#435 Mark Zuckerberg's Empire

Founders

This episode explores a deep-dive profile by Jeremy Stern regarding Mark Zuckerberg's rise to power and his management of a massive non-territo

Key takeaways

• Zuckerberg's childhood obsession with Augustus Caesar foreshadowed his imperial approach to business expansion.
• The 'Dictator's Dilemma' illustrates how extreme power can insulate leaders from the reality of their own empires.

Main topics

• Mark Zuckerberg's biography
• The Dictator's Dilemma in leadership

Notable quotes

Either a Caesar or nothing.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound look at how personal obsession and his

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) So this episode is going to be a little different. It's not on a book, but it's on this excellent long-form profile of Mark Zuckerberg that my friend Jeremy Stern wrote. The name of the profile, the title of the profile, it's called Mark, and the subtitle is A Journey to the Heart of History's Largest Non-Territorial Empire. And the piece opens with Jeremy interviewing Mark Zuckerberg's parents, and he says, there they are, the Zuckerbergs. They look you in the eye and they don't break contact. His dad is a ham. His mother is shy. I don't know what I expected them to be like, but for whatever reason, this wasn't it. So they talk about what Mark was like as a child. His dad says, he didn't stand out as the bright one in the family. If anyone, I would guess our middle daughter Donna was considered the nerd or the smart one in the family. His dad continues, we just had four really bright, successful kids. We're equally proud of all of them. Mark just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was a perfect confluence of his passion. And then his mom hits on something that you and I talk about over and over again. You see this in these biographies that you and I talk about. And usually there's some kind of passion or interest that they have. True interest is revealed early, usually in childhood. And so his mom says, I think people who have a passion are the luckiest people in the world. And so then Jeremy asks Zuck's parents, were there signs? And says, yes, perhaps there were some. In nursery school, he became so possessed by a one-week unit on outer space that he employed the teacher to extend the unit to a month, to which she relented at the insistence of a four-year-old. By the time he was six, his incessant demands for logical explanations of rules and step-by-step justifications for consequences that he expected his parents to prepare before laying down the law. And it was this habit that Zuck had when he was six that they thought he was actually gonna become a lawyer. So by the time he was 12, he's already writing computer programs, he's building games. There's also this time when he was 12 and a virus crashed the computer game he built, but he did not back up. He was devastated and he declared through tears that not only would he rebuild the game from scratch, but he'd find new ways to optimize it. He'd make the game better and faster this time and goddammit, he would never forget to back up his work again. This is also one of the most fascinating parts about the story is it gets into Zuck's kind of fascination or maybe even obsession with the Roman Empire and with Augustus. So this game when he was 12 says 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. This through line continues. In high school, he excelled at Latin. Nearly a decade later, he still recalled the Latin verse for Jupiter's decree in the Aeneid. This is the quote. For these I set no bounds in space or time. I have given empire without end. At Harvard, one of the first websites that Mark built was a class study tool for the art history course called Rome of Augustus. At early crisis Facebook meetings to fend off threats from Google, Mark would end his speeches by declaring, Carthage must be destroyed. All hands meetings would end with him shouting, domination. Sean Parker, Facebook's early president, warned Mark that shouting domination could one day be cited in an antitrust suit. And Sean Parker later observed that Zuck had this kind of imperial tendency in him. In more recent years, Zuck periodically mused in public about the really harsh approach Augustus employed before establishing 200 years of world peace. This is a direct quote from Mark. That didn't come for free. He's talking about Rome's first emperor who turned it from a republic into an empire. He had to do certain things, Mark said. At the company's flagship annual conference in 2024, Mark wore a shirt with the words, either a Caesar or nothing. Mark's wife, Priscilla Chan, joked that on their honeymoon in Rome, his constant pursuit of Augustian sights and statues made the emperor their third wheel. The names of their three children are Maxima, August, and Aurelia. And so Jeremy Stern is a fantastic writer because he's going back. So it starts with him interviewing the parents. Then he goes into Mark's fascination with Augustus and he brings, he weaves this. He does this constantly throughout the piece in all his pieces. Highly recommend reading all the pieces he's writing on entrepreneurs and investors these days. I think he is the best in the world at what he's doing right now. But what he does back here is like, we start with talking about interviewing Mark's parents. Then we go into this fascination with Augustus. Then he brings it back into, you almost forget, the storytelling is so amazing in this piece, you almost forget that where we are, we're actually in a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg's parents. And so he says, this is the question that I came here to ask. What is it like for one of the most powerful men in human history, who better or for 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? And this goes on for quite some time, but I want to pull out some of my favorite highlights here. It's complicated, his mom says. It's very, very complicated, his father agrees. But he knows what people need and want, sometimes even before they know it. I mean, people call him arrogant. He's not. But time after time, his arrogance just turns into truth. And then there's this excellent line that anybody with kids will understand. Zuck's dad says, you will experience it one day too, when your children eclipse you. Karen nods and waits for her husband to finish, then she comes alive. She shifts her posture back towards me with a tender but firm gaze. I can tell you how it is for me as a mother. This is my child. The eye of Sauron is how her child's longtime lieutenants have referred to the unblinking, sometimes unnerving silences he involuntarily imposes when preparing to answer a question or make a point. I see it now, I think. So she continues. Things have been written and said about him that are so untrue from such an early age. 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 has been really brutal, she says. I mean, how would you feel if your child was subjected to this kind of scrutiny? And so Jeremy asked to follow up, do you wish he'd stop? And his mother responds, I always said to him, just do this only as long as you can find happiness within it. It has to bring you joy. One of my favorite parts in the piece that comes later is Mark emphatically says, I will never stop. So then the story transitions to another setting. And it says Mark Zuckerberg is suspended in midair by an NCAA Division I wrestling champion who is slamming him to the floor. 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 America's society writ large. He decided to give up his lifelong habit of sleeping in late in order to hit people and get hit three mornings a week. Says 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 Meta. but in his congressional testimonies and court proceedings, at Taylor Swift concerts and the Prada runway show at the Milan Fashion Week, at dinners with friends and birthday parties of his daughter's friends. It's been true even in his meetings with heads of state, including his own commander-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 majority control of Mehta'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 and a market cap of $1.6 trillion. It is not a normal situation for a human being to be in, let alone from the time they are 19 years old. 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. And the conundrum they're referring to is the dictator's dilemma. 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-preservation, 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. And then there's some great historical examples of this dictator's dilemma. Thus, in the spring of 1941, there were no officers left with the courage to implore Stalin after he scoffed at the 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 JFK'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 in many ways is 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 report. Kennedy, who learned from the Bay of Pigs, absented himself from the National Security Council sessions during the Cuban Missile Crisis so that his personal magnificence wouldn't affect the debate. Warren Buffett called Charlie Munger his abominable no-man. for the rate at which he vetoed his ideas, for which Buffet was ultimately grateful. As Emperor, 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