How Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Josh Kushner & Scott Wu Think | Jeremy Stern

October 4, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Jeremy Stern, a writer for the investment firm Colossus, has spent the last few years producing some of the most ambitious long-form profiles of major tech figures. In this conversation with David Senra, he explains his method: he does not start with a person. He starts with a cultural question—whether defense tech is real, whether the American dream is still alive, whether there is an AI leader who is not grating—and then searches for the person whose life best illuminates that question. The result is a series of profiles that aim to tilt the reader’s understanding of a public figure by ten degrees, not by extracting business lessons, but by revealing the messy, historically contingent, and often contradictory interior lives of people who shape the world.

The Emperor and the Terminator: Mark Zuckerberg

Stern’s profile of Mark Zuckerberg began with a question: why is he the last man standing from his generation of founders? Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates—all stepped back. Zuckerberg, now 42, has not. Stern spent months interviewing Zuckerberg’s family, friends, colleagues, and even his rivals. The piece opens with Zuckerberg’s parents and closes with his wife, a deliberate framing that signals Stern’s interest in the person, not just the CEO.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:02) **Introduction & The Zuckerberg Profile Origin** - Jeremy Stern describes how Meta’s team initially reached out to him, despite his previous negative profile of Palmer Luckey, and the initial skepticism he felt about writing about such an overexposed figure.
2 (02:57) **The "Galaxy Opening Up" Method** - Stern defines his core reporting philosophy, explaining that spending time with a subject and their entire circle reveals a universe of relationships, psychoses, and successes that dictates the final shape of the piece.
3 (06:44) **The Caesar-Augustus Framework for Zuckerberg** - Stern details Zuckerberg’s long-standing, deep interest in Augustus, using it as a lens to understand his psychology and self-image.
4 (13:03) **The Dual Nature of Zuckerberg: Ruthless Competitor & Nice Guy** - People close to Zuckerberg, and even his rivals, consistently highlight two underestimated traits: his extreme competitive drive and the fact that he is not personally an asshole.
5 (15:57) **Why You Shouldn't Bet Against Meta in AI** - Stern explains why Zuckerberg’s "ideological coherence" and the boring, unsexy work of building infrastructure gives Meta a structural advantage over pure AI labs.
6 (18:49) **The "Addicted to Building" Founder Gene** - Stern analyzes the specific quality of founders who cannot be bought and will die at their company, using Zuckerberg’s rejection of Yahoo’s $1 billion offer in 2006 as the canonical example.
7 (21:51) **Palmer Luckey: The First Profile & The Defense Tech Thesis** - Stern explains his first-ever profile was driven by a macro question: "Is defense tech real or is it bullshit?" after the October 7th attacks revealed the limits of high-tech warfare.

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Guests on this episode

David Senra

Show Notes

Jeremy Stern is the editor-in-chief of Colossus, where he writes long-form profiles of leading entrepreneurs and investors. He goes behind the scenes of his reporting on Mark Zuckerberg, explaining how months of interviews revealed Zuckerberg’s fascination with Augustus, relentless competitive drive and commitment to building Meta for decades. Jeremy discusses why Meta’s distribution and infrastructure could give it an advantage in AI and why some founders seem incapable of walking away. He explains how a question about defense technology became his first profile, on Palmer Luckey, and why he brings the craft of fiction and poetry to writing about business. Jeremy also describes Scott Wu’s combination of mathematical genius, natural leadership and authenticity, and how Josh Kushner’s family history shaped his exploration of Thrive Capital and the American dream. The conversation closes with the story of Jeremy’s Russian professor, whose belief that people have an obligation to their gifts changed his life and helped shape how he sees the people he writes about.

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/jeremy-stern

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