“I don’t think she was that happy with it.”
Two months ago in February, Mark Zuckerberg made headlines when he took the stage in a baby blue jumpsuit to perform for his wife’s birthday.
Priscilla Chan, the billionaire’s wife of 13 years, seemed to take it in stride — even as he leapt off the piano, recreating Benson Boone’s stunning performance at the Grammys a week prior.
But that was just one of his many gifts to Chan, who was turning 40. Zuckerberg also forked out bigtime for a gawdy seven-foot statue in Chan’s likeness, fabricated out of turquoise and silver. He unveiled the gift last August, sharing the gesture with the world via a photo on Instagram.
“Bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife,” the tech mogul enthused.
As it turns out, Chan was less receptive of the statue than the odd performance. On a recent appearance on the podcast “This Past Weekend” hosted by Theo Von, Zuckerberg revealed Chan’s thoughts on the extravagant gesture.
“I don’t think she was that happy with it,” the Meta CEO said, adding that she was a “good sport” about the towering gift.
“She doesn’t want a sculpture of her in the front lawn,” Zuckerberg told Von, in a decidedly human moment. “That’s weird.”
The whole thing seems more like a gift for Zuckerberg than for Chan. The billionaire is apparently a huge fan of the sculptor behind the statue, the pop artist Daniel Arsham, but decided to go with his wife’s likeness, he said on the podcast, because a statue of himself would have been “crazy.”
“Who wants a sculpture of themselves in the front yard?” Zuckerberg asked Von, ironically.
The bizarre present is sort of par for the course for Zuckerberg and Chan. Though the uber-rich tech couple reportedly skipped the marriage prenup, they have signed a contract mandating a minimum of one date and 100 minutes of “alone time” per week.
That contract came about through a “series of negotiations” after Chan decided to move to Palo Alto, California to open two schools for low-income communities near the San Francisco Bay Area. Those communities were shocked recently when the couple pulled funding with little explanation, leaving some to speculate it’s part of the billionaire’s rightward turn on social issues.
And when it comes to weird junk on her lawn, Chan might be lucky to get away with just the statue; Zuck’s also graced Chan with an appalling cover version of Lil Jon’s “Get Low,” as well as deploying an MMA fighting cage in his backyard to prepare for a would-be cage match with Elon Musk back in 2023.
“Mark, I have been working on that grass for two years,” Chan wrote in a text Zuckerberg shared on Instagram, prompting the billionaire to poll his followers: “save the grass” or “keep the octagon.”
That fight never happened, but it’s anyone’s guess whether the fighting cage is still standing — or what bizarre scheme Zuckerberg springs on his wife next.
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