Guardian interview of Facebook’s Zuckerberg

It must have seemed like a peach of an opportunity for The Guardian’s Simon Garfield when he landed a chance to interview the multi-billionaire founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

But the reality turned out to be anti-climatic, not through any fault of Garfield’s – but rather Zuckerberg’s recalcitrance.

The Zuckerberg schtick has always been rooted in contradiction. That image of the workaholic college dropout billionaire, perennially clad in a North Face fleece – a social networking leader and aloof geek – by The Times’ reckoning.

He’s even removed the ‘add friend’ button from his Facebook profile.

Garfield paints a bemusing picture of the interview at the London Excel Centre. Zuckerberg, flanked by two ‘advisers’ specialising in an array of duties from question filtering to general fleece advice, seems to make for a nightmarish interviewee.

Coolness to the media

He reinterprets questions, and blandly regurgitates stock answers. The word ’share’ becomes almost like a punctuation mark and its clear that this was never going to get off message despite Garfield’s attempts otherwise:

Garfield: Did you ever wish you could communicate more, and more easily, when you were a kid?

Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t know. I haven’t thought that much about that.

Ultimately we were faced with the Zuckerberg story as it has been known since 2004.

While the article’s true focus was the Facebook Connect angle, it’s hard not to feel stung by a coolness towards the media displayed by a man whose success has sprung from the ethos of ’share and share alike’.

Read So how many friends do you have, Mark? here.