Dark Secrets of Mark Zuckerberg

On a Friday afternoon in July 2015, Mark Zuckerberg stood in front of a couple hundred employees at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, a video camera there to record his words for thousands of other employees around the globe.

Zuckerberg, usually calm and a natural introvert, was uncharacteristically angry.

News of Facebook’s previously secret messaging assistant, M, had leaked earlier that week to the press. The Facebook CEO made a promise to his employees: We’re going to find the leaker, and we’re going to fire them.

At another company meeting a week later, Zuckerberg delivered an update: The culprit, he said, had been caught and fired. Many of those in attendance applauded.





Both the leak and the ensuing witch hunt are Facebook rarities. Unlike tech companies such as Apple and Snapchat, which keep employees in the dark about projects and ambitions, Facebook routinely shares all kinds of secrets with all of its workers at Friday afternoon Q&A sessions that Zuckerberg has been running for a decade.

What’s most surprising: Almost none of it leaks out.

Sources say Zuckerberg uses these weekly meetings to tell his nearly 16,000 employees details of yet-to-be-released products, like news reader app Paper or Snapchat competitor Slingshot — and M, the AI assistant.

He’ll open up about the company’s product strategy, like its push into live video. And Zuckerberg will also share his personal opinions on competitors like Snapchat and Twitter, and even Facebook’s board members.

Almost nothing is off limits. And almost nothing leaks to the press, even though Facebook’s entire workforce — includig its interns — have access to the meetings.

“That level of transparency is alarming when you see it at first.”
“That level of transparency is alarming when you see it at first,” said one former employee. “But there’s something [special] about knowing you’re getting an unfettered response.”

And that special feeling — that employees have access to information and an open, unscripted, says-whatever-he-thinks Zuckerberg — helps keep what happens at the weekly meetings inside the weekly meetings. Usually.

“If we’re going to have this open culture, there’s a little bit of a pact [around not leaking secrets],” explained another former employee.

There are formal pacts as well. Facebook puts new employees through media training and warns them that they could be fired for leaking company info. And Zuckerberg routinely reminds Facebook employees that his weekly Q&As are meant to be private.

But at Facebook there’s another deterrent: Shame.

We spoke with more than a half-dozen current and former employees, and almost all of them mentioned peer pressure as a key motivator for keeping secrets secret.

“People would be pissed if someone else leaked something,” explained one former employee. “You don’t betray the family.”

Company-wide Q&As aren’t unique to Facebook. They have become standard in the tech industry, a tradition that many trace back to Google and its weekly all-hands meetings, called TGIF. Twitter, Uber and Nextdoor hold them, too.

But Zuckerberg’s celebrity and Facebook’s size and influence make the company’s weekly ritual rather astonishing. Zuckerberg has even started doing public Q&As with Facebook users in different cities around the globe.

Some believe Zuckerberg gets as much out of the events as his employees. The meetings offer Zuckerberg a chance to hear from the rank and file, but also a chance to improve his public speaking skills. (Zuckerberg was a notoriously poor and awkward public speaker in the company’s early days, but has improved dramatically over the years.)

At Facebook headquarters, the Q&As work like this:

Each Friday at 4 pm PT, Zuckerberg speaks for about an hour from the cafeteria in Facebook’s massive new building in Menlo Park. Zuckerberg’s top lieutenants — folks like COO Sheryl Sandberg, product boss Chris Cox and CTO Mike Schroepfer — sit in the front row of chairs set up for employees in case Zuckerberg wants to call on them to answer a question.


Reddit / jrengle
The meetings are usually limited to Facebook employees, though others have made appearances, too. Board members Peter Thiel, Susan Desmond-Hellmann and Don Graham have all attended Q&As, as did Jay Z back in the summer of 2013, though no one seems to remember why he was there. If you work out of a remote Facebook office, the Q&As are streamed live and then uploaded to Facebook’s internal portal for a short time so people can watch them at their convenience.

Zuckerberg starts with opening remarks, then typically acknowledges any long-tenured employees celebrating a work anniversary that week — what Facebookers call a “Faceversary.” If you’ve been there long enough, usually around a decade, you might get to go up and share a favorite story about your time with Facebook.





