Mark Zuckerberg

Colossus Magazine

This episode presents an intimate profile of Mark Zuckerberg, tracing his trajectory from a precocious child in Dobbs Ferry to the architect of

Key takeaways

• Zuckerberg's early technical ingenuity was evident in 'ZuckNet,' a primitive communication system he built for his father's dental practice.
• The 'dictator's dilemma' is used to analyze Zuckerberg's leadership, suggesting that massive power creates environments where subordinates may fear providing honest feedback.

Main topics

• The Zuckerberg family history
• The psychology of extreme power

Notable quotes

He is the company, and thely company is him.

Conclusion

A profound examination of how personal obsession drives global-scale t

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:07) Profile. Mark. A Journey to the Heart of History's Largest Non-Territorial Empire. By Jeremy Stern. September 2026. Issue 8. Read by Scott Brick. There they are, the Zuckerbergs, both in black slacks and plain shoes, both in zanily-patterned shirts that look made to wick sweat. No heavy watches, no bright jewelry. They look you in the eye and don't break contact, not even to sample the spa water or crudités provided by the company on the glass table between us. He is a ham, she is shy. They speak, to my surprise, in unreconstructed New York accents. I don't know what I expected them to be like, but for whatever reason, this wasn't it. All my children are amazing to me, says Karen, when asked what it's like. He didn't stand out as the bright one in the family, says Ed. If anyone, I would guess our middle daughter Donna was considered the nerd or the smart one in the family. I tell them I'm reminded of the first Jewish president of the United States, whose mother nudges a reporter at the inauguration and whispers proudly, his brother's a doctor. We just had four really bright, successful kids. We're equally proud of all of them, says Ed. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was a perfect confluence of his passion aligned with some of my passions. And Karen and I together, Karen especially, we just created an incredibly supportive environment for him to excel. I think people who have a passion, says Karen, subtly correcting Ed, are the luckiest people in the world. But were there signs? Well, yes, perhaps there were some. In nursery school, he became so possessed by a one-week unit on outer space that he implored the teacher to extend the unit to a month, to which she relented at the insistence of a four-year-old. By six, his incessant demands for logical explanations of rules and step-by-step justifications for consequences. What Ed calls the mental PowerPoint he expected his parents to prepare before laying down the law convinced them he'd become a lawyer. Then there was the time he built a social network. Ed ran his dental practice from the ground floor of their home in Dobbs Ferry, a village in Westchester County, where he went by the painless Dr. Z and advertised on a primitive website that he caters to cowards. After work, Ed would walk upstairs to join his wife and kids for dinner, where Karen would lead each of them in sharing something from their day. Those were some of the best times in our lives, says Ed. I hope you don't miss those, Karen says to me. One evening in 1996, when it was Ed's turn, he shared that he was excited about a new technology for his dental office. He'd hired someone to string together a strip of six differently colored lights, mounted in each room to serve as a silent communication system, with each combination of colors conveying a different message. The next patient needs a crown on the right molar, your 2 p.m. canceled, the hygienist needs an exam, etc. Ed's son asked if they'd have to drill through all the walls to run the wires connecting the lights. They would. Why would you do that? He asked. You already have computers in every room. I could write a program in a few weeks that connects them without the light system. He wrote the program in Atari Basic in two days. It worked. The family also used it to communicate with each other from different rooms and dubbed it ZuckNet. It was a year before AOL Instant Messenger. There was also the time when he was 12 and a virus crashed the RISC-like computer game he'd built but didn't back up. He was devastated. He cried. Oh, Karen's child, how he cried. Until he stood up and declared through tears that he'd not only rebuild the game from scratch, but find new ways to optimize it. He'd make it better and faster this time, goddammit, and he'd never forget to back up his work again. The game was set in the Roman Empire. The player would conquer the world, one territory at a time. Perhaps that was a sign, too. He was not multidimensional, says Ed. Like, language was terrible for him. He could do the book stuff, but his accent in French was atrocious. His sisters made fun of him. Thus, a few years later, in high school, he excelled at Latin instead. He took to Virgil. Nearly a decade later, He still recalled the Latin verse for Jupiter's decree in the Aeneid. For these I set no bounds in space or time. I have given empire without end. At Harvard, one of the first websites he built was a class study tool for his art history course, Rome of Augustus. At early crisis Facebook meetings to fend off threats from Google, he would end his speeches by declaring, Carthago de Lenda est. Carthage must be destroyed. Friday, all hands meetings ended with him shouting, Domination! Sean Parker, Facebook's early president who warned the young founder that shouting