"Nah, f*** that."

Zuck Smash

If you haven't heard, Facebook-turned-Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has entered his baddie era. He's a UFC guy. He's wearing prominent gold chains. He's surfing in a tuxedo while drinking a beer and holding the American flag, as one does. And now — gasp! — he's swearing onstage.

In a live-streamed discussion on Monday with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at this week's SIGGRAPH 2024 conference, Zucko scandalously dropped the F-bomb while discussing the merits of open-source versus "closed" platforms. Meta recently doubled down on its decision to embrace open-source AI, a move that, though deemed dangerous by some AI researchers, has been billed by the company and its founder as "good for developers, good for Meta, and good for the world." (Zuckerberg even penned a letter about why he's all-in on open-source AI models, in which he predicted that Meta's newly-revealed "frontier" open-source model, Llama-3.1, will be "an inflection point in the industry.")

But for all of his open-source optimism, it seems that Zuck feels an equal amount of scorn for closed systems, which made him angry enough to curse on the livestream.

"There just have been too many things that I've tried to build and then have just been told 'nah you can't really build that' by the platform provider," Zuck told Huang, "that at some level I'm just like, 'nah, fuck that.'"

"There goes our broadcast opportunity," Huang joked back, to which Zuck offered his apologies.

"Sorry," said the Facebook founder. "Get me talking about closed platforms, and I get angry."

Eras Tour

Zuck's "nah, fuck that" moment is the latest to cement the tech founder's newly more "accessible" image, as the billionaire's more relaxed new vibe was described back in April by New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman.

Indeed, in the years since he first rose to global fame and vast fortune, the founder's public image has repeatedly gone through dramatic shifts. First, he was the 19-year-old wunderkind, depicted as cold and vindictive, if undeniably smart, in David Finchers' 2010 film "The Social Network"; then he was the guy who got really sweaty onstage; then, in the late 2010s, his face and persona became synonymous with that of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, and thus with an event widely seen as the tech industry meddling with the democratic process.

But now, once again, there's a new Zuck. He's (sort of, not really) shaking off the failures of his beloved Metaverse, tossing on some bling, and sweatlessly throwing around a healthy dose of bad language while speaking to a crowd.

Hey, if you get famous at 19 and go on to make your first billion by 23, it's probably fair to go through some personal transitions. At least there aren't any in-office katanas anymore. That we know of...

More on Zuck: Zuckerberg Reportedly Got Furious at Wedding at Mention of His Dumb Metaverse Selfie


Share This Article