Zuckerberg's Masculine Energy

Tech Mans Up

Mark Zuckerberg said recently on Joe Rogan’s podcast that corporate culture needed to return to “masculine energy.” What does “masculine energy” mean?

Your mother doesn’t work here. You do.

Zuckerberg’s front-row seat at Trump’s inauguration is a clue. He has started to sound like Trump and Musk combined. As they call for downsizing and belt-tightening, Trump and Musk exude the “masculine energy” that Zuckerberg is talking about, which is also the power that feminists and the woke despise—efficiency, results, drive.

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If those qualities have been MIA in tech, that’s because tech companies were desperate to hire five years ago. They brought on layers of new workers, even some they did not have jobs for. Companies catered to GenZ, piling on benefits for people who are famous for expecting their preferences to be honored. Reports from Miami and elsewhere put GenZ at the heart of upscale rentals, settling into expensive quarters surrounded by wealthy people just like themselves (see Flint in Sources).

Tech has been treating employees as if they were the children of a generous and thoughtful mother. That’s why the tech world has been swimming in feminine energy.

Meta was the epitome of the mom-boss. Meta employees used to drop off their laundry when they came to work and pick it up on the way out the door. Cafeteria food (to suit every preference) was free. Unlimited age- and diet-appropriate snacks were provided. Just like home! Employees could live in company-owned dormitories, safe in a shell that protected their preferences and reinforced their prejudices.

Such comfort came at a price for both giver and receiver. During Covid-19, companies paid workers more for less. Now that companies are pulling back, employees are feeling the pinch. Hours at free cafes have been trimmed. Google has reduced the “fun budget” that paid for employees’ visits to wine tastings and go-kart racing, a nice mix for man-child and woman-child workers.

People who have been catered to become highly attuned to their own fragility. The worker-bees of GenZ are easily shocked and offended when things change, as we learn in “Miserable at Work: Tech Workers are Just Like Us,” by Katherine Bindley, a tech staff writer for The Wall Street Journal.

I am not sure who “us” is in “just like us,” but Bindley seems to be one of “us” and to assume that you and I are in that group as well. Is she miserable because she writes about tech, or is she miserable because she writes for the WSJ? Does she know any tech workers who are not miserable?

Her article should have been called, more modestly and more honestly, “Tech Workers Are Just Like Me.” Bindley is yet another WSJ writer who places her feelings at the center of her story. This is the now the signature of the woke journalist: empathy instead of information, feelings instead of facts. Inside this fuzziness, however, is a steel core of smug superiority.

Bindley’s article is itself an example of feminine energy, credulous, apologetic, and absolutely sure in its assertiveness. She sympathizes at every turn with tech workers who are dismayed to find that their lavish benefits are being curbed by hard-hearted bosses.

Those bosses are the source of the new masculine energy Zuckerberg is talking about. That energy seems to be darkening the woke workplace. Some companies have streamlined their free snack list. Now they provide cheaper munchies that offer a less balanced mix of acid and alkaline. GenZ knows that this balance is at the heart of cosmic harmonization. Morale has plunged.

Workers long for the “glory days,” as Bindley calls them. The height of that glory was a holiday appearance a few years ago by a Google executive who tossed out $1,000 “bundles of cash” to employees, as if the bundles were bags of nuts. This scene captures the gap between the tech world and the world in which people have to work for every dollar they put their hands on.

By erasing the line between work (earning) and play (something for nothing), tech companies taught workers to measure the value of their jobs in terms of lifestyle benefits, including snacks. Minor perks used to be secondary to service to the company—these are businesses, after all. However, a feminine, feel-good culture has sidelined the personal satisfaction and professional growth that ordinarily come with engaging whole-heartedly with one’s work. Living a comfortable life has become more important than charting a path to productive and creative adulthood.

If Google, Amazon, and other tech giants are finding that they have to pull back on benefits, they can only blame themselves for having set unsustainable (as they like to say) expectations. Companies have “started keeping closer tabs” on employees, Bindley notes ominously. They expect workers to show up three days a week, or more. GenZ resents the accountability that comes with tech’s new masculine energy. But perhaps lagging productivity has been noticed; perhaps supervisors have been instructed to ensure that their workers are actually working.

Bindley takes the workers’ side. She notes with disapproval that “management has become focused on results.” What did they focus on before? No doubt employee satisfaction was among the boss-moms’ priorities.

When she asked Amazon about the company’s employee oversight, a representative told her that that Amazon has a duty to protect the proprietary information that employees handle. Even the woke cannot argue with that, I trust, especially since the companies they themselves deal with—their financial institutions, say—have to protect sensitive information and ensure that it is handled properly.

Despite its carefully curated snacks, tech has grown fat. Now the diet has begun. It is estimated that nearly 100,000 tech workers became unemployed in the last year, and reductions have continued in 2025 (Crunchbase News). Bindley reports that 50,000 workers have been laid off by 100 companies so far in 2025. Companies of all kinds are making these reductions. That means that fired tech workers won’t have an easy time finding a new place to work, something that would have been difficult to imagine in the post-Covid boom of recent years.

