The youngest of this group trains like he’s auditioning for a sport, and eats meat from cattle he personally farms.
In 2026, the CEO of the world’s largest social network published a short video from his Hawaiian estate explaining a hobby that had started as a joke and become an obsession: on the ~3,000 acres he and his wife have assembled into a working ranch, his cattle are fed roasted macadamia nuts, and given a choice of cold water or beer — brewed by him, for them — because the alcohol stimulates appetite and the nuts carry the fats and sugars that finish a steak. The goal, stated on camera without irony: “the highest-quality beef in the world.” Every cow, reportedly, eats like a contestant at a state fair he owns.
It is the fourth phase of a long, public, and increasingly sincere diet experiment history. In 2013 he spent a month strictly vegan and posted the grocery list. He followed with a paleo period, then an obsession with sourcing every bite himself — the famous anecdote: he once ate nothing but meat from animals he hunted or raised for an entire year, which is why there is now a ranch with his cattle on it. He has never called any of it a diet. He calls it doing the thing.
The thing he now actually does daily is martial arts. Since 2023 he has trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu several times a week with a professional coach, competing at his company’s internal games — he won medals in gi and no-gi divisions — and describing the submission grappling as the part of the schedule no board meeting replaces. The second thing is running: he hired a distance coach, trained through 2025, and crossed the finish line of the New York City Half Marathon in about 1 hour 36, then completed a full marathon weeks later, posting splits like a mid-pack club runner who discovered mid-life that his body was a product he hadn’t yet optimized.
He sleeps, by his own account, not enough, and has said he doesn’t diet-count. The food philosophy is protein-heavy, self-supplied, performance-shaped. The exercise philosophy is combat and cardio because they’re fun — the same impulse that made him pick up disc golf, horseback riding, and a MMA gym inside a campus building.
Ask him the secret and he’ll show you a cow, a medal, or a 4-hour wall-clock schedule he’s optimized like an app.
His name is Mark Zuckerberg. He is 42 years old, the sixth-richest person in the world at about $211 billion, and the man feeding macadamia nuts and beer to the cattle that feed him.
Sources & citations
- Fortune, “Mark Zuckerberg feeds his cattle nuts and beer” (Jul 2026) — fortune.com/2026-07-02
- His own 2024–2025 X posts — BJJ medals, Meta Games; 1:36 NYC half marathon; 2025 full marathon splits — x.com/fzuckoff/fzuckerberg (verified in news coverage)
- 2013 vegan month — documented Facebook posts + Deadspin archive; paleo/self-sourced year — multiple 2013–2015 profiles
Part 7 of the series “What Billionaires Actually Eat.”