At the end of 2023, while Elon Musk was flirting on X with conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, the two exchanged jokes about a popular trend on social media, which involved asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire. Eighteen months later, St. Clair announced she had given birth to Musk’s 13th known child.
They chose the name Romulus for him, the latest addition to a blended family that the head of Tesla, X and SpaceX privately calls his “legion.” As for his three daughters, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg chose names inspired by Roman emperors: Maxima, August and Aurelia. And when the two men considered facing off in an MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fight in 2023, Musk suggested holding it in Rome, at the Colosseum.
Many leaders of major tech companies have a fascination with the Roman Empire. Palmer Luckey, the virtual reality pioneer who shifted to military drones at Anduril, wants to create an ultra-realistic simulation of ancient Rome. Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter (now X), often draws a parallel between the advent of the internet and the development of aqueducts by the Roman Empire. The powerful investor Marc Andreessen has said California is “like Rome in maybe 250 AD, we live amidst an enormous flowering of culture and creativity, but the roads are becoming unsafe and nobody is quite sure why.”
Zuckerberg, who has a good command of Latin, is passionate about Rome, to the point that he recently designed T-shirts himself featuring altered Latin phrases. For example: “Carthago delenda est” (“Carthage must be destroyed”), or another that drew some mockery: “Aut Zuck aut Nihil” (“Zuck or nothing”), a nod to “Aut Caesar aut nihil” (“Either Caesar or nothing”) attributed to Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli’s Prince.
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