How Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Josh Kushner & Scott Wu Think | Jeremy Stern

David Senra (0:02)

All right, you're here because I'm a massive fan.

I think you are the best in the world at what you're doing right now, which is writing these incredible long form profiles on a lot of the top investors and entrepreneurs in the world. I just finished reading the one you did on Mark Zuckerberg. I thought it was so good, I actually did an episode on it for my other podcast founders. So I wanna just like jump into what it was like spending. If you just like go behind the scenes of like, okay, how long did that piece take to write? How much time did you spend with him and like his entire world?

Jeremy Stern (0:32)

So his team reached out to me first originally, I think toward the end of last year, which surprised me quite a bit because a couple of years ago, I wrote this profile of Palmer Luckey, who started Andral and Oculus. And in that profile, the big villain in the piece is Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg had provided a comment for it, which I think eventually led to some sort of reconciliation between Palmer and Zuckerberg because after 2016, Zuckerberg had fired or didn't block the firing of Palmer Luckey after he'd made this small contribution to a pro-Trump group. So they'd had a big falling out, and that falling out had become legendary at that point in Silicon Valley, and it was a big part of this piece I had written. So I was surprised to hear from his team that he would be interested in talking to me. So I think earlier this year, I think we were both a little bit skeptical about the idea, and we decided just to have lunch for a couple of hours off the record, just to meet and say hi, and say everything that was on our minds. I initially came away from it feeling a little bit pessimistic about a piece, just because, you know, he's one of the most overexposed people on planet Earth. He's been under a microscope for 25 years, but eventually I did land on, you know, a number of things that I thought really made it interesting, which is some of the stuff that we've talked about before.

In a lot of ways, he's kind of the last man standing from his generation of founders. So, you know, Larry and Sergey, they eventually step away. Bezos steps away. Obviously Bill Gates stepped away. Jobs died. Zuckerberg, in a lot of ways, is kind of, you know, the last one. He's also kind of weirdly representative of millennials as founders, because there are literally no others at his level, at his scale. I haven't looked this up, so maybe this is a bit wrong, but I think, you know, the second most valuable company started by a millennial would be Stripe, which I think is worth, I don't know, $100, $150 billion, something like that. So like one-tenth of Zuckerberg's company. So I thought maybe there was some, you know, underexplored territory there with him. And then, like with a lot of these pieces, the things that you start out being interested in, you know, they still make their way into the piece. But once you talk to someone, a kind of whole galaxy opens up.

And so I think it ended up going a lot of different directions. And over the course of about five or six months, I spoke to him, I spoke to almost 40 other people for the piece.

David Senra (2:53)

Wait, explain that when you start to talk to somebody, you realize a whole galaxy opens up. What does that mean?

Jeremy Stern (2:58)

Usually with these pieces, I begin with a thing that I'm interested first in first, before I find the right person to use as an excuse to explore the thing. You know, I think with Zuckerberg, there was still a lot of kind of rawness and open wounds from the 2016 to 2020 period, where there was an enormous amount of government and other types of pressure to censor social media. Obviously since then, there's been this huge national debate about whether social media is a good thing in the first place, whether it's extremely harmful and comparable to alcohol and cigarettes and should be regulated as such. There was a number of different themes I think I was broadly interested in before I was interested in Zuckerberg per se.

But I think with a lot of these people that I write about, there's this, the old, in the Talmud, there's a rabbi who basically says, when you kill a person, you destroy a world. And I think it basically gets at the idea that every individual life contains many, many different worlds within it.