domination could one day be cited in an antitrust suit, later observed this kind of imperial tendency in him. For the first two decades of the company, he wore his trademark hair in a short Roman fringe. In more recent years, he's periodically mused in public about the really harsh approach Augustus employed. before establishing 200 years of world peace. That didn't come for free, he said of Rome's first emperor, who turned it from a republic into an empire. He had to do certain things. At the company's flagship annual conference in 2024, he wore a shirt with the words, Out Zuck, Out Nihil, a riff on Cesare Borgia's famous motto, Out Kizar. out Nihil, either a Caesar or nothing. His wife, Priscilla Chan, joked that on their honeymoon in Rome, his constant pursuit of Augustine's sights and statues made the emperor their third wheel. The names of their three children are Maxima, Aurelia, and August. But to me, computer science was like, okay, he's just picking up a different language, says Karen, qualifying the seeming inevitability of his later life. On the East Coast for us back then? It wasn't the road to success. If you wanted real financial success, you went into banking and finance. The epitome of academic success was to become a doctor. Computer science, to me, was just, you know, you might as well be doing any other activity. I thought everything should be computerized, says Ed. Karen may have thought not. She doesn't have the forward vision with technology that I have. Karen looks at me and smiles, which girds me to insist again on the question I came here to ask. What is it like for one of the most powerful men in human history, who, for better or worse, has, by age 42, secured a place in the books that'll be written about his era for centuries after his death? To be your child. A long pause to think. One of our most important roles that we play now in our lives is to try and keep the grandchildren grounded, says Ed. They have an impossible time raising kids. They've done an incredible job, and the kids are just great. But they're still very protected, which you have to understand. We took the older one a couple years ago to the mall for her birthday to buy a pair of earrings. That was a really eye-opening experience. Just walking through them all. We haven't really discussed it with them yet, about how they're going to integrate them. One day they'll be out for high school, maybe. I Speaker 1 (9:38) don't know. It's complicated, says Karen. Speaker 2 (9:42) It's very, very complicated, Ed agrees. And he knows what people need and want, sometimes even before they know it. I mean, people call him arrogant. He's not, says Karen. But time after time, his arrogance Speaker 1 (10:00) just turns into truth. Speaker 2 (10:02) You will experience it one day too, Ed ruminates, when your children eclipse you. Karen nods and waits for her husband to finish, then comes alive. She shifts her posture back toward me with a tender but firm gaze. I can tell you how it is for me as a mother, she says. This is my child. The Eye of Sauron is how her child's longtime lieutenants referred to the unblinking, sometimes unnerving silences he used to involuntarily impose when preparing to answer a question or make a point. I see it now, I think. Things have been written and said about him that are so untrue from such an early age, Karen says. I wish that sometimes the people who do that... would reflect on what it must be like to fabricate stories or create their own imaginary scenarios of what this person is like. I sometimes really wonder if anyone has ever sat back and thought, this is a real person. It's been really brutal, she slackens. I mean, how would you feel if your child was subjected to that kind of scrutiny? It's inconceivable to me, I offer. I sometimes feel that people who go into the movies, they want their private life, but they chose to go into the spotlight. This was something where my child just wanted to make a difference in the world. It was not like he chose to be out there with all the cameras on him. I just hope he realizes within himself how wonderful a human being he is. Giving and kind, he's always been that way. He was always so fair. I just hope he realizes how much he really is loved by the people who love him. Do you wish he'd stop? I ask. I've always said to him, just do this only as long as you can find happiness within it. It has to bring you joy, she concludes. I think as long as he feels he's going to bring goodness and change people's lives in a positive direction. I mean, you can't change what people do with the tools you give them. It doesn't make the maker a bad person just because people do bad things with what you offer, right? A company press handler knocks and enters. Ed and Karen have to be going. It's time. As we stand up to say goodbye, I mention that I'll soon be interviewing their son at his home, then joining him and his family for dinner that Friday, and get in a parting question about it. We did not keep Shabbat. says Karen. But growing up, we wanted our children to have a Jewish education. I did, says Ed. She did not. I did not at first, she confirms. But it was really important to us that our children realize that with their behavior and their actions, they're accountable to something. Whatever you want to call it, there is some higher essence up there. You have to live with yourself and what you do, she says, because there is a higher authority. Speaker 1 (14:00) And Felix sends back finished PowerPoint decks, Excel models, and sourced research. Felix works the way your team