Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed with embarrassing himself on Instagram. In the past few months, he has taken to the app to partake in some weird flirting with Kim Kardashian and share an acoustic cover of “Get Low” that he recorded for his wife, Priscilla Chan. How could it get worse? Well, what if I told you that he shared a video of himself doing Benson Boone cosplay for Priscilla’s 40th birthday?
Let’s unpack this. While hosting his wife’s black-tie birthday party, Zuckerberg got onstage to re-create Benson Boone’s Grammy performance of “Beautiful Things,” complete with two people ripping away his tux to reveal a sparkly baby-blue jumpsuit with a deep V. Zuckerberg chickened out from doing the thing that makes Benson Boone notable, which is doing a backflip off of a piano. Instead, he just jumped off normally. What is the point of all that martial-arts training if he can’t even do a backflip to impress his wife? That’s not very “masculine energy” of him.
In a final cowardly move, Zuckerberg doesn’t even let us hear his rendition of the song. I guess he might have been lip-syncing, but I still want the raw audio. Instead, the video is set to Boone’s brand-new single “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else.” (It is entirely possible that this post is doubling as spon-con for Boone.)
A question I’ve found myself asking recently is, “What does Priscilla think about all this?” Does she support her husband in all of his endeavors or is she cringing a bit? In Zuck’s video, she can be seen smiling broadly and laughing at his performance — which is, again, purportedly in honor of her birthday. However, in her own recap post, she opted not to include any shots of her husband making a fool of himself. That’s enough of an answer for me.