A vibe shift is afoot in Silicon Valley. For aeons, the movers and shakers of the tech industry signalled that they were serious people working on serious things via their simple outfits. Crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried (now in jail) always looked as if he had rolled out of bed and forgotten to change out of his pyjamas. The late Steve Jobs famously adopted a uniform of black polo necks. Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, once boasted that he owned and wore multiple versions of the same T-shirt because it was efficient.
“I’m not a cool person and I’ve never really tried to be cool,” Zuckerberg said in a 2014 Q&A. “I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible … I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous.” That attitude seemed to extend to his hair, which has always been kept Lego-style short.
Suddenly, however, tech executives seem to have shed their anti-style sentiment and developed a passion for fashion. There’s Jeff Bezos, of course, the poster child for brawny billionaires. Bezos has transformed from looking like a scrawny e-commerce nerd into the image of a ripped Hollywood supervillain. Gone are the ill-fitting shirts and chinos: the Amazon founder now struts around in cowboy hats, trendy sunglasses and muscle tees. None of which, one imagines, he got off Amazon.
Elon Musk has also had a dramatic makeover. The X CEO has gone from having a noticeably receding hairline to sporting a lush set of locks. This might be the work of a benevolent God; or, rumour has it, an expensive hair transplant surgeon.
Like Bezos, Musk has also ditched his former unflattering button-ups. He now loves his Top Gun-esque pilot jacket and frequently dresses, as a fashion writer for the Washington Post put it, “like a caricature of mid-century rogue masculinity”. While he used to wear colourful shirts (there is a famous photo of him in a purple so bright he looks like a bar of Dairy Milk), he now seems to have developed strong thoughts on colour. Last year SpaceX workers told Reuters that Musk, the rocket company’s founder, discouraged them from wearing safety yellow because he doesn’t like bright colours.
Zuckerberg has always been keen on imitating other people’s ideas. Still, the fact that the guy who was once the blandest man in tech has now joined the fashion fray is quite a shock. When the Facebook founder recently posted an Instagram video of himself talking about Meta’s latest AI assistant, jaws collectively dropped. Zuck wasn’t looking as robotic as he normally did; his hair was more voluminous and he was sporting a chain necklace. “Went from steal my data, to steal my wife and kids,” one commenter wrote. Someone then took a still from the video and added a little facial hair and the doctored picture quickly went viral. A bearded Zuck was suddenly the hottest thing online. The billionaire even responded to a campaign urging him to grow a real beard with a photo of a razor alongside a thinking face emoji.
This video wasn’t the first evidence of what has been described as Zuck’s Meta-morphosis. He has been spotted out and about in a statement shearling jacket, and there’s a clip of him admiring a $1m Richard Mille watch at the ostentatious pre-wedding event of the youngest son of Asia’s richest man. “Watches are cool,” Zuck enthused. At the same wedding he wore a showy Alexander McQueen number. “Is Mark Zuckerberg becoming stylish?” a popular menswear influencer tweeted in March, alongside a collage of the 39-year-old’s outfits.
Stylish is a stretch. But Zuckerberg has certainly become significantly less beige. So why the change? Is it some sort of midlife crisis? Has he finally run out of things to spend his money on and hired a stylist?
Perhaps. But a cynic might consider the more likely explanation – that this is part of a wider strategic overhaul of the tech mogul’s public image. Meta is embroiled in an anti-monopoly lawsuit and is being sued by dozens of states alleging that Facebook and Instagram are exploiting children to boost profits. Far better, don’t you think, that we all talk about how handsome a bearded Zuck would be rather than dwell on Meta’s less attractive business practices?
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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