Years ago, when I had a proper office in downtown Palo Alto and Facebook was still operating as a much smaller company there, I would see Mark Zuckerberg fairly regularly. Not to meet him, of course, but just seeing him doing this or that with co-workers, or maybe on the Stanford campus. Sightings of high-tech celebrities are not uncommon here, and folks know pretty much to leave them alone, particularly since they probably have security watching over them.
Last night, however, I saw him for the first time in a very long time, and in a rather unlikely place. I didn’t recognize him at first, since he’s got the Cool New Zuck appearance going………
……..as opposed to the old school Command Data kind of format:
The weird thing is that he and his wife were sitting at a little outside table, right out with us normal people, enjoying dinner at Teleferic with a bottle of red wine. I didn’t see any security personnel near them, which struck me as kind of amazing, because there are many parts of the world where someone with literally 1/10,000th of this guy’s net worth would make him a great kidnapping target. Yet there is was, right out in the open, having a lovely little dinner with Priscilla Chan, his wife. The put this in perspective a bit, below is a diagram of where Zuck was sitting (red oval) and where I was sitting (left side, magenta oval), both at outdoor tables.
I was pleased to see no one bothering them or staring at them, and to be honest, it was a really sweet scene, because they looked like they were having a quiet, romantic dinner and enjoying their time together. It began to strike me, however, how bizarre it must be to be Mark Zuckerberg – – sitting there, having a pleasant meal just like the rest of us – – and having about one-fifth of a TRILLION dollars at his disposal. It is an unfathomable amount of money. It actually makes the very notion of him getting a $120 check at the end of the meal sort of preposterous, since he could easily buy the entire shopping complex and blow it up with dynamite just for the hell of it if he wanted to, and have it affect his finances about as much as if you or I threw five cents into the middle of the road.
I was way more into the fact that the miniature society in which I lived allowed this couple to have a pleasant meal together. I was sort of proud of Palo Alto in that respect. We could, out of courtesy, set aside the fact that this one guy had a bigger net worth the that GDP of many of the world’s countries.
