Why Does Mark Zuckerberg Think Like an Emperor?

David Senra, reading Jeremy Stern's profile Mark, says Mark Zuckerberg has thought like an emperor since he was a child. At 12 he built a game set in the Roman Empire where the player conquered the world one territory at a time. In high school he excelled at Latin. Nearly a decade later he still recalled Jupiter's Latin verse: "I set no bounds in space or time. I have given empire without end."

At Harvard, one of the first websites he built was a class study tool for the art history course Rome of Augustus. In Facebook meetings held to fend off threats from Google, he ended speeches by declaring Carthage must be destroyed. All-hands meetings ended with him shouting domination. Sean Parker, Facebook's early president, warned that shouting domination could one day be cited in an antitrust suit, and later observed an imperial tendency in him.

In more recent years Zuckerberg mused in public about the harsh approach Augustus used before establishing 200 years of world peace. Rome's first emperor turned a republic into an empire, and that peace did not come for free. He had to do certain things. At Facebook's flagship conference in 2024 he wore a shirt that read "either a Caesar or nothing." His wife, Priscilla Chan, joked that on their honeymoon in Rome his hunt for sights and statues of Augustus made the emperor their third wheel.