Has Mark Zuckerberg become the anti-Musk?

By PJ Grisar
November 14, 2024

Who among us hasn’t dreamed, a la Tevye, how we’d live if we were rich men?

Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Meta (ne Facebook) is living the dream, recently using his insane wealth to record — with T-Pain— an acoustic-and-autotune cover of Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz’s “Get Low,” an ode to sexual athleticism across household surfaces, as a tribute to his wife, whom he met at Harvard while the X-rated song played in the background.

In other words, Zuck has returned to the factory setting of nerdy, white, Jewish suburban kid. Listening to the track (by the one-off teamup called Z-Pain) it’s hard to imagine that, just a few short years ago, he was put forward as an active threat to democracy. But this cringe evolution is, indeed, nothing new.

Following a period of Aaron Sorkin-crafted notoriety, Zuckerberg has established himself as a man of all-thumbs efforts at the common touch. In a 2016 livestream, where the tech CEO was “smoking meats,” he — excessively — sang the praises of Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce and became an instant meme.

In 2020, he slathered something else on: a Pagliacci-worthy layer of sunscreen while out surfing in Hawaii.

In between, Zuckerberg, whose website was scrutinized for its role in election interference and failures to protect user data, testified before Congress, giving a sweaty performance that rivaled Cousin Greg’s in Succession. While we could laugh at his clumsy answers, most of us could probably also relate.

Something has shifted in the billionaire landscape for Mark Zuckerberg, who is now committed to the creation of “the metaverse,” a virtual environment that for some reason struggles to give users legs. While Zuckerberg is insanely rich and in charge of products that have done measurable harm to the fabric of our country, he can now be regarded primarily as an embarrassing millennial dad and overzealous “wife guy” who is apparently pretty good at jiu jitsu.

The reason for this effective rebrand, I’d venture to say, lies in one of the only few people occupying a similar tax bracket: his would-be cage match opponent Elon Musk.

Musk was once a moderately entertaining tech weirdo with an electric car company, a drilling enterprise and a vanity space program. But as Zuckerberg became better known for his meme potential, even as he tried to thread the needle on allowing antisemitism on Facebook, Musk decided that he’d become the savior of free speech, buying Twitter, renaming it X, and allowing every Nazi, white supremacist and conspiracy theorist to have a soapbox there.

If Facebook played a decisive role in the 2016 election, seeding Russian-manufactured misinformation to the American public (and it still has issues with that, to be clear), Musk was doing his best to subvert democracy in this most recent election, awarding $1 million to voters in swing states as part of a legally dubious sweepstakes. (Musk made no secret as to his preferred candidate and is now slated to serve in Trump’s second administration in a new department named for a dog-based cryptocurrency.)

During Facebook’s most controversial moment, Zuckerberg endeavored to have some good headlines donating $1.3 million to Jewish groups. Musk has commented “actual truth” on a post that claimed Jewish communities have been pushing “hatred against whites” and threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League.

Musk and Zuckerberg have emerged as accidental foils. But while Musk pulls stunts like bringing a sink into Twitter’s headquarters — a move that recalls how Zuckerberg showed up to an important meeting in pajamas — and saying “let that sink in,” his dad jokes (he has 12 kids that we know of) are often overshadowed by his other qualities, including his hostility to trans people like his own daughter.

As for Zuck? Well, whatever he’s up to is way less embarrassing — even if it’s the cringiest thing we’ve ever seen.

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