After starting Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg made billions, had babies, made a great life and more recently made a Katana sword. The Meta boss, worth $174 billion, is currently celebrating his wife, Priscilla Chan’s birthday in Japan. The power couple’s visit to the Far East has made the tech tycoon’s dreams come true as well. An avid enthusiast of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), the father-of-two shared a snippet of his unconventional activity on Instagram. The man who donned bracelets and glitter for his daughter’s event at a Taylor Swift concert, made a Katana sword with sword master Akihira Kokaji for the sake of his own interests.
Mark Zuckerberg is in Japan right now making Katanas with Japanese Sword Master, Akihira Kokaji. pic.twitter.com/aZhzWpcwIl
— AI KATANA (@ai_katana) February 25, 2024
He posted, ‘Really special afternoon learning about making katanas with Master Akihira Kokaji — thank you for sharing your craft with us!’ Zuckerberg’s obsession with swords goes back a long way. A 2022 report by Yahoo News states that a former Facebook employee, Kagan, shared that Meta CEO Zuckerberg wielded a katana sword at the office after getting frustrated with his employees’ code, and it wasn’t the first time. Way back in 2005, a then-21-year-old Zuckerberg would often walk around with a sword to taunt underperformers. Kagan wrote in his book, ‘How I Lost 170 Million Dollars: My Time as #30 at Facebook,’ ‘He had some great motivational lines. With love, he’d say, “If you don’t get that done sooner, I will punch you in the face,” or “I will chop you with this huge sword,” while holding a huge sword in hand. To this day, I don’t know why he had that sword.
One seldom understands why geniuses do the things they do, but what people at Meta do understand is that the billionaire’s long-standing interest with combat sports is an investment risk in addition to being a personal hazard. Per CNBC, Meta’s latest annual filing stated, “Mr. Zuckerberg and certain other members of management participate in various high-risk activities, such as combat sports, extreme sports, and recreational aviation, which carry the risk of serious injury and death,” the company said in the SEC filing.
In addition to MMA, the Meta founder has a penchant for extreme sports such as hydrofoiling, a passion that received more backlash than accolades. On another occasion, an online spat with Tesla CEO Elon Musk led two of the world’s richest people to take their rivalry into the cage for an MMA match. To the relief of investors, the fight ultimately never materialized. In the video posted by Zuckerberg, who enjoys a following of 13.1 million on Instagram, he is working hard with the sword master in his workshop, following instructions and sweating it out with a hammer in hand to shape the Katana. He even shows off his creation in another clip with his group cheering him on.
