A lot has changed in Mark Zuckerberg's life since a drunken night at Harvard in 2003, when he decided to start Facemash.
Back then, he was a brave 19-year-old computer science student who thought it would be cool to launch a gag site for his college campus where he would rate students' photos as sexy or not.
Now he's the 39-year-old mega-billionaire in charge of the world's most powerful social media platform, Meta, and the subject of a new documentary on Sky called "Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse."
The premiere takes place a month before Facebook's 20th anniversary, in February.
For a scholar, the extraordinary trajectory of Zuckerberg's life in the two decades since 2003 - revealed in this documentary - raises an important question: Do we really know Mark Zuckerberg?
As the inventor of the Zuckerberg files released in 2013, Michael Zimmer, a privacy and ethics researcher at Marquette University, set out to answer this question by obsessively documenting everything Zuckerberg said publicly.
Although more than three billion of the world's eight billion people use Meta-owned apps, be it Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Threads, Zimmer's reason for this is simple.
“The Zuckerberg Files were the result of a project in which I thought about how Zuckerberg talks about privacy,” Zimmer explained in the document. “So I started collecting his blog posts, speeches and interviews about his personal life and decided to create a digital archive. »
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quickly became more than just billionaires' approach to privacy.Zimmer told Business Insider he was fascinated by the way the CEO talked about Facebook's raison d'être, his response to the "pushback" and his language when controversy arose.
“The idea of being able to follow the evolution of his speech, the language he uses both in and out of the script, I found really fascinating,” he said.
Zimmer believes this global project was “really eye-opening” in showing the maturity of Zuckerberg and his company. But even then, it's hard for him to say that he really knows this guy.
“I can look into his soul, will I understand Zuckerberg?”" Zimmer wondered. "I can't."
That's understandable. As the documentary shows, Zuckerberg's life has undergone one change after another.
There is the young Zuckerberg, a visionary, as David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect,” says as he talks about his first meeting with the entrepreneur.
“As soon as he started talking, I immediately calmed down because he spoke one of the most visionary languages I have ever heard,” he said.
As Zimmer notes, Zuckerberg is confident in Facebook's potential to fulfill its mission of connecting the world.
This confidence also gave way to the seemingly arrogant Zuckerberg, who wanted to push ahead with the multi-billion dollar takeover of Instagram without consulting the Facebook board, or who thought Harvard students were “stupid” for reporting their own data, as journalist Sheera Frenkel said.
“He was still a very young man during the many years of their rapid growth and became a billionaire at such a young age,” Zimmer said.
However, there seems to be a clear transition point for Meta's boss. This follows an embarrassing interview at the 2010 D8 conference, where a sweaty Zuckerberg reluctantly removed his hoodie at the request of journalist Kara Swisher.
Zimmer said the embarrassment he felt during that interview sparked a change that made the tech leader colder and more calculating in his public appearances.Call it the mocking version of the Android CEO.
This is perhaps the image of Zuckerberg that people know best. The documentary is interspersed with scenes of this version of the CEO, taken from arguably the most important moment of his career: his testimony on Capitol Hill.
For Zimmer, this may have been Zuckerberg's coming of age. Questions about Russian interference in Facebook during the 2016 presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which exposed Facebook's vulnerability to attack, were hard to avoid.
“He was monitoring those calls,” Zimmer said. “He had never made such a statement before, but he was well prepared and no longer a Harvard dropout.”
However, if we take a look at today, it is clear that Zuckerberg has carefully renamed himself again.
After switching Facebook to meta, his main task was to create a metaworld. While he was busy developing this untested idea, he took up a new hobby, jiu-jitsu, started raising livestock in Hawaii, and managed to look like a real adult next to "Elon Musk."
Of course, this adds another dimension to Zuckerberg's life and times and makes it harder to decipher who he really is.
But if Zimmer is clear about one thing about Zuck, it's this: "He has incredible confidence and knows that what he's doing is right."