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This week started pretty well for Mark Zuckerberg. On Monday, reporters and social media users were feasting on the news that the Meta CEO had purchased a 440-acre estate in Ireland with its own castle. This new home rounds out his $450 million housing portfolio that includes homes in Palo Alto, Lake Tahoe, Hawaii, Washington DC, and Florida. (When he’s in New York he crashes on his cousin’s futon in Queens.)
Sure, it’s not ideal that everyone in the world knows where a widely despised CEO and his family live (sometimes), but when you’ve made $200 billion mining users’ data, a little forced disclosure can be seen as fairplay. After a few weeks of gentle mockery about the sun never setting on Zuckerberg’s empire, he was probably going to release a self-effacing video about his Irish pile to show that even landed gentry have a sense of humor.
And then the bad week started. On Wednesday, Meta settled a lawsuit brought by 51 attorneys general accusing the company of addicting young people to social media. Meta’s going to pay north of $17 billion, which could buy a lot of houses for its CEO, but isn’t really all that much given the company’s market cap of over $1.4 trillion.
Worse than the money is that Meta is going to have to tighten its age verification, alter some visible metrics, and implement blackout hours for teen users from midnight to 6 a.m. If Facebook is the town square (as the old cliché has it), this is the equivalent of imposing an emergency curfew on its inhabitants.
Then Zuckerberg’s week got a little worse. With the timing and lethality of SEAL Team Six, Sony dropped a new trailer for Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning featuring Jeremy Strong playing Zuckerberg as a cross between Beaker from the Muppets and a dead-eyed Damien Hirst shark.
Most peoples’ impressions (as in, actual impressions) of Zuckerberg come from The Social Network (2010) (also penned by Sorkin), in which Jesse Eisenberg played him as a personality disordered Luke Skywalker gradually giving himself over to the dark side of the Force.
The new film appears to frame Zuckerberg as Darth Vader himself, a cold, imperious leader who’s more machine now than man. In 2010, Zuckerberg rented out a theater for his team to see the first movie; it’s doubtful he’d do the same for this one.
Criticism of Zuckerberg isn’t an amusement anymore. It’s a serious liability now. Zuckerberg is no longer the 90 lb. weakling with a 1,000 lb. chip on his shoulder: he’s the bully kicking sand in everyone’s face. This new movie appears to show him as such.
As Meta pays out that $17 billion and preps for the other lawsuits coming its way, I imagine Zuckerberg doing a lot of thinking about how he went from flawed hero to unambiguous villain in fifteen short years. I know introspection is seen as a bug among Zuckerberg’s cohort, but even the relentlessly forward-moving shark in Jaws probably thought for a second about how he ended up with a scuba tank in his mouth.
One thing that always helps me think is room to pace, and Zuckerberg's got plenty of that in Ireland. And Miami. And Palo Alto. And Hawaii. And Lake Tahoe. And DC. He should be able to get a lot of thinking done.
ONLY ON GAZETTEER SF
- BIN THERE: Olivia Peluso on what packaging is actually compostable.
- EYES UP: Eddie Kim on a Muni crash.
- SMASHED: Cydney Hayes on a robbery at Modern Relics.
- PAY DAY: Joel Rosenblatt on the mayor’s salary.
- QUEEN OF QUEENS: SF mourns Dolly Parton.
- FACEBOOK ‘EM: Meta’s paying up.
- ENDORSE THIS: DCCC backs Manny in D8.
- STIRRED: Drinking Companion visits Zam Zam.
Just a reminder: Your tips can go a long way at Gazetteer HQ. Got a good scoop? A fun bit of tea to spill? A nugget of gossip you’re dying to share? Send it our way. We can assure anonymity.
DISPATCHES FROM THE FOG
- DROPPING IN: Owner of Beya Alcaraz’s former pet store is moving it to Clement Street. (Mission Local)
- EAT IT: Jules and Maria Isabel are among the best new restaurants in America. (Bon Appétit)
- FAHRENHEIT VGT3: What’s it like to scan and destroy books all day? (404 Media)
- READ IT AND WEEP: Rebecca Solnit’s beautiful tribute to Dolly Parton. (Meditations in an Emergency)
- KEEP IT TO YOURSELF: California Democrats don’t want billionaires’ stupid money. (Politico)
