Finally, after years of interview requests, here I am face-to-face with the CEO of Facebook. He is casually sitting on a chair, cross-legged and barefoot, holding a laptop and wearing his trademark hooded sweatshirt.
It is a quieter meeting than I would have wanted, as Mark Zuckerberg just smiles and stares into space, flanked on one side by a stoic Leonardo DiCaprio in a suit and a dancing Rihanna on the other. Standing next to the new lifelike wax sculpture of Zuckerberg might be the closest I get to an interview. I am enthralled.
Twenty artists worked for months to construct the sculpture. It’s the small details, like the hand-painted freckles, that make Zuckerberg look real, says wax artist Petra Van der Meer.
"You can see the eyes. They're made of acrylic,” Van der Meer adds. “They're also hand-painted. And, also, you can see the tiny little veins in the corners of his eyes. Those are silk threads,” she says.
The artists inserted his hair, which is real, one strand at a time.