Zuckerberg: My Honeymoon Kind of Had 3 People

Him, his wife, and Roman emperor Augustus, as the 'New Yorker' explains
By Newser Editors,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 11, 2018 9:55 AM CDT
Mark Zuckerberg's Scrabble Strategy Is Telling
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.   (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

The New Yorker is out with a lengthy profile of Mark Zuckerberg, and a Scrabble anecdote is drawing attention. It seems Zuckerberg was playing a friend's teenage daughter on a plane, and she beat him in the first game. Before game two, he wrote a computer program to have a dictionary come up with all the possible words for his letters, which allowed him to have a slim lead by the time the plane landed. "During the game in which I was playing the program, everyone around us was taking sides: Team Human and Team Machine," the girl, who was in high school at the time, tells the magazine's Evan Osnos. The story illustrates Zuckerberg's competitiveness—"I care about succeeding. And, yes, sometimes you have to beat someone to something, in order to get to the next thing"—and the story explores that and the CEO's efforts to "fix" Facebook.

"Zuckerberg is not yet 35, and the ambition with which he built his empire could well be directed toward shoring up his company, his country, and his name," writes Osnos. "The question is not whether Zuckerberg has the power to fix Facebook but whether he has the will." Might Zuckerberg's fascination with the Roman emperor Augustus shed light? "Through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace," says Zuckerberg, whose interest in the historical figure isn't fleeting. "My wife was making fun of me, saying she thought there were three people on the honeymoon: me, her, and Augustus," Zuckerberg recalls of their 2012 stay in Rome. "All the photos were different sculptures of Augustus." Later, the couple would name their second daughter August. For much, much more, read the full profile. (More Longform stories.)

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