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Mark Zuckerberg's Makeover Didn't Make People Like Him, Study Shows (techcrunch.com) 105

Posted by BeauHD from the tech-bro-fatigue dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A study by the Pew Research Center found that Americans' views of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg skew more negative than positive. While Zuckerberg has sparked chatter in Silicon Valley with his sudden interest in high fashion, the Meta CEO is less popular than President Trump's right-hand man, Elon Musk, the report found. While about 54% of U.S. adults say they have an unfavorable view of Musk, 67% feel negatively toward Zuckerberg. [...] But Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, is more universally disliked, though he draws more ire from the left-leaning demographic. While 60% of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents hold an unfavorable view of Zuckerberg, 76% of their Democratic counterparts share that sentiment.

So, while Zuck may be playing the part of the cool guy, Americans haven't been fooled by his gold chains or musical ambitions, it seems. Pew's study involved a panel of 5,086 randomly selected U.S. adults. The survey was conducted from January 27, 2025, through February 2, 2025, so these responses reflect people's recent opinions.

Mark Zuckerberg's Makeover Didn't Make People Like Him, Study Shows More | Reply

Mark Zuckerberg's Makeover Didn't Make People Like Him, Study Shows

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  • Wait, what? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:35PM (#65186281) Journal
    Was Zuckerberg's makeover supposed to be a popularity move? I just assumed that it was self-expression on the part of someone who finally realized that the best part of having functionally unlimited money is that other people's opinion of you matters little.

    The idea that what he's doing now is some kind of polished PR persona seems wild.

    • Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh@NosPam.gmail.com> on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:44PM (#65186305) Journal

      Same here, I never would've guessed those fashion choices were intended to win anyone's approval. And while there are a lot of reasons not to like Zuck, it's kind of alarming that he's less popular than a guy who endorses the AfD and throws back-to-back nazi salutes in public.

    • The idea that personal image / brand changes are PR moves aimed *at the public* is wild.

      Maybe its self-expression, maybe its premature middle age crisis (is there a difference?) or maybe its virtue-signaling, like most people changing public image. But virtue-signaling is driven ny peer groups and power differentials, not "popular opinion" unless you are literally running for elected office

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dohzer ( 867770 )

      Wait, what? Zuck had a makeover?! Did they add legs to his VR model or something? What'd I miss?

    • Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by illaqueate ( 416118 ) on Friday February 21, 2025 @11:54PM (#65186441)

      yes, he got into bjj/mma, which is full of right wing trump fans, started dressing like them and turned more right wing, probably because they were love bombing him while he was getting hate from mainstream media for what his companies do (some justified, some unjustified). I didn't have a negative opinion about him until he said that new media like Joe Rogan is replacing old media and it's a good thing which suggest to me he doesn't understand the difference between journalism and opinion/analysis or is so pilled he doesn't give a fuck.

      • True, Rogan is more of journalist than anyone mainstream media.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I do not know about Zuck, but Musk seems to be attention and approval-starved. Essentially an ultra-rich screw-up, because he sabotages himself.

    • I'm sure Caligula, Charles I and Louis XVI all similarly thought they were untouchable. Well, probably not fair to include poor old Louis, he was more out of touch than malicious. No one is truly untouchable, and even if the guillotine or the assassin's blade doesn't touch you, you're still going to die, and the body of the richest man is worth not one farthing more than the body of the poorest man.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      Was Zuckerberg's makeover supposed to be a popularity move? I just assumed that it was self-expression on the part of someone who finally realized that the best part of having functionally unlimited money is that other people's opinion of you matters little.

      There are two types of people who have lots of money — the ones who see it as "f*** you money" and don't care what other people think of them, and the ones who donate huge amounts of money to get buildings named after themselves.

      The main difference is that in a hundred years, the latter tend to be remembered as good people even if they were awful.

      If Zuckerberg really wants people to remember him musically, the best thing he could do is get together with people high up in Apple and Google, and build a

      • Doesn't matter how much money the someone gives away people will always hate them. Rockefeller gave away all kinds of money. Most people are still gonna view him as some dead rich asshole.
    • My thoughts are that people donâ(TM)t trust him as now he is trying to cozy up to the right side of politics while for years censoring that side and people on the left realise they have been conned thatâ(TM)s why left leaning hate him even more remember he admitted to censoring on behalf of the left. Musk at least appears honest and genuine and his views may upset you but you will respect him for being open and transparent about them

  • Physical attractiveness plays a role (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:42PM (#65186299) Homepage

    Zuck looks like an humanoid lizard wearing an ill-fitting human suit. Seriously, you can't look at the guy without getting creepy uncanny valley vibes.

    And Musk? Well, he kind of looks like what you'd get if you ordered Mike Myers from Temu.

