What's going on with Mark Zuckerberg's glow-up?

Mum, can you come and pick me up? They’re calling Mark Zuckerberg hot on social media again.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, congratulations, you probably have a very healthy screen time. If not, strap in, it’s about to get very strange.

It all started back in April, when a video went viral of Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, talking about a new AI assistant. Pretty bland subject matter, but what the internet was obsessed with was his new look – namely, a full head of curly hair, deep tan, and a silver chain around his neck.

“Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement about something Meta is doing with AI, but I could not listen to or retain a second of it because when I look at the Reel of him talking, all I see is necklace,” wrote journalist Amy Odell at the time.

Immediately afterwards, a photoshopped version of the same picture, with added scruffy facial hair went even more viral. Thousands of people took to Instagram and X to share their confusion, but also to pose the tentative question: is Mark Zuckerberg hot now? Among those commenting on the photo posted by celebrity news account The Shade Room was Gwyneth Paltrow, who compared Zuckerberg to her ex-husband Chris Martin.

This week, the chaos continued when another video of Zuckerberg discussing the release of Llama, his open-source AI model, started doing the rounds on X. And yes, you guessed it, the chain was back. It apparently caught the eye of American singer and rapper T Pain, who then took it upon himself to send the tech billionaire another, chunkier gold necklace (like he couldn’t afford to buy one himself).

“Wow, that’s awesome,” the 40-year-old CEO laughed in a video of him unboxing the gift. “The other one wasn’t quite big enough, so this definitely…it’s a vibe.”

So, what is going on here? Throughout the majority of his career, Zuckerberg was the face of the robotic, nerdy, tech entrepreneur community. Like Steve Jobs and the black turtlenecks before him, Zuck’s “fashion” consisted solely of the same grey t-shirt and a pair of blue jeans –  it was a high-end version of a grey T-shirt from Brunello Cucinelli, but a t-shirt nonetheless.

“I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” said Zuckerberg about his style in a 2014 interview . “I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.” (Similarly, Jobs reportedly told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he had enough black turtlenecks to “last the rest of my lifetime”).

Famously, Zuckerberg’s whole brand was having such little personality that some people genuinely believed he wasn’t a real human being. Youtube compilations like “Mark Zuckerberg Pretending To Be Human For 27 Seconds”, and “Mark Zuckerberg Being A Robot For 5 Minutes” have racked up millions of views, analysing everything from his vacant gaze to the way he drinks water.

“Tech bro fashion became its own sub-genre, with the rise of global brands like Facebook, Amazon, and Apple”, says menswear stylist Holly Macnaghten. “The idea behind it was that these CEOs and entrepreneurs were too busy and bright to care about fashion – there weren't enough hours in the day for them to be worrying about what they wore, so they adopted a super minimalist wardrobe as a way of streamlining their days and the decision-making process.”

“That minimalist fashion definitely adhered to the saying, 'money talks but wealth whispers'”, agrees Megan Watkins, Head Stylist at online fashion destination SilkFred. “Steve Jobs was the pioneer – his black polo-neck, blue jeans and New Balance trainers ensemble was iconic and novel. He changed the idea of what a CEO should look like.”

But this Zuckerberg is nowhere to be found. The Zuck rebrand – or Meta-morphosis if you will – has been gathering steam for months now. Now, the Zuck of 2024 has become something of a gym bro, MMA, surfer dude hybrid. New Zuck is working on his gains to Green Day’s “Look Ma, No Brains.” Or, he’s uploading a rather surreal video to Instagram of himself on July 4 effortlessly hydrofoiling in a tux holding an American flag and beer, with the caption: “Happy Birthday, America”. Because, sure.

Over the last few months he has also shared photographs of himself looking “Yellowstone”-ready in a chunky shearling coat by Overland. We've also seen pictures of him and his wife, Priscilla Chan, attending Anant Ambani's three-day pre-wedding celebration in Gujarat, where the pair wore a variety of Indian-inspired outfits, including a gold silk Sunderbans Tigress shirt by Rahul Mishra, a black Alexander McQueen suit embroidered with silver dragonflies, and a kurta.

It seems that Zuckerberg has discovered a gap in the market. Looking out at the landscape of tech elites, they are all, for lack of a better word, weird. Take Elon Musk, whose takeover of X and descent into right-wing conspiracy theory-land has seen him become the undisputed villain of the tech world. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos appears to be having some kind of post-divorce extended mid-life crisis manifesting in the form of of launching phallic-looking rockets into space every few months. And then there are the straight-up criminals, like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes.

Clearly, the bar is subterranean. But when positioned alongside this cast of characters, Zuckerberg begins to emerge as the nice, normal, tech bro next door.

“I think Zuckerberg is trying to connect with a younger audience,” Watkins says. “It’s no secret that Zuckerberg's Meta is no longer 'cool' and it is possible Mark is trying to change up his image. After being criticised for his robot-like demeanour in the Facebook trials, Mark's rebrand to a more casual, carefree style may be him trying to show the more personable side of him.”

But will it work? While Zuckerberg’s rebrand has certainly attracted a lot of attention online, many on social media are already seeing through it. “Mark Zuckerberg rebrand ain't fooling me,” one X user wrote. “A lot of people are convinced he's now a "nice guy" cause he got a tan, some blonde curls and a rapper chain.. he's dumbing himself down so he can be more relatable.”

“Why is everyone falling for this extremely obvious rebrand and acting like Zuckerberg isn’t a POS [piece of shit] that runs a horrific business where the users are the product,” another wrote. “This was 100% put together by an image consultant.”

“It's certainly a far cry from the man we saw testify before Congress in 2018 over data misuse or indeed the much-criticized avatar "selfie" in front of the Eiffel Tower,” says Macnaghten. “The grown-out hair, the chain, the designer clothes -  He looks human!! And dare I say it, quite good?

“But I'm cynical,” she continues. “To me it's all just deflection. If Zuckerberg is seen wearing an Alexander McQueen suit, or box-fitting t-shirt and cashmere cardigan more readily seen on Hollywood off-duty actors, perhaps he's trying to show us he's just a fashionable billionaire celebrity these days, not the nerd from high school who was profiting off our data.”

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