With his interchangeable T-shirts and short neat hair, Facebook’s founder famously ‘never tried to be cool’. Is his makeover just a distraction from what’s going on at Meta?
A vibe shift is afoot in Silicon Valley. For aeons, the movers and shakers of the tech industry signalled that they were serious people working on serious things via their simple outfits. Crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried (now in jail) always looked as if he had rolled out of bed and forgotten to change out of his pyjamas. The late Steve Jobs famously adopted a uniform of black polo necks. Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, once boasted that he owned and wore multiple versions of the same T-shirt because it was efficient.
“I’m not a cool person and I’ve never really tried to be cool,” Zuckerberg said in a 2014 Q&A. “I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible … I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous.” That attitude seemed to extend to his hair, which has always been kept Lego-style short.
