Who is the Really Truly Real Mark Zuckerberg?
By Hamish McKenzie
On May 18, 2012
Given the excitement over that thing Facebook is doing today, it’s easy to lose sight of just who its 28-year-old founder really is (apart from the 29th richest person on Earth, and, for that matter, probably any other planet). Just as well, then, that you have The Media.
As we’ve found through minutes of intensive research (that’s years in old-media speak), Mark Zuckerberg, computer programmer and son of a dentist, is a man of multitudes, comprehensible only by hyperbolic metaphor. Allow us to help you out. Here we present helpful explanations of Zuckerberg’s character, from today and the days leading up to the IPO. Ladies and gentlemen, Mark Zuckerberg is…
- a renegade, says the Philadelphia Inquirer
- like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak rolled into one, according to Woz himself
- like Bill Gates, says David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect”
- a complicated lover, per CNN Money
- The One, according to Silicon Valley VC Roger McNamee
- “to uselessness what Henry Ford was to the automobile,” reckons Rich Lowry of the National Review Online
- red-green colorblind, points out CNN
- the governor of a Roman province, suggests Nick Bilton
- this century’s Don Draper, insists the New York Post
Tune in tomorrow for the two-pronged comparison of Zuckerberg to Jesus and Bob Dylan’s first guitar pick.
Update: Zuck has some competition. One of the anchors on Bloomberg TV just said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was “treated like Mick Jagger at Davos.”
Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced "hey-mish" and you can follow him on Twitter.