    There's a reason why well-loved celebrities can be tycoons, but tycoons can't necessarily be well-loved celebrities, and it probably does come down to looks.

    • Re:Physical attractiveness plays a role (Score:5, Funny)

      by hambone142 ( 2551854 ) on Friday February 21, 2025 @11:11PM (#65186369)

      When you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      > And Musk? Well, he kind of looks like what you'd get if you ordered Mike Myers from Temu.

      Which Mike Myers?

      The comedic actor ... or the killer in the thirteen Halloween movies that's wearing a children's Captain Kirk mask painted white?

    • There's a reason why well-loved celebrities can be tycoons, but tycoons can't necessarily be well-loved celebrities, and it probably does come down to looks.

      If we had to choose between clueless beauty and ugly brains, I know which one investors will back.

      ”Looks” as the investment has one major flaw for half the human race that utilizes it to maximum advantage; The Wall, is unforgiving and undefeated.

      Eventually you need to provide actual value. Capitalism doesn’t often invest heavily in depreciating assets.

    • Zuck looks like an humanoid lizard wearing an ill-fitting human suit. Seriously, you can't look at the guy without getting creepy uncanny valley vibes.

      And Musk? Well, he kind of looks like what you'd get if you ordered Mike Myers from Temu.

      There's a reason why well-loved celebrities can be tycoons, but tycoons can't necessarily be well-loved celebrities, and it probably does come down to looks.

      Honestly, I think Zuckerberg just looks like an insecure socially awkward geek. And unlike most insecure socially awkward geeks who get their twenties to figure out their identity he ended up CEO of a tech giant instead.

      He spent the first decade or so of super fame trying to dress like a responsible yet relatable tech genius, then he had an early midlife crisis and entered his awkward phase in full public view.

      FB is all kinds of problematic, but I think Zuckerberg is just awkward.

    • Both of them are somewhere further along the autism spectrum than your average human being or celebrity. I don't think either of them really relate to the average person and that's what makes them uncanny. They're smart enough to realize that even if they don't naturally or intuitively understand it that they should make an effort, but they're just wired differently in a way that makes it impossible for them to fit in seamlessly.

      Celebrities are the opposite side of the coin. They're the people who can de

  • Elon may be a mini-nazi, but at least nazis are human beings.

    Zuck is literally an alien from another planet who is still trying to convince humanity he's one of them.

    • Elon has undergone more gender affirming care than any trans youth. Recall his photo circa 1999. https://miro.medium.com/v2/res... [medium.com]

      • Elon has undergone more gender affirming care than any trans youth. Recall his photo circa 1999. https://miro.medium.com/v2/res... [medium.com]

        Fan or no fan of Elon, this isn’t even a valid argument you’re making. Reverse-age Musk naturally with any capability, and you’ll likely get the same result.

        Dude also has more kids than a baseball team, and cracks jokes as lame as any Old Man would. Good luck with that theory of yours.

        • If you reverse aged him from today he would end up going from a full head of hair to bald? That's strange. You must have learned different things than the rest of us about how that all works. What's it like staning online for a narcissist ketamine addict billionaire that doesn't know you exist? How exactly do you get to a place like that in life?

        • Dude also has more kids than a baseball team

          . You understand he does not have sex? At least 9 are IVF kiddies. You do not want women, when you blow the orange man all day.

    • Elon may be a mini-nazi, but at least nazis are human beings.

      Zuck is literally an alien from another planet who is still trying to convince humanity he's one of them.

      Let’s put at least some fears to bed permanently, shall we?

      IF a literal alien landed on our planet and found it’s only aspiration in life to build fucking Facebook, then I think we can now all feel quite safe about that whole “alien invasion” we’ve been freaking out about since Welles.

  • Fuck the Zuck. Preferably with a large bamboo skewer or something. He can live stream the entire thing on Facebook. That will be the guy's greatest achievement for the advancement of society to date.

  • Wording of the polling question was interesting: (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday February 21, 2025 @11:08PM (#65186359)

    "So which do you prefer... this big pile of poop over here, or that other big pile of poop over there?"

  • 54% unfavorable of Musk (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21, 2025 @11:22PM (#65186391)

    What the fuck people. Does he have to grow a Hitler stache for you to disapprove of Musk.
    Sadly I guess his "take your kid to work" stunt actually work, it should make anyone vomit.
    "Look at me, I'm destroying the government with zero oversight, but I got a 4 year old on my head, I'm cute"

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Musk has reportedly threatened to cut Ukraine’s access to Starlink unless Kyiv agrees to its demands on critical minerals, according to Reuters. After Zelensky refused to hand over 50% of these resources, Washington hinted at a potential shutdown.

      That number is going to get a lot worse.

      Seems weird America would ask for 50% when Europe has provided more support.

