With his gold chain, apparent rightward political shift, and musings about “feminine energy,” the still-very-much-married Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is rivaling Elon Musk in his levels of divorced dad energy, some online observers say.
Zuckerberg made waves last week when he announced Meta’s platforms would replace third-party fact-checking with an X-style community notes feature and named UFC president Dana White to the Meta board.
He followed up those announcements—seen by many as an effort to appease President-elect Donald Trump—with a three-hour appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience that had the internet wondering whether the Facebook co-founder was in the midst of a midlife crisis.
“The most surprising thing to me about all the Meta changes and the Rogan interview is that Zuckerberg is doing this all and hasn’t announced he’s divorced,” one user wrote on X, racking up nearly 50,000 likes. “Feels like that should’ve come first.”
“Zuckerberg is on the verge of a divorce or a preemptive midlife crisis,” another user wrote. “Either way, women are about to pay for everything they’ve ever done to make him feel inferior and his new bump curl, outspoken chats, and gold chain with the UFC training tells me so.”
In one of the most-shared clips from his interview with Rogan, Zuckerberg discussed his newfound interest in mixed martial arts. Combat sports, he said, have given him a fresh perspective on what he called an increasingly feminized corporate culture.
“I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” Zuckerberg said. “I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits.”
Musk, who has been divorced three times and purchased X in the wake of his split with Grimes, responded to the clip with his now-trademark “Interesting.”
Over on Bluesky, users awed at Zuckerberg’s ability to channel Musk’s divorced guy energy without actually splitting from his wife Priscilla Chan.
“wild that Zuckerberg and Elon are in a competition to be the most divorced guy to ever exist and Zuck’s papers aren’t even filed yet,” wrote one user.
“People look down on billionaires without noting how they’re innovating,” another user joked. “For instance, Mark Zuckerberg shows us how they’ve figured out how to act extremely divorced even before their divorce proceedings officially begin.”
Zuckerberg and Chan, a pediatrician by training and now the co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, have been married since 2012 and have three daughters.
A Business Insider story recently celebrated Zuckerberg as “the ultimate wife guy,” after—among other wholesome Instagram posts—he surprised Chan with an acoustic rendition of “Get Low” by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, which was playing when they first met at a party at Harvard.
And yet, Zuckerberg managed to flip that internet narrative on its head in a matter of days without his marital status changing at all.
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