When Jesse Eisenberg played Mark Zuckerberg in the Oscar-nominated 2010 film “The Social Network,” he nailed the Facebook founder’s early signature look: slight build, nondescript haircut, gray Gap hoodie.
But now, Ben Mezrich, whose book “The Accidental Billionaires” inspired the movie, told The Post: “If we do a sequel [to ‘The Social Network’], Jesse will have to hit the gym.”
Over the past year, Zuckerberg, 40, has undergone a transformation that the New York Times and Vanity Fair have termed his “MAGA makeover.”
He’s grown his hair out into a modified mullet, ditched the hoodie for trendy Balenciaga T-shirts and prominent gold chains, and taken to wearing a $900,000 Greubel Forsey watch.
After famously driving a Honda Fit for years, he boasted about designing a custom Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT minivan for his wife, Priscilla; he’s also bulked up, big time, as part of his obsession with MMA training.
“He has gone through a transformation and has become a cool looking dude with the gold necklace and [affinity for] the UFC. It’s the new Zuckerberg,” Mezrich said.
“It’s kind of like when guys don’t have style, but they come into some money and they work out and they’re putting on muscle. Like, all of those young Joe Rogan-wannabe fitness guys,” Ronny Estrella, a fashion designer and stylist, told The Post of Zuck’s new look.
But it’s more than just his style.
Zuckerberg, in an interview with Joe Rogan released Friday, exuded alpha-male energy.
“A lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered. I think having a culture that celebrates aggression a bit more has its own merits that are positive,” Zuckerberg said, crediting his love of martial arts as helping shift his views on corporate culture.
The Meta CEO sent shock waves through the tech world and beyond last week when he announced the decision to drop fact-checking and restrictions on free speech on its apps, opting instead for X-style community notes that lets users police misinformation.
And, after Facebook famously suppressed The Post’s 2020 reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, Zuckerberg also trashed the Biden administration on Rogan last week, claiming White House officials would “scream” when demanding Meta remove negative posts about the coronavirus.
“Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.
“It just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous.’ The US government should be defending its companies, not be at the tip of the spear attacking its companies.”
Biden, meanwhile, called Facebook’s decision to cut fact-checking “really shameful.”
Sources told The Post that it’s not just Donald Trump’s presidential win that has influenced Zuckerberg’s shift.
“He [Zuckerberg] always has believed in free speech but he finally has the political winds at his back to make this final decision,” one DC insider said. “Appeasing the left was never going to work … He is finally saying no to the liberal voices in his company. There is a political calculus, but it’s letting him be him.”
So who is Zuckerberg, really?
The answer may be worn on his chest. He’s worked with Iranian designer Mike Amiri to create a series of boxy T-shirts emblazoned with, as he told the “Acquired” podcast in September, “some of my favorite sayings.”
They tend to be Latin, like “pathei mathos” (“learning through suffering”), “Carthago delenda est” (“Carthage must be destroyed”) and the goofy “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil” (“all Zuck or all nothing,” a play on a famous quote about Julius Caesar).
“I think some elements of Mark’s ‘glow-up’ have been successful; the looser curls and sun-kissed glow make him look less like an android and more like an actual human being, for starters,” Page Six Style editor Elana Fishman told The Post. “Really, though, it’s the messages splashed across those viral tees reveal the most: This is a man who values power and will go to great lengths to maintain it.”
Zuck’s not the only tech billionaire who’s undergone a major makeover as their profiles have grown.
Elon Musk mysteriously sprouted hair after old photos showed a severely receding hairline. Particularly after hooking up with now-fiancée Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos went from dweeb body to muscle man who loves a fitted shirt. But Zuckerberg has been with wife Priscilla since 2003, when they were both students at Harvard.
The two, who share daughters Max, 9, August, 7, and Aurelia, nearly 2, split their time between a half-block-long spread that includes the oldest house in Palo Alto, Calif., a 10-acre Lake Tahoe estate, and a $270 million ranch in Kauai, Hawaii that’s raised eyebrows.
In 2023, Wired ran a sprawling investigation of this secretive compound, complete with a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter with “its own energy and food supplies” and “what appears to be a blast-resistant door.”
The magazine reported that different construction crews were assigned to different projects and forbidden from speaking to each other.
“It’s fight club. We don’t talk about fight club,” one former contract employee told Wired.
Zuckerberg has refuted claims that it’s his doomsday bunker — a favorite way for a certain sector of Silicon Valley’s super rich to spend their billions. But it’s not the only way he’s behaving like a prototypical tech bro.
In 2023, the internet worked itself into a lather after Zuckerberg accepted a “cage match” challenge from Musk.
Although UFC’s Dana White tried to make it happen, the two have yet to go toe to toe. Nevertheless, Rolling Stone reported that Silicon Valley was “going wild” for mixed martial arts and jiu-jitsu.
“You want to have that inner badass come out, you know?” martial-arts instructor Adrian Tandez of the Tandez Academy in Mountain View, Calif., told Rolling Stone. “They take off the glasses, and they change persona.”
Zuckerberg subbed out running with three to four jiu-jitsu and MMA sessions weekly, he told poscaster Lex Friedman in 2023, adding that he was eating 4,000 calories per day to fuel the intense training.
“He’s doing this as a hobby and takes it seriously,” ESPN MMA analyst Ian Parker told The Post. “It’s a different level of focus, a different level of patience .. I respect him for it … [but] I don’t think the MMA community really acknowledges it as a whole.”
It’s not just ji-jitsu gi and Latin-catchphrase T-shirts in Zuckerberg’s closet, though.
Last Friday, he pulled up to Palm Beach Airport in a suit, parking his Gulfstream private jet next to Trump Force One to meet with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago for the second time in less than two months.
With billions on the line amid federal crackdowns and antitrust initiatives, he’s the latest tech titan offering up a mea culpa on the war over free speech.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg declared Tuesday.
Under Meta’s loosened regulations, the social media network, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will no longer restrict open discussion on topics like immigration and gender — and will now allow users to police misinformation.
The move has garnered praise from Trump, who was once given a two-year suspension from Facebook following his comments on the Jan. 6, 2021, riots.
Some insiders say Zuckerberg’s political pendulum swing is a sign of the times and would sway far left if Kamala Harris was president. And he’s not the only billionaire visiting Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring.
Besides “first buddy” Musk — who Lara Trump recently told The Post is “always” at Trump’s Palm Beach club — Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook have met with the president-elect.
And Meta, like Bezos and Open AI’s Sam Altman, will donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.
“Mark feels the way the wind is blowing,” Mezrich said. “We’re watching the tech billionaires put their sails up to catch the wind.”
For Trump’s part, a source told The Post, “He is skeptical … I think he has a personal relationship and likes Zuckerberg, but he takes it with a grain of salt. He is probably happy Zuckerberg is sucking up to him, but I don’t think Trump trusts [Zuckerberg].”
Still, there are some who believe Zuckerberg’s so-called “MAGA makeover” is organic — and that, like many Silicon Valley types suddenly willing to come out of the conservative closet, he may just be fed up with how far the culture wars have gone.
“There have been green shoots on this for a while — it’s been obvious that Zuckerberg and Meta have been re-seeking how to engage with culture and policy,” the DC insider said of the recent announcement of Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan as Meta’s VP of Global Public Policy. “[Zuckerberg] gave an interview in September and said, I’m done saying I’m sorry … This is the culmination of that.
