Mark Zuckerberg Lost To A Teenage Girl In Scrabble On His Private Plane So He Took A Break, Coded A Computer Program To Show Him All Possible Words, Then Used It In The Rematch.

BUSINESS INSIDER - Mark Zuckerberg’s ambition has been well-documented, but a simple game of Scrabble has revealed to what lengths the tech billionaire will go to win.

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has written a lengthy profile on the Facebook chief executive on Monday which details the story of Zuckerberg facing off with a highschooler.

According to Osnos’ telling, Zuckerberg was aboard a private jet a few years ago and was passing the time playing Scrabble with the daughter of a friend.

After the high-schooler won the first game, Zuckerberg wrote a program which would process his letters and show him all available words, and the pair had a rematch.

“During the game in which I was playing the program, everyone around us was taking sides: Team Human and Team Machine,” the unnamed girl told Osnos.

Mark Zuckerberg is the dude that always took a little too long responding to his turn on Words With Friends then all of a sudden you got a screen notification that he just played “oxyphenbutazone” for 1,778 points. You keep losing by like a billion points until the day he leaves his computer open on the way to the bathroom and you type an “S” into his URL bar and “ScrabbleWordFinder.org” auto-fills it. See it happen all the time. I was always way too smart (800 on SAT Verbal obviously) to need to cheat like that, but let’s just say it was always a pretty easy catch when your braindead friend that you carry home from the bar every night was all of a sudden beating you in Scrabble with words even Merriam-Webster had to double check.

All of that isn’t to pass judgement or anything, because let me just say this loud and clear, so there’s no doubt about it: I absolutely love this move from Zuck. I admire the hell out of it. Why? Because he’s Mark Zuckerberg. He’s got plenty of things to make fun of, but his intelligence is not one of them. Sure he may not have the best vocabulary, because he was too busy in school learning enough math and science and coding to become a trillionaire tech giant. Maybe he’s not smart enough linguistically to formulate complex high scoring vocab words in his head on the spot. Know what he is smart enough to do though? Literally build a robot with his bare hands in the middle of a plane ride to compute all the words for him. May not be in the spirit of the rules, but it’s in the spirit of being a fucking genius that some little punk 15 year old could never dream of competing with.

So sure he’ll take that initial L. Just know that this is HIS private plane you’re riding on, and that is HIS complex AI robot algorithm burying your nerd ass during round 2.  Hey little girl, take a note from the big guys:

Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo described Zuckerberg as a “ruthless execution machine, and if he has decided to come after you, you’re going to take a beating.”

“And if he can’t do it with his own brainpower, he’ll program an algorithm to do it with his dork fingers.*” 

(*paraphrasing mine.)

PS,

Please don’t ever forget this.  It brings me joy on a daily, if not hourly basis.