4 Reasons Mark Zuckerberg Is A Garbage Supervillain
Despite some fierce competition from dudes who run sweatshops and build killer robots, or who shoot cars into space in between crushing unions, the closest thing we have to a billionaire supervillain is probably the data-mining, fascist-coddling, will-sell-his-daughter's-name-to-get-a-deal-in-China Mark Zuckerberg. But there isn't a single rogue's gallery that would welcome his insipid nerd ass into the fold. That's because ...
Not Even A Death Ray Can Make Him Look Cool
Zuckerberg does have the raw potential to be a proper comic book villain. Just look at the time he invited Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over for dinner. The anecdote has everything: a dreaded competitor, a tense dinner, a live sacrifice, and best of all, a laser. And yet even with all of that going for him, Zuckerberg still managed to come out looking like the most boring dork of all time.
In 2011, Zuckerberg invited Dorsey over to his home, promising him he'd cook dinner himself. But the Twitter CEO was quite shocked when he was informed that their meal had been alive and grazing in the yard mere moments before. See, Zuckerberg had decided that for one year, he would only eat the flesh of creatures that had died by his hand (classic evil billionaire move). To that end, he kept a small stable of six goats on his premises in case he wished to sate his bloodlust. And how did he kill them? No big deal. With a laser gun. Per Rolling Stone:
Letting your rival know that you're not afraid to stare death in the eye and you have a knife and a zapper hidden somewhere nearby? Now we're cooking with gas! But what happened next? Did Zuckerberg's goat sacrifice lead to a twisted bacchanalia of roasted meats, wine, and orgies? Did he serve it under a massive domed lid, only to reveal it wasn't a goat, but Dorsey's most capable henchman? Nope, he ruined the moment by being a big-ass dork. Clearly not knowing how to cook for humans, Zuckerberg let the freshly slaughtered goat sit in the oven for half an hour, shrugged that it was probably ready, and served a slab of cold dead goat to his billionaire dinner guest. "I just ate my salad," Dorsey recalled.
Zuckerberg seriously does not know how to be a person. That's an old joke, but it is entirely based in reality. Here's the Facebook CEO showing you how to eat a piece of toast like you're an alien on Day 1 of your human mimicry class in night school:
Related: 6 Underreported Reasons Why Facebook Is Just The Worst
Every Attempt To Make Him Seem More Human Does The Exact Opposite
On some level, you need to relate to a supervillain, even if it's just the personal tragedy that started them on the path to evil. Well, back in 2016, Zuckerberg tried out the whole "relating with other people" thing again. In the middle of the presidential debates, he uploaded a video of himself barbecuing in his backyard like a regular Joe, talking about regular Joe things like how to smoke "meat fibers," his two colors of T-shirt (gray for the weekdays, purple for those crazy weekends), and his love for / paid sponsorship by Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce.
He then started a "listening tour," traveling across the country to sit on tractors and connect with down-to-Earth, diverse-but-not-too-diverse Facebook users. Between these cross-country photo ops and hiring both Bush and Obama's former campaign managers, people started to think this was all a sneaky test to gauge whether America was ready for its first Android-American president. Plenty of fictional supervillains have tried to dominate the world legally by running for the highest office. And Zuckerberg seemed ready to join their ranks, except he lacked something horribly disfigured masked psychopaths just have way more of: relatability.
Because nothing official came from the trip, some started to speculate that Zuckerberg never really wanted to be a politician, but that being mistaken for one was actually a step closer to human for the Facebook CEO. Either way, it's probably for the best that the man who has carefully logged every ill-advised beach pic anyone has ever quickly deleted from their profile page was not also placed in charge of the world's largest fleet of spy drones.
Related: Fake Robot Mark Zuckerberg Is More Likable Than The Real One
His "Villainous Banter" Is Painfully Awkward
A good supervillain has high-quality banter. You've got to do something with Captain America while the death ray is warming up. With that in mind, take a look at this back-and-forth between Zuckerberg and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about Facebook taking ad money from lying fascists, in which he displays all the stammering, evasiveness, and eye-blinking charm of an ax murderer being interviewed in the middle of doing an ax murder.
To see how Zuckerberg would deal with a superhero, we'll have to talk to Vin Diesel. Did you know Zuckerberg is a massive fan of xXx, that spy movie from that period when we all thought extreme sports were cool for about six months? Diesel knows, because every time they meet, Zuckerberg makes hungry eyes at him like he's a fresh server full of private data.
According to Diesel, Zuckerberg is his #1 fan. The kind of fan who buys movie props as gifts and then forces people to wear them around the office. Also the kind of fan who'll correct Diesel to his face if he slightly misquotes a line from his own movie. But most terrifying of all, the kind of wildly influential fan Diesel claims is responsible for the sequel to a 15-year-old movie people only remember if they scroll past it on their in-flight menu.
Related: 5 (More) Reasons Facebook Is Even Worse Than We Thought
He Keeps Lying About His Lame Misogynistic Origin Story
According to Zuckerberg, he invented Facebook after he saw his nation torn asunder by the illegal Iraq War, and thought that a social network could stop corrupt governments in their tracks. "If more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have turned out differently," he recently said during a commencement speech, likely while staring in the vague direction of a nearby bald eagle.
That's a pretty good villainous origin story. It's got that disillusioned hero angle to it that really sells in the Bible Belt. But the folks who were with him at the start don't recall him ever mentioning the Iraq War, or freedom, or anything of the sort. In fact, plenty of people will tell you that Zuckerberg's real inspiration for Facebook came from FaceMash, a website he created in college after being rejected by a girl, where he uploaded hacked pictures of female students so that users could rank them by their appearances. Not such a great villainous origin story, unless you're going to wield a bloody bladed fedora and call yourself The Red Incel.
Though the gross venture was short-lived, Zuckerberg learned an important lesson: He really liked "the idea of comparing two people together." And that laid the groundwork for our current mimetic dystopia wherein everyone tries to one-up each others' holiday pictures. And when he finally launched TheFacebook and realized that people were such "dumb fucks" that they would trust him with all their private data ... well, the rest is history. Specifically, your browser history, which he now owns.
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