Name: Mark Zuckerberg.
Age: Unknown.
Appearance: Bespectacled, smartly dressed, demeanour of somebody who is fed up with Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg is annoyed with Facebook? Yes, that’s what I said.
But isn’t Mark Zuckerberg the boss of Facebook? No, Mark Zuckerberg is a well-regarded bankruptcy lawyer from Indianapolis.
Oh no, have we fallen into a parallel universe again? Do try to keep up. There can be more than one person with the same name in the world.
Got it. Mark Zuckerberg (the Indianapolis bankruptcy lawyer) is fed up with Facebook (the borderline unusable social media platform founded by the other Mark Zuckerberg). There, that wasn’t so hard.
But why? Why do you think? Imagine having a Facebook account, and also having the name Mark Zuckerberg. You’d spend your whole life being flooded with messages and requests and abuse.
That makes sense. Also, Indianapolis Zuckerberg spent thousands of dollars on Facebook to advertise his legal firm, but Meta kept deactivating his account after assuming he was impersonating a celebrity. So now he’s suing Meta.
I always feel sorry for people who share names with celebrities. Me too. Remember the poor mild-mannered Virginian man John Lewis who, thanks to the fact that he owns the @johnlewis handle on X, spends weeks of his life calmly but firmly explaining to strangers that he is a person and not a large chain of UK department stores?
What a nightmare. Then there’s the late children’s author Jeremy Strong, who had the stranglehold on his name for years until the TV series Succession came along. He spent his latter years apologising to strangers for not being the actor who played Kendall Roy.
Well that’s just bad luck on his part. Bad luck for lawyer Zuckerberg, too. Prior to the lawsuit he had been keeping track of everything that has happened to him since the younger Mark Zuckerberg came to prominence.
Oh really, like what? He has been mistakenly sued by the state of Washington while companies refuse to take his business for fear that he’s pranking them. He’s spoken about seeing disappointment on the faces of limo drivers sent to pick him up. And when he signed up for 23andme, he was inundated with people who a) claimed to be related to him and b) asked for money.
What a nightmare. Anyway, Meta has decided to reinstate Mark Zuckerberg’s account, and has apologised for the confusion, but the lawsuit stands to go ahead nonetheless.
Well good luck to him. And there’s precedent here too. In 2019, the designer Katie Perry sued the singer Katy Perry for trademark infringement. Unfortunately for Indianapolis Zuckerberg, the singer won on appeal and Katie Perry was forced to deregister her trademark.
Bad time to be called Katie Perry. Or Mark Zuckerberg.
Do say: “It’s hard being named after someone famous.”
Don’t say: “As my newborn son Donald Trump will soon discover.”
