There’s a video going around of Mark Zuckerberg trying to drink a pint of Guinness. Specifically, he’s trying to look like he enjoys drinking a pint of Guinness on a semi-regular basis. Which maybe he does. But the problem is, he desperately needs us to know that. The fate of his almost $2 trillion empire might rest on it.
The founder of Facebook is the subject of the new film The Social Reckoning, a bad title explained by the fact that this is the follow-up to David Fincher’s acclaimed 2010 tech drama The Social Network (although this time it’s directed by the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin). The Social Network told the story of Zuckerberg founding Facebook via a misogynistic “hot or not” website at Harvard in 2004. The Social Reckoning jumps forward some 15 years; Facebook is now worth half a trillion dollars, and its algorithms have already started to change how we feel, what we say, and the ways we treat each other IRL as well as online.
Zuck has changed accordingly – as he says in the film: “I’m not two years out of a dorm room any more.” Instead of an awkward geek played by Jesse Eisenberg, he’s an uncanny billionaire with a Julius Caesar haircut, played by Jeremy Strong (the events of the film take place around the time of the infamous hydrofoil photograph). According to his crisis management consultant, that needs to change, as he’s preparing to testify before the US congress about Facebook’s role in American democracy.
Put simply, things are not looking good. No amount of necktie changes – a running joke in the film – is going to fill the void where Zuckerberg’s charisma should lie. To make matters even worse for him, right-wing rioters have just stormed the Capitol, urged on by Donald Trump via Facebook’s social media platforms, and the investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz (played by Jeremy Allen White) is about to publish a series of exposés in the Wall Street Journal, featuring leaked internal documents from the whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison). In other words, this should be a pivotal moment for Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg pretending to enjoy Guinness is my new favourite thing. pic.twitter.com/y570hFF0V6
— Mark Malone (@soundmigration) October 12, 2026
In reality, things didn’t quite turn out that way. Yes, Zuckerberg had to answer some awkward questions about his platform’s role in the January 6 riots. And yes, the brave work of Haugen and Horwitz exposed the fact that senior members of the Facebook team were aware of its harmful effects on society, but continued to develop the platform to maximise engagement and profits nevertheless. But what actually changed? Shortly after the Facebook Files were published in 2021, the company changed its name to Meta and pretty much carried on. There were a few lawsuits (mostly in countries other than the US) but few regulatory challenges to social media titans like Facebook. In fact, Meta’s revenue has increased year-on-year since 2022, to around $200 billion in 2025 alone.
As Sorkin notes in the film’s outro, Meta also responded to accusations that it doesn’t adequately fact-check political ads by... refusing to moderate anything any more. All in all, it’s hard to feel as triumphant as the two main characters appear at the end of The Social Reckoning. What Sorkin also fails to mention at the end of the film is the rehabilitation of Zuckerberg himself in recent years, which has seen him throw out the neckties altogether and rebrand as a tasteful tech bro.
This isn’t an original observation. As Günseli Yalcinkaya wrote of Zuck’s tech bro glow-up for Dazed in 2024: “The Steve Jobs era of millennial minimalism... has been replaced with Gen Z rizz – a likeable dude next door who goes to the gym and eats a carnivore diet, who’s into MMA and speaks to camera like a former Supreme bro who now makes TikTok videos on how to max out your aura.” But since then, the Silicon Valley scene has evolved even further. ‘Taste’ has emerged as a vital currency, wielded by corporations like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Andreessen Horowitz, and Palantir – don’t forget the infamous chore coat – to buy our approval.
At a time when public trust in tech companies is at an all-time low, thanks to their reckless deployment of AI and complicity in violent regimes both at home and abroad, they’re more desperate to paint their leaders as cool, chill guys than ever before. Whether you think they’re successful or not is up to you. But when Mark Zuckerberg is making self-aware jokes about being called a robot on a podcast by someone like comedian Theo Von, it’s easy for many people to forget the “lizard person” who once forgot how to drink water at a US Senate hearing. Or the Zuck of The Social Reckoning, who talks to his employees like a dictator and disregards the dangers of his platform to its users. Or the Zuck who recently boasted about training AI on the work of his staff while laying off 8,000 people.
In The Social Reckoning, we get to see a glimmer of how the billionaire built his new persona, as he’s coached by a PR team on how to answer simple questions or nod to signify he cares about what someone else is saying. It’s a partially fictionalised account, just like the first film, but it’s still a potent reminder of how much – and how quickly – Zuckerberg’s public persona has shifted since the on-screen events took place. No wonder it feels so uncanny when he fails to take a convincing sip of Guinness on the Cheeky Pint podcast.
None of this would matter very much if tech founders were just normal guys, struggling to fit in. But they’re not – they control systems with unprecedented power over our politics, culture, social lives, and individual feelings. What we think about them really matters, and they know that too. The Social Reckoning is a good reminder of the lengths they’ll go to change our minds.