There’s a good chance your Facebook posts from the mid-aughts are a total disaster: blurry, low-res pics of your college dorm room and status updates about what you ate for dinner. It was a time before anyone truly understood the importance and longevity of social media. Still, if anyone could have anticipated exactly how bad those posts would look in a few years, you’d assume it’d be the guy who created the website. Well, you’d be wrong.
Image: Getty
Tucked away on his personal Facebook page are a goldmine of beautiful photos and status updates that paint a harrowing portrait of the real Mark Zuckerberg. (Thanks to Weird Facebook’s Gilbert Morgan for bringing this to my attention.) This is the beauty of Facebook: We can see how the once bitter Harvard student who created Facemash as a way to rank the attractiveness of his female classmates blossomed into the arrogant billionaire daddy who owns all your data. Let’s take a journey through Mark’s most important life events:
2005: Zuck’s first Facebook album – Businessweek photos
“Businessweek needed some photos for their top entrepreneurs thing,” Zuck wrote in his description of the album. “So Priscilla and Elaine took a lot of the same photo of me and i figured i should make a photo album out of it since i don’t have any albums yet.” What follows are 20 nearly identical (blurry) photos of Mark sitting cross-legged on a stool in front of a red wall.
Ah, 2005! When it was socially acceptable to dump a million versions of the same picture on social media. The album, however, concludes with a quintessential young Zuck selfie. He might not be smiling, but the look in his eyes coos: I will monetise your data. All of it.
October 2006: Mark’s Tortured Artist Period
Once Priscilla points out the similarities between the then-millionaire CEO and Vincent Van Gogh, you simply can’t unsee it.
October 2006, cont’d: Random Press Photos
This is where young Zuck begins his transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. Just look at that Snapple-guzzling cutie-patooty!
Baby Z has yet to figure out his signature outfit. Here, we see him try (and fail) to rock that shirt from Urban Outfitters every straight dude owned in the mid-2000s. Sweet, bro.
July 2007: Cool.
Play this on repeat. Let it be your inspiration for today, a gentle mantra reminding you of where you used to be and all places you can go.
May 2009: Mark reveals his questionable music taste
2009! It was a different time!!!!
September 2009: The Great (and Mysterious) Goat Roast
While Zuck’s old pictures might be just as basic as yours, they contain far more mystery. For example, how did he create his Great Goat Roast of 2009 Album in 2008, over a year before the event took place?
Some secrets, we should never learn.
May 2010: Mark presumably smokes some weed, asks the big questions
Weird.
December 2014: Alone in a sea of balloons
By 2014, Zuck’s Facebook presence has become significantly more curated. Here, we catch a brief glimpse of the CEO alone in a conference room of balloons.
The blurred approximation of one of tech’s most powerful men gently whispers: SUCK IT WINKLEVOSS TWINS, SUCK IT!!!!!!!!
Present day: Like your friends from college, Zuck’s Facebook is now devoted to baby pictures. Stars! CEOs! They’re just like us.