already does, delivering work quickly and accurately around the clock. Learn more at rogo.ai slash Felix. Mark Zuckerberg is Speaker 2 (14:15) suspended in midair. He is not floating or sinking, nor is he ascending anywhere. He is being hoisted like a trophy. Outside, the lake is still in the morning air and banked by turgid grass, studded with ceramic decoys in the shape of coyotes, used to deter bears and geese. Everything in a Zuckerberg residence, the flora, the doors, the bookshelves, the light. seems uncannily enlarged, like on a movie set. After walking across the vast lawns of his summer palace and entering one of its smaller structures, it is jarring to find him held aloft like this, the sovereign of history's largest non-territorial empire, being heaved against his will. Aiden Valencia, the 149-pound NCAA Division I wrestling champion, takes it in for the length of a deep breath before delivering Zuckerberg back to Earth, i.e. slamming him to the floor. The others take only passing notice. They include Dave Camarillo, Zuckerberg's mixed martial arts MMA coach, and Merab Davalishvili, the former UFC bantamweight champion and current number one contender. There are a few others from Camarillo's coaching staff and the Stanford wrestling team here, too. They are practicing single-leg entries on each other in the cramped and humid fighting studio of Zuckerberg's Lake Tahoe escape. It's war over here, Valencia says to them as he lifts his body off Zuckerberg. I don't know about over there. I can't process fast enough to understand what's happening. Zuckerberg says as he gets back to his feet, before asking Valencia to explain how he did it. You can really feel the cardio difference at this kind of altitude, he says to me, when your opponent is twenty. The dynamic in the room is immediately legible. Camarillo is the general, stalking the mat, weaving between the fighters, periodically breaking in with sudden vehemence to grapple himself and throttling the intensity of the training up or down to ensure Zuckerberg won't get maimed, but will get clocked if he loses focus. Dvalishvili is the apex predator, with a menacing look in his eye that makes you worried whether his own ferocity is subject to Camarillo's adjustment. Valencia is the up-and-comer, the boy wonder who hasn't yet tasted failure. When Camarillo instructs them all to don MMA gloves and box, and Valencia pairs up with Dvalishvili, it is impossible to take your eyes off them. The presence of the host. Pouring sweat and landing and absorbing blows seems somehow incidental. Zuckerberg has spoken in public about his affinity for the masculine energy of MMA fighting as a counterbalance to the neutered or emasculated corporate world and American society writ large. After two decades in his famous uniform of gray crewneck, dark jeans, and close-cropped Caesar cut, he appeared in 2024 with longer hair, gold chain, designer clothing, and an interest in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, leading many to speculate whether he'd decided to rebrand as a pillar of the manosphere. But here in his fighting studio, you can perhaps see a different reason he's decided to give up his lifelong habit of sleeping in late in order to hit people and get hit three mornings a week. For 23 years, The single fact dominating every moment of every room he's been in is that he is Mark Zuckerberg. It's been true not just at Metta, but in his congressional testimonies and court proceedings, at Taylor Swift concerts and the Prada runway show at Milan Fashion Week, at dinners with friends and the birthday parties of his daughter's friends. It's been true even in his meetings with heads of state, including his own commanders-in-chief, to whom it must occur, as they've tried at various points, to squeeze and threaten and blame him for everything from electoral outcomes to ethnic cleansings, that one day they will be out of office, and eventually dead, while Zuckerberg... whose unique majority control of Meta's voting power makes his removal effectively impossible, could, in 50 years, still be ruler of his empire. Today, that empire has 3.6 billion users, a market capitalization of $1.6 trillion, and has averaged, over nearly a quarter century, the addition of a zero to its valuation. Roughly once every U.S. presidential term. It is not a normal situation for a human being to be in, let alone from the time they are 19. 300,000 years of evolutionary biology do not furnish a man in this position with the keys to easily access other people or reality. Yet for all the ways in which Zuckerberg's life is statistically anomalous, The conundrum he's in is ancient. Among the terms contemporary scholars use to describe it are epistemic isolation, the principal-agent problem, the hierarchical mum effect, and other overlapping jargon out of which tenure tracks have been laid. Perhaps the cleanest is the dictator's dilemma, which needn't apply only to dictatorial regimes. The idea is simple and intuitive. The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet, through fear or awe or self Speaker 1 (20:47) -preservation, Speaker 2 (20:48) those people often become less willing to tell him what they think he doesn't want to hear. leaving him increasingly insulated from reality, even as the consequences of his decisions become larger, and as the barriers to believing one's own bullshit fall away. Thus, in the spring of 1941, there were no officers left with the courage to implore Stalin after he scoffed at intelligence that a German invasion was coming. For three years, the Great Leap