An academic analyzed everything Mark Zuckerberg said publicly for 20 years — but still doesn't feel like he knows him

Mark Zuckerberg is the subject of a new Sky documentary. Samantha Burkardt/ Getty

• Michael Zimmer has built a digital archive of Mark Zuckerberg’s public comments.
• The academic launched the project after the Meta boss discussed privacy issues in interviews.
• Despite scrutinizing the Meta boss so intentensly, Zimmer says he still doesn’t understand him.

A lot has changed for Mark Zuckerberg since the drunken night at Harvard in 2003 when he decided to release Facemash.

Back then, he was the plucky 19-year-old computer science student who thought it would be fun to release a gag site for his college campus to rate pictures of students as hot or not.

Now, he’s the 39-year-old mega-billionaire in charge of the world’s most powerful social-media platform, Meta, and the subject of a new Sky documentary titled “Zuckerberg: King of The Metaverse.”

Its release comes one month before Facebook’s 20th birthday in February.

For one academic, the extraordinary arc of Zuckerberg’s life in the two decades since 2003 — laid bare in the documentary — has posed a vital question: do we really know Mark Zuckerberg?

Mark Zuckerberg is CEO of Facebook owner Meta. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

As the creator of the Zuckerberg Files, launched in 2013, Marquette University’s privacy and data ethics scholar, Michael Zimmer, has made it his mission to answer that question by obsessively documenting everything Zuckerberg has said publicly.

With over three billion of the world’s eight billion people using a Meta-owned app — be it Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Threads — Zimmer’s reason for doing this is simple.

“The Zuckerberg Files came out of a project where I was thinking about how Zuckerberg talks about privacy,” Zimmer explained in the documentary. “So I started collecting blog posts and speeches or interviews he gave around privacy and decided to build a digital archive.”

The project quickly became much more than the billionaire’s views on privacy. Zimmer told Business Insider that he became fascinated with how the CEO spoke about why Facebook existed, his response to “pushback,” and his language when controversies would emerge.

“The idea of being able to really track how his discourse changes, the language he uses both on-script and off-script I found really intriguing,” he said.

Zimmer thinks the exhaustive project has been “really insightful” in helping track the maturity of both Zuckerberg and his company. But even then, it’s hard for him to say he really knows the guy.

“Can I look into his soul, can I understand Zuckerberg?” Zimmer asked himself. “I can’t.”

That’s understandable. As the documentary depicts, Zuckerberg’s life has undergone transformation after transformation.

There’s the young Zuckerberg who is a visionary, as David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect,” puts it when recalling his first meeting with the entrepreneur.

“As soon as he started talking I settled down fast because he spoke with some of the most visionary language that I had experienced talking to anyone ever,” he said.

As Zimmer notes, this is a Zuckerberg who is convinced of the potential for Facebook to fulfill his mission of connecting the world.

This confidence also gave way to a seemingly arrogant Zuckerberg, who wanted to see through the $1 billion acquisition of Instagram without consulting Facebook’s board, or who felt Harvard students were “dumb” to hand over their data, as reporter Sheera Frenkel said in the documentary.

“He was still a very young man through many of their explosive growth years, and became a billionaire at such a young age,” Zimmer said.

Mark Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook in 2004. San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

However, there seems to be a clear transition point for the Meta boss. It comes after an awkward interview at the D8 conference in 2010 in which a sweaty Zuckerberg reluctantly takes off his hoodie after being asked to do so by journalist Kara Swisher.

The embarrassment suffered during that interview seemed to trigger a shift that led the tech leader to become more cold and calculated in his public appearances, Zimmer said. Call this the mockable android iteration of the CEO.

This may be the image of Zuckerberg people are most familiar with. The documentary is interspersed with scenes of this version of the CEO from arguably the most crucial moment in his career: his testimony on Capitol Hill.

For Zimmer, this might be the moment Zuckerberg had to grow up. Questions about Russian interference on Facebook during the 2016 presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal that exposed Facebook’s vulnerability would be tough to avoid.

“He controlled those conversations,” Zimmer said. “He’s never done those kinds of testimonies before but he was well prepared and he was no longer this Harvard dropout.”

Fast-forward to the present day, however, and it’s clear that Zuckerberg has been carefully rebranding himself yet again.

Having changed Facebook to Meta, his primary mission has been about creating the metaverse. While he’s been busy trying to build this untested idea, he’s picked up a new hobby of jiu-jitsu, started raising cattle in Hawaii, and managed to look like a real adult next to Elon Musk.

Of course, this adds another dimension to the life and times of Zuckerberg, making it harder to decipher who he really is.

If Zimmer is clear on one thing about Zuck though, it’s this: “He does have unbelievable self-confidence that what he’s doing is right.”