After a tech bro glow-up that saw him transform from a nerdy billionaire CEO into a streetwear-clad free-speech warrior, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now clearly in his Silicon Valley provocateur era — no longer hiding behind corporate-speak, and unbothered about cozying up to President Trump while trashing everyone and everything from the Biden administration to Apple to “neutered” corporate culture that Zuckerberg thinks isn’t masculine enough.
On the latest episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, the Facebook co-founder made waves for unloading on the Biden administration over its heavy-handed tactics during Covid, which Zuckerberg said included administration officials cursing and screaming at his employees to get pandemic-related posts censored. Just days ago, Zuckerberg also announced that Meta is ending its third-party fact-checking program, which had long been a bête noire of conservatives — whose content, it should be noted, is often some of the most shared on Facebook.
Zuckerberg’s assessment, as he explained during his chat with Rogan, was that the fact-checking effort had strayed from an initial focus on absolute truth to increasingly censoring content on ideological grounds.
Meanwhile, Meta has just put one of President Trump’s closest friends, UFC president and CEO Dana White, on its board. Zuckerberg and Meta are also rolling back DEI initiatives at the company, one of the right’s favorite punching bags. “Meta, Facebook, I think they’ve come a long way,” Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago news conference.
Meta’s chief executive, meanwhile, has more than just politics in his crosshairs.
During his sit-down with Rogan, he also went on a rant about corporate culture today generally being too “neutered” and in need of a bit more masculinity. “I have three sisters, no brothers, I have three daughters, and no sons,” Zuckerberg said. “So I’m, like, surrounded by girls, by women, my whole life. The masculine energy is good. Society has plenty of that, but corporate culture is really trying to get away from it… I think having a culture that, like, celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.”
I know what you’re thinking: Who is this guy, and what did he do with the Meta CEO who banned President Trump from Facebook and Instagram in 2021?
Perhaps he’s jealous of the main character energy enjoyed by a tech rival like Elon Musk. Zuckerberg, to that end, also threw some especially pointed barbs at Apple during the Rogan podcast — part of his longstanding feud with the iPhone maker (which, remember, significantly impacted Meta’s revenue in 2021 with the launch of App Tracking Transparency). Zuckerberg, meanwhile, insisted that Apple hasn’t “really invented anything great in a while” and is largely making money by things like levying developers’ fees in addition to selling their gadgets for exorbitant prices.
“It’s like, Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later,” he added. And you just know he was talking past Rogan trying to subtly address any regulators who might be listening when he added: “The thing I worry about with Apple specifically is that they have their phones and devices so locked down that they can self-preference a ton.” Which is rich, coming from the same Meta CEO whose Facebook has routinely self-preferenced its own features like video over the years, to the exclusion of text-based content from my profession. Maybe he thought our content didn’t have enough masculine energy.