      • I don't even get that. It's not like Kiev can extract 50% of its minerals overnight and leave them somewhere near the border in a briefcase.

        • It's even fundamentally dumber than this. They are talking about unproven and untapped reserves. I.e. they are debating having something handed over that isn't currently extracted and has no hope in hell of being extracted within the president's term - i.e. it'll probably be completely thrown out in 4 years anyway given the current state of US un-politics.

    • What the fuck people. Does he have to grow a Hitler stache for you to disapprove of Musk.

      You have it backwards, that's would make them approve of him more.

  • Wow looks like a wannabe (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AcidFnTonic ( 791034 ) on Friday February 21, 2025 @11:22PM (#65186393) Homepage

    So odd how he comes off as a wannabe. Like dude you are one of the richest people yet you look like an insecure imitator. Comes off so very uncomfortable in his own skin.

    • He had a lot of money from his parents and he blundered into a virtually unlimited supply of money from Facebook. But literally everything he's trying to do since then has been an abject failure. And Facebook wasn't his idea it was just an accident.

      Musk is sort of the same way and it's why musk and Zuckerberg are often spoken together in the same breath. They are both phonies that never actually did anything useful and instead blundered into their money.

      Each man is if not terrified certainly extreme

      • Only rsilvergun can say something that asinine with a straight face.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by labnet ( 457441 )

          Yeh. I imagine most evenings he sits in a rocking chair shaking his fist at the sky.

        • There is a lot of truth to what he says; he's certainly not a Russian bot or a gullible sucker and can actually form his own opinions unlike most people these days.

          He's (or she's) lucky or successful enough to have the time to waste on the remnants of /. which has lost the rich community of nerds that used to waste their time posting here.

          • I wouldn't call myself lucky. Yeah at least I haven't gotten my legs blasted off by Russian ordinance in the Ukraine or American ordinance in Gaza but I'm not exactly doing great if I'm spending time shouting into the void here. It's less of a luxury and more of a coping mechanism as people over 50 have basically set fire to the planet and my country because they're pissed off at trans people and because they never grew out of that phase when you're 12 and you don't like being told what to do

      • Partially agree, but here is the problem: Musk is by this point at his what... 5th good high tech venture?
        Zuckerberg has bought a lot of IP, but has nothing to show for it beyond the continued operational capacity.

    • So odd how he comes off as a wannabe. Like dude you are one of the richest people yet you look like an insecure imitator. Comes off so very uncomfortable in his own skin.

      This. Sometime in the previous decade, he made a big deal about how he was killing animals prior to eating them and insisting that if you didn't do the same thing, you were some kind of poser to just buy your meat the grocery store. At that point I realized that he was completely detached from how normal people live so I stopped respecting him.

    • If my skin looked like that, I'd be uncomfortable too.

  • They needed a study for this? (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Friday February 21, 2025 @11:36PM (#65186409)

    Mark Zuckerberg's Makeover Didn't Make People Like Him, Study Shows

    I'm gonna go out of a limb and say Pew could have taken a cue from Trump/Musk/DOGE and cut the funding for this study and still come to the same conclusion.

    I mean even billionaires apparently don't like the other billionaires... Elon Musk Called Conversations With Bill Gates 'Underwhelming' After Fellow Tech Billionaire Shared He Bought An Electric Porsche, Not A Tesla [benzinga.com] -- or maybe Musk is just, um, bitter that Gates bought a Porsche EV rather than a Tesla ...

  • surprised billionaires are so wierd and creepy (Score:3)

    by Dan667 ( 564390 ) on Saturday February 22, 2025 @12:34AM (#65186489)
    Like I don't guess I am that surprised that billionaires have taken over, but I am surprised how weird and creepy they all are. zuckerberg, musk, trump, bezos. Just ew

    • Re:surprised billionaires are so wierd and creepy (Score:5, Informative)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Saturday February 22, 2025 @02:13AM (#65186579) Journal

      Like I don't guess I am that surprised that billionaires have taken over, but I am surprised how weird and creepy they all are. zuckerberg, musk, trump, bezos. Just ew

      I'm not so sure the Trump is a billionaire, or at least that he was before the TikTok guy threw all that cash into Trump Media. He's clearly had assets worth billions for years, but he's also had enormous debts, and it wasn't even certain that the net was non-negative, much less the billions he claims. The DJT stock's ludicrous valuation almost certainly puts Trump 2-3 billion in the black, but it's also purely paper, propped up by its memestock status and by people buying influence. If at any moment normal business valuation logic is applied, its value will rapidly go to zero.

      But Trump is clearly set up to take massive bribes, so he probably will be a true billionaire, maybe even deca-billionaire, by the end of this term. Of course, that will still make him worth chump change compared to the others you mentioned, all of whom are multi-centi-billionaires.

