Three years ago, the big day of Mark Zuckerberg was a bust. At his company's annual developer conference — then known as Facebook Connect — he rolled out his grand ambition to make his trillion-dollar social network "a metaverse company." His company was renamed Meta, and we braced for a world in which we'd be one with our virtual avatars, who could maybe, just maybe one day stand on two legs. And yet, that seismic shift never came to be.

For the most part, the metaverse was smoke and mirrors. His company's stock plummeted, and for the first time ever, Facebook wasn't growing. Then, Meta did several rounds of mass layoffs. It looked like the fall of an empire, but Zuckerberg managed to reverse the fate of his sinking ship. In calls with anxious investors, he stopped using the word "metaverse," and when the AI boom came around, he was thrilled to pivot to a new buzzword. The stock went up.

As his company recovered from crisis, Zuckerberg had a glow-up himself. Now, he has become something of a fashionista.

While he's still the guy who used to show up in front of the Senate looking like a ghost and stumbling over the words "I love barbecue sauce", he flashes a bit of swag now that has caught this observer off guard. But he isn't just sporting an Alexander McQueen suit and training in MMA with some big-name fighters, either, and calling it good. Now, he's making his clothes alongside fashion designer Mike Amiri. So when Zuckerberg strolled onstage at this year's Meta Connect event-three years after the metaverse fiasco-his outfit mattered.

Wearing a structured black tee and jeans, a classic look for Silicon Valley founders who want to make us feel like they're one of us except that they're powerful billionaires Zuckerberg had at what may be Meta's most impressive developer keynote ever.

The letters cross from the sleeves to the chest in a trend of fashion, but it is hard to read, especially if one is not conversant with the declarations of ancient Latin declarations on the Roman emperors. From the original phrase, aut Caesar aut nihil, it translates to "either Caesar or nothing." It expresses a person's will to be the supreme ruler at all costs.

"I just started working with people to design some of my own clothes," he says on the Acquired podcast. "I figured, you know, look, we're going to design eyewear, we're going to design other stuff that people wear — let's get good at this."

These T-shirts are part of a series he designed for himself, based on his favorite classical sayings. Another shirt displays the ancient Greek phrase pathei mathos, or "learning through suffering." In May, he wore a shirt with the phrase Carthago delenda est to his 40th birthday party, which comes out to "Carthage must die," a rallying cry for Rome to continue its attack on Carthage during the Punic Wars. It has also been used by him in 2011 when Google launched the would-be Facebook-killer Google+. It's the same song, second verse: Zuckerberg still imagines he's fighting the establishment, not that he is the establishment.

The sartorial statements Zuckerberg makes are deliberate, but which Harvard dropout would the ancient Roman general be who founded one of the greatest empires in history?

That is cocky, but then, if one is to be fair, Zuckerberg runs a company whose products touch billions of people every day. His reach is greater than that of Julius Caesar. And, if all goes according to his plans, he's going to build wearable AI gadgets and virtual reality headsets that will change how the world communicates once again.

No matter how large Meta has become, Zuckerberg's costumes prove he still thinks himself the villain over more established tech companies. Comparatively, he's no Caesar, merely the entrenched emperor. He sees himself instead as the earlier Caesar, a brave general destined to be one of the greats, leading an empire bigger than he.