The original incarnation of Facebook—back when Mark Zuckerberg was a dweebish Harvard undergrad—was called “FaceMash.” Users would log on and be greeted by the headshots of two coeds from around America’s most prestigious university and be asked which person was “hotter.” Due to its breach of privacy and reckless misogyny, Zuckerberg’s project almost got him expelled from the school. A few short years later, Facebook would revolutionize the internet, generating many billions of dollars for its founders, proving that no bad deed goes unrewarded.
I’m recapping all of this because the Man in the Arena—Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, seventh-richest person in the world—is currently in the midst of a glow-up himself. Yes, since Zuckerberg started advertising his love for MMA training last September, the Meta CEO is looking jacked. Earlier this week a tastefully thirsty photo surfaced from one of Zuck’s sparring sessions with legit UFC professionals Israel Adesanya and Alex Volkanovski. Zuckerberg is shirtless in the image and showcasing a coiled set of abs, veiny biceps, and broad, pulsating shoulders. You can still see the dweebish tech CEO in his overall silhouette, but the soft bits of his stature have been chiseled into stone. Like so many other outrageously wealthy men, Mark Zuckerberg has decided to spend his 40s in ridiculous shape. But, has he also become hot in the process? That’s another matter entirely.
It’s weird how common this has become for a certain type of tech guy. Jeff Bezos famously sports a yoked, post-divorce musculature, wandering around the Amazon campus in tight black polos and aviators like Lex Luthor. Tim Cook also seems to be, at the very least, vaguely in shape, although he’s several decades older than his oligarchic contemporaries, and would surely be an underdog in the Octagon. (Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s projected “uber-masc” demeanor would make you think that he was swole, but the cameras never lie.) All of these men are weird and unseemly in the way that ultrarich guys tend to be, and they’ve achieved their enviable muscle development by leveraging all of the tools available to the gilded class. (Personal chefs, expensive trainers, the fact that when you’re CEO of a gigantic company, you pick and choose when you want to work.) For what it’s worth, Ian Douglass, a fitness writer and all-around built dude, believes Zuck’s Chadness is au naturel.
“If Zuckerberg had been previously untrained and decided to get down to serious business—both in the gym and with his nutrition plan—there wouldn’t be much preventing him from gaining a solid 8 or 9 pounds of muscle in just his first three months of training,” he said. “Zuck could also expect to drop anywhere from 10 to 20 pounds of body fat during this same time frame. That sort of body recomposition makes a major difference in someone’s appearance.”
But money can’t buy you everything, and according to the experts who attend Slate’s very own deranged “Thirst” Slack channel—who spend all day debating the hotness levels of everyone from Ulysses S. Grant to Carmy from The Bear like the sickos they are—a jacked Mark Zuckerberg is still, tragically, Mark Zuckerberg, at the end of the day.
“He looks like a dirty container of soy milk,” said Derreck Johnson, a designer at Slate, when I posted the aforementioned image of MMA Zuck into the channel. I made it clear that I wanted my beloved colleagues to divorce all of the Metaman’s extracurricular sins—the various ways Facebook has befouled our democracy and degraded our parents’ brain chemistry—in order to focus on the body and face through a totally objective lens. It didn’t change a thing.
“It’s a no for me dog,” added associate writer Nadira Goffe. “This is the basic white male. The summation is, ‘Meh.’ ”
“Even if I saw him shirtless at Riis [a beach in Queens], I wouldn’t notice him,” continued producer Daisy Rosario.
“Why are his pecs so high up on his chest,” wondered Lizzie O’Leary, host of the Slate podcast What Next. O’Leary maintains that this isn’t necessarily an insult, but an observation. “I am not yoked, I am a slightly doughy middle-aged mom,” she said. (O’Leary also cordially invited Zuckerberg to guest on her podcast.)
OK, fair enough. It’s true that Zuckerberg is uncannily pale—sheet-white, to be exact. And from what I understand, that tends to be a turnoff. Maybe I wasn’t asking the right question. What if the choice was to spend an evening with either Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos? Have the evils of other mercurial psychopaths in tech made Zuckerberg a more sympathetic, perhaps even romantic figure? Can he, at the very least, claim to be the hottest of our ruthless tech barons? Sure enough, the channel came up with their own rudimentary, old-school FaceMash between the three founders to find the answer.
“There is absolutely no universe in which Bezos has ever been remotely attractive to me,” said Goffe, who cursed that she was being forced to play this game. “Looking at him is not pleasurable. Zuck is a normal dude, Bezos is not.” (Goffe made it clear, however, that this distinction does not necessarily make Zuckerberg “hot,” and that Musk “kills thirst across species.”)
Jonathan Zuckerman, a web developer at Slate, disagreed. He said that “from the neck down,” Bezos is the clear choice, linking to an image of the former Amazon boss in board shorts and a button-up, which is, frankly, a whole other can of worms.
The conversation continued to cycle like this, as Slatesters struggled to find a consensus on Zuckerberg, or Bezos, or the grim prospects of being forced to listen to either of them speak for hours on end at a dinner date. It turns out that none of our current class of billionaires possesses much sex appeal, which makes me desperate for the halcyon days of Richard Branson—is a rich guy with a nice face really that much to ask for? Eventually, we all retreated to the only common ground we could count on. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, on staff wants to sleep with Elon Musk.
