(Reuters) – Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg is known for his passion, including for ancient Rome, and on Wednesday he wore a shirt that played on his own ambitions as his company launched what he described as the best glasses in the world.
At Meta’s annual Connect event in Menlo Park, California, Zuckerberg wore a custom T-shirt with the Latin phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” or “all Zuck or all nothing,” as he revealed the first working prototype of Meta’s augmented-reality glasses.
The phrase was a play on “aut Caesar aut nihil,” which means “either a Caesar or nothing,” or more simply “all or nothing.”
The saying, indicative of grand ambition, was a personal motto of Italian Renaissance Prince Cesare Borgia and was possibly coined by Julius Caesar himself, according to some scholars.
Zuckerberg has long been interested in the Roman Empire. He spent his honeymoon in Rome and two of his children, August and Aurelia, are named after emperors Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.
Earlier this year on his 40th birthday, Zuckerberg posted photos on social media in which he wore a T-shirt with the words “Carthago delenda est,” meaning “Carthage must be destroyed,” referring to Rome’s great rival.
Zuckerberg’s latest fashion statement comes as Meta Platforms seeks to overcome past tech industry failures and develop augmented-reality devices that are embraced by the masses.
While Meta’s new Orion AR glasses are not yet available for users and for now are mostly for internal testing, they represent Zuckerberg’s vision for products that would bring the virtual world into the real one.
“The way to think about AR glasses is as a time machine,” Zuckerberg said on Wednesday. “They exist, they are awesome and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting.”
(Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Henderson and Matthew Lewis)
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