Forward's mass famines were reported up to Mao as record harvests. It was the self-censorship of Kennedy's advisors during deliberations on the Bay of Pigs. that popularized the term groupthink. The Shah of Iran was protected by his court from indications of a coming revolution until it was already too late. Henry Ford ignored warnings that the Model T was dying until the market was dominated instead by General Motors, afraid of their volatile superiors, middle managers at Nokia in 2007. downplayed the appearance of the iPhone. The list of great statesmen is in many ways a list of figures obsessed by the dictator's dilemma. Lincoln, for instance, installed himself in the War Department's telegraph office in order to read field dispatches raw as they came off the wire before subordinates could filter them. Churchill retained the frank and combative Alan Brooke as his top military advisor and built a private statistical office whose job was to cross-check every ministry's reports. Kennedy, who learned from the Bay of Pigs, absented himself from National Security Council sessions during the Cuban Missile Crisis so that his personal magnificence wouldn't affect debate. Warren Buffett called Charlie Munger his abominable no-man for the rate at which he vetoed his ideas, for which Buffett was ultimately grateful. The dictator's dilemma was already a long-standing fixture of study by the time of Augustus, whose education might have included Greek texts concerned with the matter, such as Xenophon's Hiero, Isocrates' Tunicocles, and Philodemus' on frank speech. As emperor, the eminently sensible Augustus called on senators at random to stifle premeditated remarks, periodically rotated his advisory council, and tolerated libel and jokes at his own expense. He ran three censuses of Roman citizens, kept his own ledger of the empire's legions and treasuries, and instituted Rome's first courier carriage system so that, like Lincoln, he could interrogate a direct source of information before anyone could corrupt it. He reigned for 40 years and died in his bed. According to nearly all the three dozen people I interviewed for this story, Zuckerberg is hyper-aware of the dilemma's potential, which is to say paranoid. He is an inveterate micromanager and voracious consumer of data, aware that any chief's inner circle is most incentivized to act as courtiers. He frequently engages the direct reports of his direct reports. and the subordinates of the reports' reports. He is known for inviting outside experts and commentators to visit him and argue about his decisions, although he is not known for ever giving an inch. He often accepts personal blame in public for the mistakes of others, perhaps in part because he accepts the reality of Meta, which they accept too. He is the company. and the company is him. He is, in any case, subject to certain types of feedback and the gustus never faced. Stock prices, litigation, tell-all whistleblower memoirs, and the international free flow of online ridicule. Yet, a certain amount of slippage is perhaps inevitable. MMH. Make Mark Happy was for a time the internal nickname for a project that subordinates thought was going down in flames, but felt compelled to prop up and which they encouraged each other to fall in love with. In 2016, Facebook's security team warned of instances of foreign troll farms, which Zuckerberg deputies purportedly had scrubbed. Reports are endless of engineers and product managers proposing algorithmic fixes to downrank garbage content on Facebook, only to have the proposals killed by superiors who predicted, likely accurately, that Zuckerberg would not be willing to sacrifice the expansion of his empire for its content quality. There are stories, although disputed, of deputies letting him win at board games. None of which is unique to Zuckerberg. Even the great statesmen find themselves surrounded by people, however exceptional otherwise, who in the end remain governed by fear or by awe, by the expectation of reward or defense of their fiefdoms, or by rational recognition that there is only one man who cannot be liquidated. Augustus himself earned the censure of Seneca, who chastised the emperor for lamenting that his later reign would not have been plagued by scandal if Agrippa and Machinus, his key early Speaker 1 (27:00) lieutenants, hadn't died. Speaker 2 (27:02) We have no reason for supposing that it was the habit of Agrippa or Machinus to speak the truth to him, Seneca wrote half a century later. Indeed, if they had lived, they would have been as great dissemblers as the rest. It is one of the habits of kings to insult their present servants by praising those whom they have lost, and to attribute the virtue of truthful speaking to those from whom there is no further risk of hearing it. Yet, in Zuckerberg's case, it isn't hard to imagine a more banal reason why he, despite his and his team's efforts, could get stuck in the dilemma, which in turn might have explained the increasingly central role that fighting, of all things, has come to play in his life. Much of Zuckerberg's inner circle consists of people who had been with him for over 15 years, since before Facebook's IPO in 2012. Some were even around in 2006, when nearly all of Facebook's management team quit. After Zuckerberg, who was only 22, rejected their pleas to take an offer from Yahoo to buy the company for $1 billion, forever establishing a central tenet of the company's culture in the face of opposition, Zuckerberg is right. Others are people who long ago came to terms with the fact that they cannot do what