- Mark Zuckerberg says he's becoming more comfortable with himself as he gets older.
- The Meta CEO reflected on his early-career awkwardness in a recent Threads reply.
Mark Zuckerberg says he's getting more comfortable as he ages.
The Meta CEO, who turned 40 in May, recently replied to a Threads post commenting on his evolving public persona. The Threads user noted Zuck's age when he founded Facebook, noting that he "looks way more comfortable now."
In a response to the post, Zuckerberg said when he was 19 years old he "didn't know anything about running a company, communicating publicly, etc."
He said he built confidence on the technical and product side of the company, but got negative feedback on how he came across.
Early in his career, the Meta CEO was repeatedly labeled as awkward. Some of Facebook's missteps, most significantly the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data breach, didn't help his reputation.
Zuckerberg was widely mocked in 2020 after the New York Post shared a photo of him surfing with a face covered in sunscreen. The CEO faced another round of internet mocking in 2022 after he released a selfie of his Metaverse avatar posing in front of the Eiffel Tower.
The image quickly went viral for its low-tech appearance — and the billionaire reportedly took it all personally.
"Being awkward and getting negative feedback on how I came across definitely made me more careful and scripted," Zuckerberg said in the Threads post. "Still not my best thing, but getting a bit more comfortable just being me as I get older."
Zuck's tried to revamp his public persona in recent years.
He's undergone a fashion and style transformation, and even comes across differently in interviews and public appearances. Now, the CEO tends to pair his signature T-shirts with gold chains.
In a marked difference from the viral sunscreen snap, the billionaire recently posted a video of himself surfing in a tux and sipping beer backed by Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA."
Zuckerberg is impressing people in the business world, too.
He recently won praise from CEOs for open-sourcing Meta's AI model, Llama 3.1. Shopify's CEO called the model an "incredible gift," and even Elon Musk said he "does deserve credit."