When Mark Zuckerberg sat down with podcaster Joe Rogan for three hours on Friday, he only mentioned his newfound support of President-elect Donald Trump in passing, almost as an afterthought.

‘He just wants America to win,’ said the 40-year-old Meta chief executive, before quickly moving on to expound on the importance of neck strength in mixed martial arts, the merits of the bow and arrow for wild boar hunting and his concerns that Western society has been ’emasculated.’

Zuckerberg’s blink-and-you-missed acknowledgment of his shift was so brief that one could be forgiven for thinking it was unremarkable.

But in reality, it represents a dramatic conversion for a man who has seemingly transformed from a proud tech nerd in the good graces of the Democratic establishment to a MAGA solider on the frontlines of the war for free expression.

In fact, the metamorphosis of Zuckerberg’s company as well as his public persona have some suggesting that he may be in a re-design phase.

Could this be Zuck 2.0?

Signs of the change first showed in late November, after the presidential election, when Zuckerberg boarded a plane bound for Palm Beach, Florida and newly re-elected Trump’s ‘Winter White House’ in Mar-a-Lago.

It was a bold decision, given that just three months earlier, in August, Trump had loudly threatened the Facebook co-founder with jail, warning that Zuckerberg would ‘spend the rest of his life in prison’ if he attempted to interfere in the 2024 election.

Mark Zuckerberg sat down with podcaster Joe Rogan for three hours on Friday to talk about the importance of neck strength in mixed martial arts, the merits of the bow and arrow for wild boar hunting and his concerns that Western society has been ’emasculated’. He only mentioned his newfound support of President-elect Donald Trump in passing,

Indeed, Zuckerberg’s Facebook has been accused of meddling in the 2020 election by suppressing early reporting on Hunter Biden’s ‘Laptop from Hell,’ which revealed the First Son’s debaucherous decline into drug use and his ties to foreign businesses and governments.

Zuckerberg was likely trying to mend his relationship with Trump, which soured even further after Facebook and Instagram, also owned by Meta, banned the 45th president from their platforms in the wake of the January 6, 2021, riots at the US Capitol. (Trump’s account has since been reinstated.)

Zuckerberg may have been inspired by the apparent success of another billionaire tech bro who has worked his way to the top of the ascendant MAGA regime to become Trump’s ‘First Buddy’: Elon Musk.

Musk, 53, and Zuckerberg have long been arch-rivals, to the point they spent the much of 2023 publicly challenging one another to an MMA-style ‘cage match.’ Eventually, Zuckerberg called it off, concluding his rival wasn’t serious.

But now, critics are alleging that Zuckerberg has realized that to succeed under Trump, he, like Musk, had better fall in line. ‘We’re going to work with President Trump,’ Zuckerberg said, in a shock announcement posted to Instagram on Tuesday.

In the most shocking move yet, on Friday, Meta took a page from the Tesla CEO’s playbook by disbanding its entire DEI team and terminating equity and inclusion programs at the company, effective immediately. (Musk famously lumps slavish liberal commitment to diversity among the symptoms of the ‘woke mind virus.’)

In his personal life, Zuckerberg has also appeared to have embraced Muskian eccentricity.

On the eve of his 40th birthday in May, he underwent an extraordinary aesthetic re-brand, prompting many to question if he was having a midlife crisis. The self-admitted nerd who wore the same gray shirt, hoodie and jeans for 13 years morphed into a trendy Silicon Valley bro with long curly hair, a tan and a new streetwear wardrobe.

On the eve of his 40th birthday in May, he underwent an extraordinary aesthetic re-brand, prompting many to question if he was having a midlife crisis. The self-admitted nerd who wore the same gray shirt, hoodie and jeans for 13 years morphed into a trendy Silicon Valley bro with long curly hair, a tan and a new streetwear wardrobe. Pictured here with Joe Rogan 

The metamorphosis of Zuckerberg’s company as well as his public persona have some suggesting that he may be in a re-design phase

The change was captured in a photoshoot at his birthday party, gifted to Zuckerberg by his wife Priscilla Chan. 

Zuckerberg was pictured sitting in various carefully staged, strikingly bizarre, miniature models of all the places he has lived throughout his life, from his childhood bedroom to his freshman dorm to his Facebook office.

In one particularly unsettling photo, Microsoft founder Bill Gates sat with Zuckerberg in his mini-dorm, but the camera angle and seating arrangement left Zuckerberg looming ominously over Gates who seemed to be reduced to a child’s size.

Regardless, the statement was clear: Look how far Zuckerberg has come, and how much he has changed.

Now he is rarely seen without one of his thick gold chains. In recent months, he’s leaned into a classical Emperor aesthetic, wearing shirts reading ‘pathei mathos, Greek for ‘learning through suffering’ and ‘Aut Zuck aut nihil’ translating to ‘all Zuck or all nothing.’

As one tech journalist said of Zuckerberg’s appearance at a Meta event in September: ‘He no longer looks like the kid who got bullied in high school, but rather, the kid who would do the bullying.’

Then there are the reports he’s building a 5,000-square-foot ‘Doomsday bunker’ under his $270 million compound in Hawaii, which he denied, claiming instead it was ‘just a little shelter’. Not to mention the giant, larger than life statue of his wife that he gifted her for her 39th birthday, saying he was ‘bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife.’

Zuckerberg’s also leaned into his hobbies, building an octagon for MMA practice in his backyard. ‘I want to do one pro or competitive MMA fight and then I figure I’ll go back to jiu-jitsu,’ he told Rogan on Friday, brimming with enthusiasm.

When it came to slaughtering wild pigs, he turned philosophical. ‘I mostly use a rifle just because it’s so much more efficient. Your conversion rate is so much higher,’ he said, though conceded, ‘my favorite is the bow and arrow, that feels like the most sporting version of it.’

President Barack Obama and Zuckerberg wave after speaking at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Stanford in June 2016

Among the raft of reforms he announced this week are many that mirror changes that Musk recently made on X (formerly Twitter): Getting rid of third-party fact checkers, revising community standards to allow more controversial speech and moving content moderation teams from California to Texas

Both hunting and MMA fighting have helped him to feel more manly, he said, voicing his concerns that much of Western society and corporate American has become ‘neutered or emasculated.’

There’s a need to return to masculinity, he claimed. But as Zuckerberg seems to tell it, he’s had an epiphany.

Even he has landed on the wrong side of Meta’s censorship policies. A Facebook post he made about a knee injury he suffered while sparring was supposedly flagged as potential medical ‘misinformation’ in November and suppressed by the algorithm. The incident, we’re told, prompted him to launch a review of Facebook censorship.

Among the raft of reforms he announced this week are many that mirror changes that Musk recently made on X (formerly Twitter): Getting rid of third-party fact checkers, revising community standards to allow more controversial speech and moving content moderation teams from California to Texas.

Meta also made some telling leadership appointments, adding Trump-cheerleader and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White to Meta’s board of directors and promoting Joel Kaplan, a former deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush, to global policy chief.

‘The whole point of social media is basically giving people the ability to share what they want,’ he told Rogan. ‘It goes back to our original mission to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.’

Indeed, over the past year, Zuckerberg has demonstrated he is willing to change almost everything from the way he runs his companies to his appearance.

We are now seeing the MAGA-friendly version of Zuckerberg.

But it all begs the question, who will he transform into next?