Mark Zuckerberg

David Fincher needed two hours of footage to fix in the collective memory a guy in a ragged hoodie and plastic flip-flops while tearing into other people's privacy. Aaron Sorkin wrote a sharp profile of him in The Social Network, but the reality of Mark Zuckerberg always proved colder than tragic. In February 2004, he launched a online network for Harvard students, and within five years he was managing the attention of half of humanity.

Nobody saw the blow coming.

For decades, the big screen portrayed tech magnates as tortured geniuses driven by emotional wounds. Zuckerberg never fit that dramatic mold, because his engine was never aesthetic glory or the approval of others, but an almost robotic discipline for devouring competitors and multiplying metrics.

The script Aaron Sorkin didn't want to tell

That kid from White Plains learned to code in high school and, before turning twenty, was already turning down buyout offers from software giants. When he designed Facemash on a lonely night in 2003, he crashed his college's internal network and dodged immediate expulsion thanks to a calculated coolness.

The academic uproar didn't faze him at all.

He set up base in California and played by the rules of the most ruthless capitalism. In 2012, he paid 1,000 million dollars for Instagram when the app had barely thirteen employees on payroll and zero revenue. Two years later, he wrote a 19,000 million check to take over WhatsApp and close off any escape route for mobile messaging users.

And antitrust regulators took a decade to react.

2018's corporate scandals over the massive Cambridge Analytica data leak landed him in front of the U.S. Senate. He sat through hours of questioning with a deadpan composure that sparked hundreds of memes online, but he didn't give up an inch of control or loosen his grip on his board of directors.

The Red Numbers of Utopia

His absolute dominance began to waver when he decided that mobile phone screens were already an obsolete format. In October 2021 he rebranded his empire as Meta and announced a forced migration into immersive 3D environments that recalled the rudimentary video games of the 1990s.

The bill was outrageous.

The Reality Labs division racked up operating losses of $58,000 million between 2020 and 2024, triggering a stock plunge that forced the founder to lay off 21,000 employees in two rounds of brutal cuts. Shareholders demanded common sense, but Zuckerberg kept the preferred shares that give him more than 50 percent of the voting power.

So he jumped to the next tech chessboard without apologizing. In July 2023, he released the code for his LLaMA family of artificial intelligence models, shaking up the closed-model business policy defended by OpenAI and Google.

In September 2024, he unveiled Orion, a prototype holographic glasses with silicon carbide lenses whose manufacturing cost topped 10,000 dollars per unit.