked his wind out. Zuck sat down rocking back and forth: “Wow. Oh, man.” His coach’s theory: it’s the only place he can be “just one of the guys” and get told he’s wrong

👑 The “dictator’s dilemma”: a project subordinates hated was internally nicknamed M.M.H. (Make Mark Happy). There are stories of deputies letting him win at board games. In 2006 nearly the entire management team quit when the 22-year-old refused Yahoo’s $1B, cementing the rule: in the face of opposition, Zuckerberg is right

🏰 Scale: 3.6B users, 1 in 2.3 humans alive. Each of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp has more MAU than Christianity has adherents. Meta’s capex this year exceeds the military budget of every country except the US, China, and Russia. Voting control means he could still be running it in 50 years

🔒 The whole strategy is a jailbreak from Apple. Apple’s ATT cost him ~$10B in year one. The phone, Libra, Oculus, $90B on the Metaverse, now AI glasses: every one was a tunnel out of the App Store prison. To Jensen Huang, on being told “you can’t build that” by platforms: “Nah. Fuck that.”

🕶️ The glasses told him unprompted he was botching a recipe while baking with his daughter. The nose mic is clear enough to “take business calls on a jet ski.” Author’s prediction: they’ll be known as “pervert glasses” within a year

🐄 Asked why he doesn’t just stop, he digressed into cattle genetics: he’s roasting macadamia nuts and brewing beer for his Hawaii cows to fatten them. “I’m never going to stop. I can get obsessive.”

💀 Every few years he’s pronounced dead (2012 mobile, 2016 Snapchat, 2018 Cambridge Analytica, 2022 TikTok) and every time he comes back bigger. This summer: Wired ran “Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit,” an employee called the AI unit “literally the gulag,” a $17.1B teen-harm settlement, an AI support bot handing hackers Instagram accounts, and a leaked prediction-markets app

🤖 After Llama 4 flopped, he executed regime change in 11 weeks: $14.3B for Scale AI, hundreds of millions per researcher, LeCun out, $145B spend this year. Muse Spark now beats Gemini. The steelman from his rivals: if AI commoditizes, Anthropic and OpenAI go to zero and value flows to distribution he already owns. If it doesn’t, he only needs to stay within 6 months of the frontier. Heads he wins, tails he wins

🔥 A researcher at a competing lab who used to work at Meta: “Mark is the fucking Terminator. He’s actually not an asshole, which is interesting. But his source of advantage is he’s never happy. He just doesn’t fucking stop.” And: “Mark’s still the alpha of that”

🎬 The Social Network was fiction: no Erica Albright (he was already dating Priscilla), never rejected by WASP clubs (he was a beer-guzzling AEPi bro). Stern’s read: the class resentment in the movie was Sorkin’s, who saw social media coming for his industry. The new sequel’s climax: a progressive woman radicalized by Facebook tramples a Black cop on Jan 6

🇨🇳 His most demeaning era: staging Xi’s book on his desk, jogging through Tiananmen, and reportedly asking Xi to name his unborn child

🏛️ On the government: “the White House tells you they want stuff censored, and then you push back, and that’s your right… then all of a sudden you get all these investigations from all these different parts of the government”

🧬 Around year 18 Priscilla asked him to quit: “Aren’t we tired? Can we be done? Let’s call it.” He said no: “I just love building things.” For years she didn’t get it. Then their daughter, with no prompting from Mark, started vibecoding a messaging app, a podcast called “Is Romance Appropriate?”, and a dating site (Mom said no). That’s when it clicked: “It’s Mark. After 23 years, I get it now. You can’t take this away from him. He wouldn’t be him if he stopped.” She stopped asking

An emperor for life who cries at crashed Risk games, gets kicked in the chest for fun, and has never once been convinced he was wrong. That’s the whole profile.

Full piece by @colossusjeremy at @colossusmag