Three years ago, Mark Zuckerberg’s big day ended in failure. At the company’s annual developers conference, then called Facebook Connect, he unveiled grandiose plans to turn the trillion-dollar social network into a “metaverse company.” He renamed the company Meta and prepared for a world in which we become one with our virtual avatars, and maybe one day we’ll even have legs. But that dramatic change never happened.
The Metaverse was largely a hype gimmick. His company’s stock price plummeted, and for the first time, Facebook stopped growing. Meta then implemented several massive layoffs. It seemed like the collapse of an empire, but Zuckerberg reversed the fortunes of the sinking ship. In conference calls with concerned investors, he stopped using the word “metaverse,” then, when the AI boom arrived, he gleefully pivoted to the new buzzword. Stock prices soared.
As the company has recovered from the crisis, Zuckerberg himself has regained his lustre and is now something of a fashionista.
Once known for making ghostly appearances in front of the Senate and awkwardly professing his love of barbecue sauce, he’s now surprisingly overconfident. But he doesn’t just wear Alexander McQueen suits and train with top mixed martial artists and call it a day: He now designs his own clothes with fashion designer Mike Amiri. So when Zuckerberg appeared onstage at this year’s MetaConnect event, three years after the Metaverse debacle, his outfit mattered.
For perhaps the most memorable of Meta’s developer keynotes, Zuckerberg wore a crisp black T-shirt and jeans, the go-to look for Silicon Valley founders who want to make us feel like we’re one of us (though they are powerful billionaires). But look closer and you’ll see a bold declaration on his shirt: “Aut Zuck aut nihil.”
The lettering, though on-trend in style and spread across the sleeves and chest, is difficult to read unless you’re familiar with the ancient Latin proclamation of a Roman emperor. The original phrase, “aut Caesar aut nihil,” translates to “Caesar or nothing,” an expression of the desire to be the supreme ruler at all costs.
“I started working with people to design my own clothes,” he said on the Acquired podcast, “and I thought, I’m going to design eyewear, I’m going to design other things for people to wear, I’m going to do this well.”
The T-shirts are part of a series he designed for himself, based on his favorite classical sayings. Another of his shirts is embroidered with the phrase “pathei mathos,” which means “learning through suffering” in ancient Greek. In May, he wore a shirt to his 40th birthday party with the phrase “Carthago delenda est,” which means “Carthage must die,” a call for Rome to attack Carthage during the Punic Wars. He also used the phrase when Google launched its Facebook killer, Google+, in 2011. It’s a variation on the same theme. Zuckerberg still thinks he’s fighting the system, not the system itself.
The message Zuckerberg is sending through his clothing is well-intentioned, but dropping out of Harvard meant nothing to an ancient Roman general who went on to build one of the most powerful empires in history.
It’s arrogant to compare yourself to Julius Caesar, but in fairness, Zuckerberg runs a company that serves billions of people every day. His influence dwarfs that of Julius Caesar. And if all goes according to his plan, he’ll be developing wearable AI gadgets and virtual reality headsets that will once again change the way the world communicates.
No matter how big Meta has become, the way Zuckerberg dresses suggests he still sees himself as an opponent to more established tech companies. In this comparison, Zuckerberg isn’t an established Caesar. He sees himself as the Caesar of old, a brave general with a great destiny, taking on an empire bigger than his own.