Then Zuckerberg highlights a “fix of the week,” usually honoring some behind-the-scenes engineering fix or accomplishment that others may not be aware of. It’s a small shout-out that’s meant to help Facebook keep its “hacker DNA,” even as the company swells in size.

After the formalities, Zuckerberg digs into questions submitted by employees, starting with the most popular questions Facebookers have submitted and voted on throughout the week using an internal Facebook group. (The questions aren’t submitted anonymously.) A snapshot of this polling system published by Gizmodo earlier this year showed questions ranging from Snapchat’s business strategy to whether or not employees should try to stop Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Once the poll questions are done, Zuckerberg will take unfiltered questions from the audience for the remainder of the time.

Topics vary wildly. Zuckerberg usually won’t comment publicly on competitors, but at Facebook Q&As, he’ll talk candidly about Twitter and Snapchat. He’s talked about Elon Musk and his rocket ambitions on multiple occasions. When Kanye West asked Zuckerberg for $1 billion on Twitter, Zuckerberg was inevitably asked about it the following Friday. “Maybe if he’d asked me on Facebook,” one employee remembered him joking.

Mark Zuckerberg invest 1 billion dollars into Kanye West ideas

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 14, 2016
The questions and ensuing responses can also get serious. Zuckerberg took issue when board member Marc Andreessen compared the company’s Internet.org initiative in India to colonialism, and once gave an impassioned speech about the Black Lives Matter movement after an internal note he sent around to the company was published online.

Usually, though, Zuckerberg is relaxed. And seeing a relaxed and authentic version of Zuckerberg is one of the reasons employees still look forward to hearing from their CEO, and why they’re so tight-lipped about what he has to say.

“It's a side of Mark Zuckerberg that the outside world doesn't have access to,” one former employee explained.

But that dedication to Zuckerberg appears to be under some pressure. Since the 2016 election, we’ve seen some uncharacteristic dissent among Facebookers, most notably when a small band of employees started their own task force to investigate Facebook’s role in disseminating fake news leading up to the election. That move, breaking company message and openly defying Zuckerberg, was shocking to numerous former employees we spoke to.

Whether or not that’s an isolated incident or just the nature of a company growing up, will undoubtedly come back to Zuckerberg.

"People come to work at Facebook because they want to work for Zuckerberg," said one former employee. “No one else has a Mark."
Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most recognizable CEOS in the world, and what he has achieved at 32 years old is pretty staggering.

Even though more than a billion users flock to Facebook every month and he has donated billions of dollars to medical research through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, it’s important to remember that he’s still a human being with weird quirks, just like everyone else. Read on for some unexpected facts about the Facebook founder.



1. He nearly worked for Microsoft.
When he was a senior in high school he co-created an app called Synapse Media Player, an MP3 player that kept track of the user’s favorite songs and made playlists based on their choices, essentially an early Spotify or Pandora.

Microsoft sought to acquire the company and its founders, but instead of working for the Seattle tech giant, Zuckerberg and co-creator Adam D’Angelo  -- who went on to found Quora -- got a patent for the tech and went to college instead.

2. He was inventing in middle school.
When Zuckerberg was 12, he created an instant messaging program that he called ZuckNet so his dentist father could know when patients arrived.

3. He has unexpected pop culture tastes.
One of his favorite books is The Aeneid, and one of his favorite TV shows is The West Wing, which was created by Aaron Sorkin, the man who also wrote the movie based on the creation of Facebook, The Social Network.


4. He’s known for being frugal.
Even though today he has a beautifully appointed home that is powered by an AI butler with Morgan Freeman’s voice, in an interview with The New Yorker in 2010, he said that he found all of his apartments on Craigslist.

5. His eyesight is the reason behind Facebook’s color scheme.
Facebook’s logo is blue because Zuckerberg has red-green color blindness.

6. He wasn’t always a high-level coder.
He first learned to code from a C++ for Dummies book.

Related: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Pledges $3 Billion to Curing and Managing Disease

7. He’s multilingual.
He’s always been interested in ancient languages such as Latin, and he can speak Mandarin.

8. He turned down many offers to sell Facebook.
Many big name companies wanted to see if he wanted to sell -- NewsCorp, MySpace, Viacom, Yahoo, NBC, Microsoft (again) and Google all put their hats in the ring -- but Zuckerberg held firm.


