Member-only story
Nerds, Curdled
Why are modern business tycoons like this?
Say what you want about the robber barons, but at least they weren’t weird.
In the previous Gilded Age, men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt created immense business empires through often immoral means. They made their employees work in unsafe conditions, used violence to break strikes, and deployed their wealth to purchase political favors. They didn’t all behave well in their personal lives. But they did seem like adults.
I was thinking about the robber barons the other day when reading about Mark Zuckerberg’s latest announcements about changes at Meta (in which he essentially agreed to a wish list of changes supported by Donald Trump and his supporters). In his announcement video, Zuckerberg sports the new look he’s been testing out in recent months. No more hoodie and jeans — now he’s got a $900,000 watch, a gold chain, longer hair, and designer T-shirts.
Some see this transformation as Zuckerberg embracing a sophisticated style, but to me, it reads like he’s Going Through Something. Here’s a middle-aged man, one of the most wealthy and influential people in the world, dressing like a trust-fund frat boy out for a night at the club. Zuckerberg has, in addition to exploring new frontiers in style, beefed himself up and become…
