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Mark Zuckerberg reveals the nickname his co-workers ‘lovingly’ call him

The CEO of Meta (formerly known as Facebook) has an interesting moniker at the company.

Mark Zuckerberg's colleagues have a rather interesting nickname for the Meta CEO.

In a rare interview, the 37-year-old talks at length about his business strategy, parenting principles and the name his co-workers use to describe him.

"Some of the folks who I work with at the company — they say this lovingly — but I think that they sometimes refer to my attention as the Eye of Sauron," he told tech investor and podcaster Tim Ferriss.

The term comes from J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" books; the Eye of Sauron (aka the Great Eye) is a symbol that the Dark Lord adopts in the Third Age. According to a fan website, the legend says that "few could endure its terrible gaze," and the eye was used as a symbol on banners and armor to represent "Sauron's quasi-omnipotence."

Zuckerberg went on to explain why his co-workers bestowed the nickname on him.

"(It means) that basically, you have this unending amount of energy to go work on something, and if you like point that at any given team, you will just burn them," he said. "But at the same time, right, it’s managing that so that way, I can manage my own energy and diffuse it well enough so that way it’s like, ‘OK, I have the thing that I’m focused on that day."

The entrepreneur said it's very important for him to be able to manage his schedule as much as possible.

"I just think the engagement that you get of having like an immediate feedback loop around thinking about something then getting to go talk to the people who are working on this is so much better than going and scheduling a meeting that you’ll have three weeks later," he said.

Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook, announced in October 2021 that the social media site would be renamed Meta as part of the company's evolving virtual reality strategy.

At the time, critics suggested that the name change could also be a way to distract people from paying attention to the Facebook Papers, a group of leaked documents that call out Facebook for ignoring "internal reports and warnings of the harms its social network created or magnified across the world," as reported by The Associated Press.

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