      • He also pushed a meme coin just before he was sworn in as President. Isn't the value of his 80% or so holdings of that supposed to be worth a few billion as long as he can find a foreign government willing to buy it from him?

      • Not much different than Musk... Musk has some real businesses unlike Trump...(and none are money laundering fronts) but both are grossly inflated paper values with far less in actual real assets. It's sick that Musk has surpassed Carnegie and approaching JP Morgan when those two had REAL assets (and it took national monopolies to achieve that!) It's like everything has become some form of MIME coin; some having a portion of tangible assets.

  • [...] But the fact that social media sharing puts people who try to be scrupulous and accurate at a competitive disadvantage to people who try to be sensationalistic and prejudice-flattering is a real problem. I sympathized with almost everything he said about this to Ezra Klein during his 'lib' turn in 2018, as well as with almost everything he said about it to Joe Rogan during his 'MAGA' turn this winter. The underlying problem is, that while technological progress is good in the aggregate, not every specific innovation is good. Zuckerberg just happens to be cursed with the reality that be became very rich at a very young age by being a pioneer in a technology that is basically harmful. [...] But there's no way around the fact that an information ecosystem based on virality - whether Facebook or TikTok or Twitter or anything else - exacerbates the flaws of establishment media rather than improving them.

    Poor little-rich kid caught a tiger and doesn't know what to do.

    It's clear Zuckerberg didn't care about the emotional damage his platform caused. He turned people's privacy into a saleable commodity, studied how to enrage and addict people to his toxic virality, and was the first to "kiss the ring" after Trump was elected. Bezos isn't any better. The tech-bro fashion update they both undertook, hasn't hidden the abuse they heaped upon their customers and subscribers.

    • This part really isnt much different than Biden. During the Biden years, the president wanted DEI, so companies half-heartedly embraced it in public, and gave a few managers titles with the word “diversity”. Don’t think for second that this actually changed them all that much.

      Now we’ve got a new president that wants ”DEI” out, and he’s very clearly demanded (legal) bribes from the big companies. So, the compamies shrug their shoulders, remove “diversity

  • Scares me! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Saturday February 22, 2025 @01:02AM (#65186527)

    I'm a former Marine. Served in a war. Only one thing in this world scares me ... Zuckerberg's soulless beady eyed stare. Sends fucking chills down my spine when I see it. It's God damned unnatural!

    • I get the same uneasy feeling when I see Jesse Eisenberg, Dude never should have gone full retard.

    • YES!
      I wonder why there aren't alien abduction conspiracies about his mother. Sometimes at rare moments I think he might be learning some humanity like how odd he looked at the inauguration; it was as if I he realize something was deeply wrong.

  • Since when is what some tool wears news for nerds or stuff that matters?

    There's already piles of celebrity news trash rags available. Let them report this nonsense.

  • People's opinions on Musk have been changing pretty dramatically lately

  • I guess it's a good thing that life isn't a popularity contest then ...

  • He said a lot of great things in his more recent interviews, but I would guess the typical American hasn't watched them. All they know is a picture of him stealing a glance at Bezos's wife while sitting in the front row at Trump's inauguration, and looking out of place when testifying to congress.

    • I couldn't help but stare at Bezo's new girlfriend well, i don't care, i could help it. I'd think want to talk to her and try to figure out what he sees in her... Maybe his space efforts are to help her return home?

  • Point out any incorrect observations by citing proof

    1) Elon buys Twitter, which pisses off all the liberal owned media.
    2) Elon fires 80% of the staff. Media says "OMG he's ruining it!"
    3) Twitter is just fine without the 80% of people after he fixes a lot of issues they had.
    4) Elon audits government. Suggests they fire a bunch of people.
    5) Media says "OMG he's ruining it.

    What follows in this series?

    • Twitter was never going to be ruined in the sense that it went bankrupt. Musk has way too much money for that, and what they do isn't really that hard. It was ruined in the sense that it became a right wing megaphone cesspool where lies and misinformation were praised. We all know this is not good for the human race. We all know this sways elections to selfish people who say they will be good for you and then help themselves. But hey free speech I guess, even if allowing free speech never meant that it

    • You have a curious definition of just fine.

      Twitter had lost a lot of users and advertisers, the thing is needs to exist and the thing it needs to make money.

      It's that the "doing fine" you expect from the government? Circling the drain but lacking enough transparency to tell exactly how bad?

    • 3) Twitter is just fine without the 80% of people after he fixes a lot of issues they had.

      There were a bunch of bots on Twitter before, there's more now. Is that fine?

      There were a bunch of independent journalists on Twitter before, they're on Bsky now, is that fine for Twitter?

      There were a bunch of advertisers on Twitter before, some of the biggest have left, is that fine?

  • Doesn't help the pig.

  • He really thinks people like him.

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