Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is often characterised as a violent supervillain, usually as a joke. (Hey, even we did it in our April Fool’s article this year!) However, if one Facebook employee is to be believed, that violent streak is far from fictional.
Did Mark Zuckerberg threaten programmers with a sword?
Revealed in a now-viral TikTok video, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg brandished a samurai sword at Facebook employees. Former Facebook coder Noah Kagan revealed that the incident happened during his time at the company.
In the video, Kagan explained that Zuckerberg’s frustrations resulted in him pulling out a real sword and threatening programmers. According to the TikTokker, violent acts like these would occur whenever the CEO was upset with coders.
“Mark, one day, [was] bringing around a katana sword because he didn’t like the code and the stuff we were putting out on the website,” he explained.
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A history of violent behaviour?
The tiktokker behind the video has discussed these violent occurrences before. However, they were not on social media, but instead in something called a book… also in e-book form.
In his 2014 book "How I Lost 170 Million Dollars: My Time as #30 at Facebook, thanks Futurism, Kagan detailed some of the violent behaviour exhibited by Mark Zuckerberg.
"He had some great motivational lines," Kagan writes. "With love, he’d say 'If you don't get that done sooner, I will punch you in the face,' or 'I will chop you with this huge sword,' while holding a huge sword in hand. To this day, I don't know why he had that sword."
As an employee at Facebook’s early days — he was the 30th employee at the company — Kagan saw a much earlier Zuckerberg than we see today. Perhaps his many billions have changed the CEO for the better. On the other hand, he could be much worse.