Zuckerberg’s Big Bling

The beginning of the year saw a thawing in Government censorship efforts as Mark Zuckerberg took to video and the Joe Rogan Podcast to talk about winding back fact check departments in favour of more even handed community notes.

This comes on the heels of the judiciary committee releasing it’s final 1700 page report that found that government departments had pressured Tech companies into censoring content mentioning non-controversial topics such as vaccines having side effects and gagging users from linking to news articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Free speech proponents who have dared to look the gift horse in the mouth have found it’s mostly full of capitalism. Zuckerberg showed his hand in the Joe Rogan interview by noting that overseas fines from Europe for not following their rules are a direct result of the way the tech companies are treated at home.

“If some other country was screwing with another industry that we cared about, the U.S. government would probably find some way to put pressure on them, but I think what happened here is actually the complete opposite,” he said. “The U.S. government led the kind of attack against the companies, which then just made it so the EU is basically in all these other places, just free to just go to town on all the American companies and do whatever you want.”

He compared these multi-million dollar fines as essentially tariffs made against American social media companies, and that if the government wanted they could choose to protect them the same way they protect other exports. So this about face could be a fig leaf to the incoming Trump administration to save the tech sector “more than $30 billion” in penalties.

But free speech stuff? That’s boring. The most important part is what he’s wearing on his wrist. What would you do in Trump’s America when you have an extra couple billion dollars? You get a luxury hand made watch by Greubel Forsey. The balance springs are forged just a few at a time, and every component is hand placed. Dubbed the Hand Made 1, it has an entirely hand polished finish. Only a few pieces are completed each year and sell for around $900,000 each.

“It’s a pleasure to see someone who has played such a pivotal role in shaping the modern digital landscape and lifestyle show true appreciation for the most traditional approach to fine watchmaking today,” Greubel Forsey’s CEO Michel Nydegger told Fortune.

Zuckerberg caught the bug after a $1 Million Richard Mille RM 30-01 caught his eye, since then he’s sported everything from Patek Philippe, Jaeger-LeCoultre, De Bethune and FP Journe. Very classy taste, although my editor would shake his head at the lack of vintage Casios.

To find out what Zuckerberg will do next just have a look at whatever Elon Musk is doing and then wait for Zuck to do it in a year or two.