A driving force behind this reduction is Artificial Intelligence, which is expected to produce further changes in work in years to come. The role of human judgment in “information aggregation” is shrinking, replaced by tools generated by AI. Google and TikTok are among the companies affected. Crunchbase itself, the source of my information on this development, maybe headed for a slimmed-down future. Technology has begun to eat its young, a natural method of population control and protecting scarce resources.

As tech companies are trimming their benefits, they are also stepping back from the DEI initiatives that, for a while, were indispensable to the image of success. This change is also alarming to some workers. The new “masculine energy” assesses and values productivity: it values what you get done, not who think you are.

Bindley quotes an operations manager who once worked at Google. Today his work is to advise those who are employed by “large tech companies.” This manager fondly recalls the days when Google was “publicly supportive of DEI initiatives.” He reports that some of his Google clients regard the “cultural shifts” now going on—i.e., those that favor Zuckerberg’s “masculine energy”—as a “moral injury.”

It’s not surprising that this fellow and those like him consider the shift away from DEI immoral and regard it as personally injurious. The emphasis on injury helps to persuade these people that they are victims, and that is their favorite role. No doubt they saw the shift to DEI, with its built-in discrimination, as salubrious.

This manager is not a member of GenZ, to judge from the fact that by 2023 he had put in 10 years at Google. But his view reminds us that woke prejudices predate wokeness. Long before workers began threatening to strike if they were not offered the right snacks, there were people like this manager who believed that the first obligation of a profit-making business was social justice.

Social justice is amorphous. It always sounds good until you examine it. Take Senator Elizabeth Warren. Social justice is her main concern. She excused the shooting of a health industry executive before she knew who killed him. Health executives are bad guys; they get what they deserve. Then there are bands at rock festivals that lead fans in screaming “F*ck Israel, Free Palestine.” This too is social justice. Impossible to ignore are the professors at Harvard who report that they are “energized” when Israeli civilians are killed by terrorists. All these people believe that they are pursuing social justice.

Meta employees whining about their free snacks seem to be miles away from the homicidal violence condoned and even encouraged by U.S. Senators, along with university faculty, the rich foundations that fund academic activists, run by George Soros and Bill and Melinda Gates, and the media. They denounce men prone to violence. But this is deeply ironic, since they themselves, the feminists and Marxists, want others to die so that the world can be made perfect.

The Trump turnaround usefully thrown a wrench, a good manly tool, into the well-oiled machine of elite, white social justice warriors who are trying to take over the world. It is even possible that Republicans in Congress will take a look at some of the fat benefits faculty enjoy. For example, Stanford, Princeton, and New York University own real estate and offer homes to faculty at far below market rates; they also pay tuition for faculty children.

None of these pricey benefits are taxed, even though they are obviously forms of income. Columbia University pays full-time tenured faculty over $300,000 (Solomon). Why should these professors, comfortably at home bastions of wokeness, get breaks on their elite housing and on family education?

As Karl Zinmeister has pointed out, the woke “have captured universities, labor unions, the media and more.” They have defamed the police, corrupted education, and tried to destroy the traditional family, all in the name of social justice. Their interest is disruption and resistance—the performance of victimhood. When these people demand that we save democracy, they forget that they are its worst enemies. What they are not interested in is work, productivity, growth, and social stability. We need to save democracy from them. Masculine energy will help.

Zuckerberg and Rogan. January 2025.

Zuckerberg makes his meaning clear. “I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the spectrum where it’s all like, ‘Masculinity is toxic. We have to get rid of it completely,’” Zuckerberg said (qtd. Factora). Zuckerberg thinks that corporate culture has become a “somewhat more neutered thing.” He also believes that society itself “has become very, like, neutered, or emasculated.” (It is worth noting that these are not the same thing.)

Zuckerberg’s criticism of emasculation is clear, and it is a criticism I have made in Substack and in Boxing and Masculinity. Society is not going to make things better for men. Men have to make things better for themselves.

Zuckerberg’s call for improved productivity in the workplace is laudable, all the more so because he dared to call it “masculine energy.” Good luck to him and to other bosses in tech as they pare back wasteful hiring and discriminatory DEI initiatives. They want to focus on what business is supposed to be doing, which is selling products and services that make life better for those who purchase them.

Sources

Bindley, Katherine. “Miserable at Work: Tech Workers Are Just Like Us.” The Wall Street Journal, April 26-27, 2025. B1, B4.

Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs/. April 18, 2025.

Factora, James. “Mark Zuckerberg Tells Joe Rogan That Society Has Become “Neutered” and “Emasculated.” Them. https://www.them.us/story/mark-zuckerberg-meta-joe-rogan-society-neutered-emasculated. January 13, 2025.

Flint, Jessica. “What Do GenZ Renters Want?” The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2025, p. M1.

Frantzen, Allen J. Boxing and Masculinity: Fighting to Find the Whole Man. Bookbaby, 2022.

Solomon, Steven Davidoff. “You Won’t Believe the Tax Breaks for Professors.” The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2025, p. A15.

Zinmeister, Karl. “Conservatism Needed a Trump Reset.” The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2025, p. A10.

May 2025