When Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was going to “Make Meta Great Again,” he did so wearing a black T-shirt, a medallion on a chain around his neck, and a Greubel Forsey on his wrist. The price—you won’t get much change out of a million dollars—made it a talking point. But it is the watch’s name that is really interesting: the Hand Made 1.
Zuckerberg is a man who has shaped our world with a technology that has pushed us to live much of our lives online. And yet here he was wearing a watch that celebrated the rarefied realm of the artisan.
Founded 20 years ago by Robert Greubel and Steven Forsey, Greubel Forsey has been at the experimental end of contemporary watchmaking. Interestingly, the watch Zuck was wearing was about the most analog it is possible to get. Ninety-five percent of the components are manufactured in the company’s workshop (the sapphire crystal and the strap are outsourced), and almost all the parts are handmade. The entire process, from raw materials to wrist readiness, takes 6,000 hours.
The Damascene revelation that watches were cool came to Zuckerberg last year at the Anant Ambani pre-wedding celebrations, where his host’s Richard Mille caught his eye. Since that historic moment he has been buying watches as if money were no object, which it isn’t for him.
His stylist is rumored to be getting the watches from the 1916 Company—a luxury-watch reseller—but unsurprisingly the 1916 Company will neither confirm nor deny these reports. Still, whoever is supplying the Zuck is doing a great job, creating a near-instant collection of blue-chip pieces: Patek Philippe, F. P. Journe, De Bethune, and Greubel Forsey.
He is far from being the only tech baron with an interest in watches. Jack Dorsey has been spotted wearing a Cartier Crash Skeleton, and Sam Altman was first seen wearing his Greubel Forsey Invention Piece 1 way back in 2018. But even more interesting than the horological choices of the C-suite is the groundswell among their employees.
Bay Area–based Eric Ku, a watch dealer and proprietor of the auction site Loupe This, explains: “The most interesting thing is that the three biggest tech companies, Meta, Alphabet, and Apple, all have internal watch-collecting groups that are tremendous: hundreds, if not thousands, of employees that get together on a regular basis and nerd out. They talk about watches. They commission special editions for their own watch group.”
Zenith, Bamford London, Moser, and Tudor are among the brands that have worked with collector groups at Google, Meta, and TikTok, among others. Some tech employees have even left their jobs to devote themselves full-time to watches.
Whoever is supplying the Zuck is doing a great job.
The best-known example of this is Asher Rapkin, who held a position at Meta so big it could barely fit on a business card—“Director, Global Business Marketing, Emerging Platforms”—and who left to open Collective Horology, a watch store. His business partner is the former creative director at Meta. “The culture is tremendous,” says Ku. “These are groups of really passionate people.”
Among them is 42-year-old Pavel Ponomarenko, a project manager at Meta, who started the Meta watch club with six or seven colleagues a couple of years before the pandemic. It now numbers several thousand. Recently, he has noticed an uptick in neophytes wanting to learn more.
“Over the last couple of years, I have been doing introductions to watchmaking for people who have never had a nice watch,” he says. “I have seen people go from not having a single watch to creating really nice collections.” Ponomarenko may not be Zuckerberg’s watch whisperer, but he is delighted that his boss is succumbing to severe horolophilia. “I think it is just very exciting to see our leader getting into watches: there has definitely been a conversation and a buzz about what Mark will be wearing next.”
I called Greubel Forsey’s C.E.O., Michel Nydegger, to ask whether he had been besieged by other tech tycoons, clamoring for Zuck-approved wrist candy.
Not quite.
“We did get a lot of requests after the Zuckerberg thing, but we’re not trying to necessarily sell anything. Our clients are not impulse buyers,” says Nydegger. “I think in order to appreciate what it is that we’re trying to do, you have to know quite a bit about our watches. I suppose we do ask for some kind of intellectual effort from our clients.”
But, for the tech tycoon who knows his crown wheel from his cannon pinion, the rewards are remarkable. “Recently our client manager had a conversation with someone quite important in the tech world,” says Nydegger. “He said that he wants to feel the real world, to get back to reality. Watches like this help him get that feeling that he doesn’t have in the digital world.”
A reality in which a watch takes 6,000 hours to make and costs almost a million dollars to wear.
Nicholas Foulkes, the author of more than 20 books on the arts and history, is a London-based writer and editor
