People can’t get over how different Mark Zuckerberg is in 2004 interview after Facebook had just been created
The world of big tech makes huge stars out of previously unassuming people, and there's no better way to verify that than by going back to look at old interviews of the most famous CEOs on the planet.
We've seen this recently for Jeff Bezos, showing people around the tiny Amazon office in 1994, and now a 2004 interview of Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has resurfaced and amazed viewers.
The interview was on CNBC, and was actually opposite another developer who made a website called WesMatch for his own university campus.
Zuckerberg's company was still at this point called TheFacebook, and was limited to university campuses, ahead of its unbelievably stratospheric rise over the next few years.
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The first question put to Zuckerberg himself in the interview is how big he thinks his service will become, and his answer is characteristic of his relatively reserved style: "Well, it's impossible to tell."
Zuckerberg goes on to explain that the demand for TheFacebook is massively bigger than they were expecting, with around 100,000 people already using the website.
He sketches out a whole bunch of ambitions for more options and apps, saying that they could be really "cool" in the future, and calls TheFacebook an "online directory" rather than using any words like "social media", which was coined far later.
What's pretty amazing about the interview is both how much Zuckerberg has changed, and how similar he is in some other ways.
His delivery of responses, even in a really short segment like this one, hasn't actually changed drastically over the years - he's long been accused of having a bit of a monotone, and that's evident here already.
However, physically Zuckerberg has changed massively, given that he's now hugely active, an apparently accomplished MMA fighter and surfer, and in great shape.
This new physicality, paired with the same old monotonous delivery, has people in the comments under CNBC's YouTube upload of the interview all agreeing that it's weird watching a younger Zuck in action.
Of course, another amazing element of the interview is the repeated use of "TheFacebook", which just sounds wrong now that the site has been without the "The" for years and years.
We're still getting used to Zuckerberg's company being called Meta, after all, but that's far easier to stomach than the clumsy TheFacebook. That name would change to simply Facebook in 2005, just a year after this interview was recorded.