To celebrate his wife Priscilla Chan turning forty last weekend, Mark Zuckerberg did something truly extraordinary. The CEO of Meta, known for years as a buttoned-up computer nerd, donned the same sparkly jumpsuit worn by Benson Boone at the Grammys and re-enacted his viral performance for their enraptured guests. “This is amazing! Wow!” commented Jeff Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sanchez.
Of course, he couldn’t very well re-enact the thing that made Boone’s performance go viral in the first place – an unfortunate grabbing of the crotch that made SZA and the internet squirm.
Welcome to Saturday night in the era of the broligarchy. With men like these, who needs the Oscars? The real question is why Zuckerberg felt the need to put on such a camp display, when, just months ago, he was banging on about the need for more “masculine energy” on the Joe Rogan Experience.
But maybe that’s just the point. Maybe, just maybe, Zuckerberg has finally realised who really runs his digital platforms – besides Nick Clegg and Joel Kaplan. Could it be that he’s finally realised the laws of online virality are dictated by the gaytriarchy – and all things camp, excessive and unhinged are rewarded over what’s not?
It would be totally in keeping with Meta’s recent decision to ban fact checkers – not necessarily a bad idea, as I’ve written about here – and the wider anarchy coursing through Silicon Valley. Sam Altman and Elon Musk are caught in a very public feud over the future of OpenAI, while the latter takes his four-year-old son to work in the Oval office. David Sacks, Trump’s crypto czar, just announced a crypto reserve. (To which, one word: run).
Zuckerberg doesn’t like to be left out, and must have decided now’s the time for a new personal rebrand (the tech wunderkind has already gone from being a geeky programmer to a Hollywood villain, real-life villain, and MMA fighter/jiujitsu competitor). I wonder who in his office is to thank for this latest reinvention as a professional imitator/wannabe gay icon. It’s certainly far more palatable and in step with the times than last year’s surfer boy renaissance, when he grew out his hair and wore gold jewellery. Or when, in November, he marked he and his wife’s dating anniversary with a cover of Get Low by Lil John & The East Side Boyz: a song they first listened to in college and which contains the lyrics “Til sweat drops down my balls”.
Someone must have been fired, or recently watched La Cage Aux Folles. Either way, they’ve finally got the memo that Zuck’s reactionary slide into the podcast manosphere doesn’t mean he has to look the part. How delighted they must have been to find out Benson Boone is, like Zuckerberg, 5”8, and pliable enough to lend his costume to one of America’s most hated men so he could surprise his wife for her birthday.
The whole thing is – pardon the pun – so meta. Zuckerberg’s performance involves a live outfit change, stripping out of a black tux to reveal the disco-inspired number underneath: a high-camp, quasi-vaudeville moment that wouldn’t look entirely out of place on RuPaul’s Drag Race or a fashion week party with Countess Luann. But it’s also a thinly veiled reference to the last image of Zuck in a tuxedo, which he wore while surfing on July 4 last year (beer in one hand, US flag in another). It’s as if to say: that era is over. 2025 is the era of Camp Zuck.
Of course, the whole thing is also incredibly cringe: a 40-year-old man pulling stunts for validation. But it speaks volumes about the world which he’s helped to create – image-led and hyper-referential – and how far he himself has come from his Harvard dorm room. To say Saturday’s performance was a far cry from what we once expected of the entrepreneur is to seriously understate just how much of a robot he used to be. Online critics still describe each new iteration of his personality as a “software update”.
With his latest changing of the garb, Zuckerberg has entered the next chapter of his Eras Tour. Although Taylor Swift wasn’t the first person I thought of when studying Saturday’s antics. And it wasn’t Benson Boone, either. Indeed, watching the Facebook founder stand on top of a piano and belt into a microphone, I couldn’t help but think instead of the Fairy Godmother from Shrek, who sits atop a Steinway and sings Holding Out For A Hero. As all who’ve watched the film will know, she is a godmother only in name. Her nature is far more conniving; self-serving; manipulative.
So, welcome, Zuck 5.0 (I think? I’ve lost count). It’s good to have you with us at last. If you’d been around last year, I’m sure they would have tapped you to impersonate Troye Sivan on SNL and not Timothée Chalamet. But let’s not dwell on the past – I hear you don’t like that very much. Cambridge Analytica? Darling: it’s all taken care of.