9. He and his wife’s first meeting was a little inauspicious.
While Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan are now parents and major philanthropists, they met for the first time in line for the bathroom at a fraternity party at Harvard.


10. He’s an admirer of Steve Jobs.
The late Apple founder’s bold leadership style apparently inspired the message he put on his first business cards: “I’m CEO, bitch.”

11. He’s on Twitter.
But he’s unsurprisingly not very active on it. He’s tweeted 19 times since 2009.

12. He can laugh at himself.
Zuckerberg is known for being somewhat awkward, but he wrote an appreciative post about Andy Samberg’s impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live.


13. He’s a fitness buff.
For 2016, Zuckerberg set a goal to run 365 miles during the course of the year. He met his goal midway through the summer.

14. He looks up to Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso.
He has Einstein’s quote, "Make things as simple as possible but no simpler,” and Picasso’s insight that, "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once you grow up,” as his favorites on Facebook.

15. His dog is a celebrity too
Beast, Zuckerberg’s Hungarian sheepdog, has his own Facebook fan page that has more than 2 million likes. His daughter’s a fan too -- he posted that Max’s first word was dog.



16. A dozen people held him manage his Facebook page.
Zuckerberg reportedly has a team of 12 people that tend to his Facebook account to monitor the comments, write his posts and take the photographs that end up on his page.
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17. He’s very protective of his privacy.  
Zuckerberg has made some considerable and litigious moves to ensure his privacy. He bought a $100 million plot of land in Hawaii in 2014, and is recently decided not to sue the people who own pieces of the property through generational ties. He also tried to tear down four houses in and around his home in Palo Alto, Calif.

18. He's buddies with Vin Diesel.
In an interview with The New York Times, the action star shared what the unlikely duo's relationship is like. "We were hanging out up at Facebook about two years ago, and I was excited about Fast 7. He said, 'You know what movie I’d most like to see is the return of Xander Cage.' It’s at a point where if Mark and I are together and if I quote a line from a character I played and I do it slightly wrong, he’ll correct me. It’s embarrassing!"

19. He seems taller than he really is in photos.

Turns out, Zuckerberg is only around five feet and seven or eight inches, however he seems much taller in photos. And that’s because he apparently has some positioning tricks. A 2010 New Yorker profile reads, “He’s only around five feet eight, but he seems taller, because he stands with his chest out and his back straight, as if held up by a string.”

And according to Wired writer Graham Starr (and tested by Nick Douglas at Life Hacker), Zuckerberg has some photo tricks that help him look taller. One of his biggest tricks is standing closer to the camera or holding himself higher as others lean in closer.

20. His signature T-shirt costs $300 to $400.

Any day of the week, you can catch Zuckerberg in a grey T-shirt, a hoodie, a pair of jeans and some Nike sneakers. There’s a reason he wears the same thing every day. In a 2014 Q&A, when asked about his simple wardrobe, Zuckerberg said, "I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.”

Turns out, Zuck’s iconic grey T-shirt, made by Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli, costs a whopping $300 to $400. However, retailer Vresh Clothing studied the color, material and length of the shirt to create an affordable replica for those who want to copy the CEO’s style.


21. He can't be blocked on Facebook.
As it turns out, you can only unfollow the mind behind the platform. Apparently blocking Zuckerberg or Priscilla Chan isn’t an option for users. If you attempt to block them, an error message will appear that reads, “this profile can’t be blocked for now.” As for the reason, a Facebook spokesperson told Quartz that “people trying to block a profile or Page may see an error message if it has been blocked many times within a short period.”

22. He has a substantial budget for security.
It costs millions of dollars to keep Zuckerberg safe in 2017 -- $7.3 million to be exact. The figure was in a regulatory filing Facebook submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which noted that funds for his security plan -- including trips made on a private airplane -- made up 83 percent of his compensation package in 2017. The company spent $4.9 million on Zuckerberg’s security detail in 2016.





23. He doesn’t ride in style.
Zuckerberg has fairly inexpensive taste when it comes to cars, reportedly driving a $30,000 Acura TSX and a Volkswagen Golf GTI.