A former Facebook employee has claimed that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once wielded a katana sword at the office after getting frustrated with his employees’ code.
AppSumo CEO Noah Kagan uploaded a 13-second video on TikTok on June 19 listing “weird things” that happened while he worked at Facebook.
Kagan shares at the start of the clip that he was the 30th employee at Facebook, which was founded in 2004.
According to the entrepreneur, Zuckerberg brought a katana sword to the office and waved it around because he “didn’t like the code and the stuff we were putting out on the website.”
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The video, which has been viewed over 50,000 times, had some commenters calling Zuckerberg a “weeb,” a term that pokes fun at a non-Japanese person who has an obsession with Japanese culture.
However, this is not the first time Kagan has mentioned Zuckerberg wielding a katana. In 2014, the AppSumo CEO released “How I Lost 170 Million Dollars: My Time as #30 at Facebook,” an e-book about his experience working for the tech giant in 2005. In the book, he alleges that Zuckerberg, who was 21 at the time, would walk around with the sword and taunt underperformers.
Kagan writes, “He had some great motivational lines. With love, he’d say ‘If you don’t get that done sooner, I will punch you in the face,’ or ‘I will chop you with this huge sword,’ while holding a huge sword in hand. To this day, I don’t know why he had that sword.”
In his June 19 TikTok video, Kagan also says that he played poker with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who “still wanted his money back” even after losing.
Another “weird thing” he mentions is that Facebook paid for all of its employees’ parking tickets, a perk he considers “amazing.”
In a separate video, Kagan shares that he lost his stock options after being let go from Facebook. Since he purportedly had a 0.1% stake in the company, this means he lost out on what would be worth more than $170 million today. Kagan was fired nine months after the tech giant hired him, which he says was a “rude awakening” that motivated him to start his own company.
Featured Image via DallE-mini
