Mark Zuckerberg confirms that he is not, in fact, a shape-shifting lizard
At the beginning of his first live Q&A on Facebook Tuesday, Zuckerberg took the time to answer a viewer's question about whether he was, in fact, an actual reptilian.
(While comedian Jerry Seinfeld did join Zuckerberg later in the Live video, it was mostly just a fun Q&A, not one full of Facebook news).
"Mark, are the allegations true that you are secretly a lizard?" read Zuckerberg to more than 100,000 viewers on Facebook Live. "I'm going to have to go with no on that," he said. "I am not a lizard."
The question may seem like a curious one. Zuckerberg, after all, looks like a fairly normal guy. Why would people think he's a lizard?
I tried Googling for theories about Zuckerberg as a lizard, and the earliest mentions I could find were from December 2010. The theory appears to have been inspired by Time magazine's cover photo of Zuckerberg that year in which he was named person of the year.
Supposedly there's a lizard-like quality to Zuckerberg's glowing green eyes in the photo.
"Mark Zuckerberg looks like lizard in human skin," wrote Luis Prada in response to the Time cover on the website Holy Taco. "If he wanted to, he could rip the feeble human meat off his skull and reveal his true self, Gundar of the Liztoka species from a planet beyond our stars."
There is, believe it or not, a group of people who really believe that lizard shape-shifters live among us (see: David Icke). The specific conspiracy that Zuckerberg is a secret lizard has lived on since the Time cover story six years ago.
"Can someone please photoshop lizard eyes onto Mark Zuckerberg?" wrote one Reddit user three months ago. Another Redditor with the user name "Scientologist2a" responded with this:
Now Zuckerberg has laid the six-year-old conspiracy about him being a lizard to rest. Or has he?