Do they hand out Nobel prizes for PR? Because the team behind Mark Zuckerberg’s recent metamorphosis deserves one immediately. Not so long ago, Zuck was widely known as an awkward dork with an unflattering haircut, whose corporate empire did evil things such as fuelling genocidal violence in Myanmar, spreading misinformation and harvesting people’s personal information.
Now, however, the tech mogul keeps making headlines for far fluffier reasons. This has been the year of the Zucknaissance, with people marvelling over his jazzy new wardrobe and far more flattering hair. In what may be an effort to seem more relatable, he has made his private life a lot more public. It’s not clear whether Zuckerberg, who has been married to Priscilla Chan for 12 years, has always been a fan of the big romantic gesture, but he certainly now seems to want to be known as a major “wife guy”.
In August, he commissioned a giant sculpture of Chan, saying he was “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife”. More recently, he teamed up with the rapper T-Pain to record an acoustic remix of Get Low for his wedding anniversary. Why? Because the song was playing when he and Chan first met in college. The “Z-Pain” remix is not for Chan’s ears only: if you really want to hear Zuck sing “till the sweat drop down my balls”, the song is available on Spotify.
I will give Mr Zuckerberg his due: it seems as if he has a loving relationship with his wife and kids. Unlike certain other tech billionaires, he is also spending his infinite riches having what looks like an endless amount of fun, rather than colonising Mars.
But that doesn’t mean we should all be fawning over the guy, as sections of the internet now appear to be doing. He’s not some regular #Girldad who just happens to have about $200bn (£158bn): he is still an oligarch who has self-servingly flattered Donald Trump enough to get back into the incoming president’s good books. And he’s still head of a platform that has a pernicious influence on the information we consume.
Unless he has personally guaranteed you a room in his apocalypse bunker, the billionaire is not your friend.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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