Welcome To Zuckerworld

Facebook's really big plans for virtual reality.

- Bryant Urstadt and Sarah Frier

The office building on Facebook Way is in the unfinished style that honours materials like plywood, concrete, and steel. The I-beams supporting its soaring walls still have the builders’ chalk placement instructions on them. It takes a business making billions of high-margin dollars to make plywood and concrete seem so appealing. The merely ordinary have to put up drywall.

Facebook’s spokeswoman calls its headquarters the largest single room in the world. Maybe. It feels like it, anyway. The space isn’t square, so it doesn’t seem pointedly vast; it’s long and narrow. Heading to meet Mark Zuckerberg, the wizard of this open-plan office, you wind through it like an Ikea, following a painted path. The desks are orderly and clean with minimalist Macs. From time to time, there’s a map with a “you are here” helpfully posted. Then, at the centre, standing at his desk announcing something to a colleague, there’s Zuckerberg. He’s a great stander; he has terrific posture. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, author of Lean In and the de facto leader of all corporate women, wraps something up and heads down the painted path.

If you spray-painted Zuckerberg a high-gloss white and told him to gaze off into the distance, he’d look exactly like a 1st century A.D. bust of Tiberius at the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Zuckerberg would get the reference. A scholar of the classics, he named his daughter Maxima, after the Roman, not the Nissan, and once declared at an anti-Google Plus all-hands meeting, “Carthago delenda est.” (This was Cato the Elder’s call to destroy Carthage, which posed a threat to Rome’s active user base.) Zuckerberg doesn’t wear a toga, unfortunately, but like any icon, he has a signature look—grey T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.