David Fincher’s The Social Network continues to provide us with illuminating and important context for why Mark Zuckerberg is the way he is: Underneath it all, he ultimately just wants to be accepted as one of the cool kids. Not getting into finals clubs at Harvard seems to have really done a number on his confidence, because all these years later, he’s still desperately trying to convince us that he’s more than just your average tech billionaire.



For the Fourth of July, Zuckerberg dropped what I’m sure he thought was the coolest video of himself wakeboarding in a tuxedo while drinking a beer and holding an American flag. To top it off, the video is set to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” because of course Zuckerberg is one of those people who misses the entire point of the song and mistakenly believes it’s a blindly patriotic anthem and not a song about a Vietnam vet returning home after suffering in a pointless war to limited support and fewer options.


Per The New York Times, experts consider the video an attempt by Zuckerberg to “remake his image.” “In recent years, he has gone from a flip-flop-and-hoodie-wearing tech entrepreneur to a sleeker, Richard Bransonesque figure, one who wears Brunello Cucinelli T-shirts, a silver chain and has immersed himself in mixed martial arts,” the paper explains.


Unfortunately for Zuckerberg, we’ve all seen The Social Network — that image of a geeky Harvard dropout in a grey hoodie is an incredibly difficult one to shake.




This isn’t Zuck’s first attempt at a viral Fourth of July video either. Back in 2021, he posted a video of himself riding a hydrofoil as John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” played. A year later, he posted a photo of himself grilling in a novelty Americana cowboy hat.


Despite how hard he tries, though, everything Zuckerberg does carries with it an air of desperation that people, particularly those he’s trying to impress, can smell from a mile away. Most of us learned in high school that the coolest thing you can do is not care about how cool you may or not be, but it appears Zuck was too busy coding to learn that particular life lesson.