Men in Power and Their Glow Ups

17 Mar, 2025

I keep circling back to this bizarre phenomenon of "influential men getting hot suddenly" and what it means. Superficially, this is basically a PR stunt. Mark Zuckerberg's team decided in the early 2020's that people would like him more if he stopped looking like a tech robot and instead looked buff, had nice hair, and wore inconceivably expensive watches during videos. Fashion magazines started covering him (see the coverage about the cost of his watch during his announcement that instagram would basically stop moderating content), and young boys thought he was cool.

Just as obvious, but slightly less front and center at first was the masculinity piece. Zuckerberg started practicing MMA fighting and Elon Musk challenged him to a flight (which never actually happened), more and more silicon valley men became obsessed with things like cold plunges and fitness mostly under the guise of "wellness" but clearly also to look hot and show endurance loudly and publicly. Zuckerberg made explicit the implicit when he did an interview with Joe Rogan where he talked about how corporate culture needed more "aggression" and that tech should be bringing back its masculine energy ¹ (as if tech had not already been a highly masculine space already for decades.)

This all has a clear tie in with the whole set of memes around men being obsessed with the Roman Empire ², and shows a clear picture of the way these men are relating to their own power and leadership in these times. I keep thinking about the fact that the Roman Empire fell, and that the "masculine obsession" with the Roman Empire fixates far more on what happened before that than on the fact that it ended.

All of this said, the one I've been most intrigued by is Ezra Klein's "glow up." Ezra is the only man I've seen undergo this public transition (in a similar timeline to Zuckerberg no less) who is not at all right wing. He has also made this shift fairly quietly -- there are neither fashion blogs writing about it or copious online takes about it. A few years ago, he started regularly lifting and spoke about it a little in his podcast. By the time he made the viral video "Don't Believe Him" (which was released at the start of Trumps 2024 presidency) he was muscular, not wearing glasses, had a tight haircut, and sported a well groomed beard. This was a major departure compared to his previous "nerdy journalist" look that was his signature appearance in his podcast thumbnail and most of what surfaces when you google image him. In this video, he points at the camera, speaks with confidence, and sits with a wider-than-shoulder-width stance.

I am struggling to totally wrap my head around this, but with both Zuckerberg and Ezra Klein undergoing masculine glow-ups in the years shortly after an election that carried so many implications around gender and modern masculinity, I think there's something in the water. Ezra Klein leveraged his own influence to start the public push to get Joe Biden to step down this past cycle, and Zuckerberg is continuing to hone his image into a more respectable public oligarch. I'll keep thinking on this, and will probably write more, but I wanted to at least start musing about empires, the men who run them, and how they Power Pose about it.