Pax Meta, 2026 AD

Pax Meta, 2026 AD Colossus @colossusmag Mark, by @colossususjeremy Profile of Mark Zuckerberg From colossus.com Profile Mark A journey to the heart of history's largest nonterritorial empire By Jeremy Stern September 2026 Mark Zuckerberg has been Larpiing as a Roman emperor for 20 years more specifically Augustus the first emperor of Rome the man who ended the civil wars brought 200 years of peace the PAX Romana and a new profile on Zuckerberg reveals exactly how deep this LARP goes how after 20 years of fighting his own employees eventual conquest of mobile more or less made Apple's App Store, the App Store in turn made Facebook. And Zuckerberg does not like being made. rival tech companies and pretty much every journalist alive -which requires a scapegoat. And who could ask for a better one than him? He is, for millions of people, a hideous mirror of both modern technological capitalism, and the resistance of history and human nature to perfectibility by it. He is seen at once as shrewd and naive, calculating and lucky. Emperor Zuck has finally won his competitors' prisoner the way he's been with Apple, and all he has to do is remain within six months of the frontier, which he's already close to. Heads, he wins; tails, he wins. and how meta is now entering its golden age okay all timer Rome Larp, you ready [The game was set in the Roman Empire; the player would conquer the world one territory at a time. Perhaps that was a sign, too.] as a kid he builds his own Roman Empire strategy games in high school French was atrocious. His sisters made fun of him. Thus a few years later, in high school, he excelled at Latin instead. He took to Virgil. Nearly a decade later, he still he studies Latin he quotes Virgil from memory [For these I set no bounds in space or time; I have given empire without end.] in early Facebook all hands meetings built was a class study tool for his art history course, "Rome of Augustus." At early crisis Facebook meetings to fend off threats from Google, he would end his speeches by declaring Carthage defenda and-"Carthage must be destroyed." Friday all-hands meetings ended with him he shouts Carthage must be destroyed Carthage referring to Google statues made the emperor their third wheel. The names of their three children are Maxima, August, and Aurelia. he has three kids Maxima August and Aurelia and who could forget the Roman fringe haircut he wore on his head for 20 years straight and the LARP worked Meta Platforms Inc MRKAS META $65.00 +0.27 +0.41% (3:44PM EDT) all time Closed: 0.27 +0.41% 65.00 65.27 64.73 65.00 2580886 Facebook has grown for 20 years straight meta is now a two trillion dollar company but with that expansion came the problem every emperor faces the more powerful you get from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet through fear or awe or self-preservation, those people often become less willing to tell him what they think he doesn't want to hear, so he keeps him increasingly insulated from reality even as the consequences of his decisions become the less anyone tells you the truth now the dictator's dilemma was a known problem even in the time of Augustus so what did he do he rotated his council Frank Speech. As emperor, the eminently sensible Augustus called on senators at random to stifle premeditated remarks, periodically rotated his advisory council and tolerated libel and jokes at his own expense. He ran three censuses of Roman citizens, kept his own ledger of the empire's legions and treasuries, and instituted Rome's first courier carriage system so that, like Lincoln, he could interrogate a direct source of information before anyone could corrupt it. He reigned for 40 years he chased down direct sources of information so they couldn't be corrupted and Zuckerberg runs a similar playbook people I interviewed for this story. Zuckerberg is hyperaware of the dilemma's potential, which is to say paranoid. He is an inveterate micromanager and voracious consumer of data. Aware that any chief's inner circle is most incentivized to act as he's a notorious micromanager and a voracious consumer of data but Zuckerberg still has some blind spots and some projects still slip through the cracks the metaverse probably being the clearest example of an MMH Yet a certain amount of slippage is perhaps inevitable. M.M.H. ("Make Mark Happy") was for a time the internal nickname for a project that substantially thought was going down in flames, but he's compelled to prop up, and which they encouraged each other to fall in love with. In 2016, the make Mark happy the internal nickname for a project everyone knew was dying but nobody would kill and most recently in his pursuit of ground truth Zuckerberg has turned to something as real as it gets the MMA Arc enter the Colosseum studio, you can perhaps see a different reason he's decided to give up his lifelong habit of sleeping in late in order to hit people and get hit three mornings a week. so the profile says that three mornings a week he trains with professional fighters who slam him into the mat inducing blows on Zuckerberg's body. Before the bell sounds, he lands an overhand right on Zuckerberg's chin. The latter nods and shakes his hair of sweat. and coming into contact with the hard truth of physical combat punch him in the face basically beat his ass but when Dvalishvili demonstrates the kick, he cracks Zuckerberg in the same spot so hard that it knocks his wind out. Zuckerberg tries to keep a smile