Mark Zuckerberg would like us all to know that learning is best achieved through suffering. And how is he telling us this? Through a T-shirt, of course.
“I’ve kind of started working on this series of shirts with some of my favorite classical sayings on them,” said Mr. Zuckerberg in mid-September during a taping of the Acquired podcast at San Francisco’s Chase Center.
He was wearing a boxy, black tee printed, in plump white letters with the Greek phrase “pathei mathos.” Loose translation? “Learning through suffering.” It was, according to Mr. Zuckerberg, “a little family saying.”
Another historical pearl was imparted through the T-shirt he wore at a Meta keynote presentation weeks later. This time, Greek was swapped for Latin. Kinda. His tee (again boxy, again black) read “aut Zuck, aut nihil,” an English-ified contortion of the Latin “aut Caesar, aut nihil” or, roughly, “either a Caesar or nothing.”
It took more than a Zuck to create these wide-as-they-are-long tees. As he explained in the podcast, they were made in partnership with Mike Amiri, a Los Angeles-based fashion designer.
Yes, between running Meta, making A.I.-enhanced spectacles, raising three children and all that MMA training, the 40-year-old Facebook founder has found time to tack yet another title onto his CV: clothing designer.
That Mr. Zuckerberg even cares enough to dial up his own deliberately oversize tees shows that the chief executive’s ongoing extreme fashion makeover Meta edition isn’t slowing anytime soon.
In recent months, Mr. Zuckerberg has swapped his wet-newspaper gray hoodies for $250 Bode shirts with embroidered flowers. He’s grown out his hair, bulked up and piled on a gold chain. Now, like wannabe Virgil Ablohs before him, he’s making his own tees.