#435 Mark Zuckerberg's Empire

David Senra (0:00)

So this episode is going to be a little different. It's not on a book, but it's on this excellent long form profile of Mark Zuckerberg that my friend Jeremy Stern wrote. The name of the profile, the title of the profile is called Mark, and the subtitle is A Journey to the Heart of History's Largest Non-Territorial Empire. And the piece opens with Jeremy interviewing Mark Zuckerberg's parents, and he says, there they are, the Zuckerbergs. They look you in the eye and they don't break contact. His dad is a ham, his mother is shy.

I don't know what I expected them to be like, but for whatever reason, this wasn't it. So they talk about what Mark was like as a child. His dad says, he didn't stand out as the bright one in the family. If anyone, I would guess our middle daughter Donna was considered the nerd or the smart one in the family. His dad continues, we just had four really bright, successful kids. We're equally proud of all of them. Mark just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was a perfect confluence of his passion. And then his mom hits on something that you and I talk about and over again you see this in these biographies that you and I talk about. And usually there's some kind of passion or interest that they have. True interest is revealed early, usually in childhood. And so his mom says, I think people who have a passion are the luckiest people in the world. And so then Jeremy asks Zuck's parents where their signs and says, yes, perhaps there were some. In nursery school, he became so possessed by a one week unit on outer space that he employed the teacher to extend the unit to a month to which she relented at the insistence of a four year old. By the time he was six, his incessant demands for logical explanations of rules and step by step justifications for consequences that he expected his parents to prepare before laying down the law. And it was this habit that Zuck had when he was six that they thought he was actually becoming a lawyer. So by the time he was 12, he's already writing computer programs, he's building games. There's also the time when he was 12 and a virus crashed the computer game he built, but he did not back up. He was devastated and he declared through tears that not only would he rebuild the game from scratch, but he'd find new ways to optimize it. He'd make the game better and faster this time, and god damn it, he would never forget to back up his work again. This is also one of the most fascinating parts about the story, is it gets into Zuck's kind of fascination, or maybe an obsession with the Roman Empire and with Augustus. So this game when he was 12 says the game was set in the Roman Empire. The player would conquer the world one territory at a time. Perhaps that was a sign too. This through line continues. In high school, he excelled at Latin. Nearly a decade later, he still recalled the Latin verse for Jupiter's decree in the Aeneid. This is the quote, For these I set no bounds in space or time. I have given empire without end. At Harvard, one of the first websites that Marc built was a class study tool for the art history course called Rome of Augustus. At early crisis Facebook meetings to fend off threats from Google, Marc would end his speeches by declaring, Carthage must be destroyed.

All hands meetings would end with him shouting, Domination. Sean Parker, Facebook's early president, warned Marc that shouting Domination could one day be cited in an antitrust suit, and Sean Parker later observed that Zuck had this kind of imperial tendency in him. In more recent years, Zuck periodically mused in public about the really harsh approach Augustus employed before establishing 200 years of world peace. This is a direct quote from Marc. That didn't come for free. He's talking about Rome's first emperor who turned it from a republic into an empire. He had to do certain things, Marc said. At the company's flagship annual conference in 2024, Marc wore a shirt with the words, either a Caesar or nothing. Marc's wife Priscilla Chan joked that on their honeymoon in Rome, his constant pursuit of Augustian sites and statues made the emperor their third wheel. The names of their three children are Maxima, August and Aurelia.

Jeremy Stern is a fantastic writer because he's going back. It starts with him interviewing the parents, then he goes into Marc's fascination with Augustus and he brings, he weaves this, he just is constantly throughout the piece in all his pieces. Highly recommend reading all the pieces he's writing on entrepreneurs and investors these days. I think he is the best in the world at what he's doing right now.