and wave keeps him in tune with reality now the next problem his Empire faces is that at its core immune to control by shareholders or his board - he does not actually hold the empire's territory. He did only once, back when Facebook was a desktop site on the meta is still a vassal between him and every one of his 3.6 billion users is an Android or an iPhone As it does with every mobile app, Apple charges a toll on digital goods sold within each of Meta's apps. It collects a tax on Meta's core advertising product, such as in that dynamic Apple calls the shots so in an attempt to regain sovereignty technologist, Zuckerberg himself describes them as part of Meta's DNA not as a mere social media service, but as a full-stack deep technology company. These ventures can also be ordered, focused, past also potential jailbreaks from Apple and other competitors, a determination to regain and meta has tried again and again to build its own platform Thus over the last 15 years, Zuckerberg explored building a Facebook Phone. He tried to replace the Android home screen from the Facebook phone to the Libra cryptocurrency to the metaverse India and other markets where Apple barely existed. He tried building Libra (renamed Diem), a cryptocurrency, to facilitate payments. He bought Oculus VR in the hope that virtual reality headsets whole thing from Facebook to Meta by 2021, and which to date has burned through approximately $90 billion. The Metaverse as such was a collapsed tunnel, but Zuckerberg is convinced that the and all of them collapsed but now we have the meta glasses which look like a real success story Metaverse as such was a collapsed tunnel, but Zuckerberg is convinced that the glasses are one of the payoffs. They are "the ideal form factor" for an AI that can "see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day, and also overlay information on the World and and could honestly be the best form factor for the next generation of AI first software the AI itself has been one of the biggest threats to Meta's empire in recent years after the rise of open AI and anthoropic Meta's AI lab fell rapidly behind Then it seemed, to Zuckerberg at least, to collapse. The release of Llama 4 in April 2025 was met with great mockery as an overhyped and underperforming model that simply gamed the various benchmarks so Zuckerberg took a lesson from the Punic Wars when Rome lost its entire fleet Rome rebuilt its massive naval fleets after catastrophic losses through emergency loans from wealthy private citizens when the state treasury was completely bankrupt. NDU Prep. 1 it's simply built a new one in months Zuckerberg tore down his entire AI division Thus in his first board meeting after the release of Llama 4, he announced a plan of regime change. The 11 weeks that followed demonstrated the sheer power of his position as the undeposable head of a galactically resource-rich empire. He subsumed FAIR into a new organization, fired hundreds of people and then paid individual researchers billions of dollars subsumed FAIR into a new organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), and reset the market on compensation for top AI recruits to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars per head. He paid $14.3 billion for a stake in Scale AI and installed to defect from open AI and anthoropic he's now spending $145 billion in capital this year doesn't matter that Zuckerberg is taking on billions in new debt and spending up to $145 billion this year, including on four data centers of a gigawatt or more, one of which is planned to scale to five. It matters even less that he positioned Meta in a recent manifesto, "The Future Is For Everyone," as more open, optimistic, and empowering of ordinary people than its relentlessly apocalyptic competitors. He's either placed the wrong bet, and is reviving to secure 5 gigawatts of compute now meta has climbed the ranks From this vantagepoint, it doesn't matter that since June, Muse Spark has overtaken Google's Gemini, vaulting Meta back to the frontier pack. It matters little that Muse, now released, was received somewhat and is arguably in the No. 3 spot in the AI race behind open AI and anthropic after Google has fallen behind Carthage has been destroyed and notice what's happened to all the hate surrounding meta the media that blamed Zuck for everything wrong with the world has now found new villains in the leading labs. and OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting for this doomer regulation. which is planned to scale to five. It matters even less that he positioned Meta in a recent manifesto, "The Future Is For Everyone," as more open, optimistic, and empowering of ordinary people than its relentlessly apocalyptic competitors. He's either placed the wrong bet, and is reviving Zuckerberg is presenting his more open optimistic you could say peaceful view of an AI future Zuckerberg has the compute he has the distribution and he doesn't need the best All models in the world that Anthropic and OpenAI have to pay to rent-to undercut them on price. The potential install base for his AI is 3.6 billion people, who don't care whether a given model is six months behind the frontier to create great products satisfy his massive consumer base Augustus took power in his mid thirties and ruled for 40 years Zuckerberg is 42 he isn't stopping anytime soon and his daughter is already shipping apps following his lead this is a great hereditary empire Pax Meta for 200 years