How Reporters Get Inside the Head of Mark Zuckerberg

What happened: A tech news outlet called Colossus published an interview with its own editor-in-chief, Jeremy Stern, about the work of profiling Mark Zuckerberg — the co-founder of Facebook and now Meta — along with other powerful figures in technology. Profiling, in journalism, means writing a deep, researched portrait of a person: their history, habits, decisions, and what makes them tick. The conversation is about the craft of doing that when your subject is one of the richest and most guarded people on earth.

Why it's genuinely interesting: Zuckerberg's company runs Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. Together those apps shape what roughly three billion people see, believe, and argue about every day. When one person has that much quiet influence over your feed, your news, and increasingly your AI tools, understanding his motivations is not gossip — it's practical context. Reporters who get close to him are effectively helping the public understand the machine that decides what shows up on your phone.

The honest catch: there isn't much actual substance here for a casual reader. The page is mostly a subscription pitch — Stratechery Plus at $15 a month or $150 a year — with the real interview and analysis locked behind a login. So you get the framing and the sales copy, not the reporting itself. Without paying, you won't learn any specific new details about Zuckerberg, Meta, or what Stern actually discovered.

So what should you take from it? Two things. First, deep reporting on tech leaders is becoming a paid product rather than a free public good — worth knowing when you see headlines about Silicon Valley. Second, the people who run the platforms you use are also the people most skilled at controlling how they're described. Treat glowing profiles and harsh takedowns alike with a little healthy skepticism, and notice who paid for the story.