In 2010, the world was a different place. Most people still had Blackberries. "The Social Network" had just hit theaters, painting a pretty brutal picture of a young hoodie-wearing CEO. Then, Time Magazine dropped their big announcement. Mark Zuckerberg was the Person of the Year 2010. People lost their minds.
Seriously.
The internet was rooting for Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder was the polarizing figure of the moment, dumping secret cables and making governments sweat. He actually won the reader's poll by a landslide. But Time’s editors didn’t care. They chose the guy who, at the time, was just a 26-year-old billionaire trying to convince us that privacy was an "evolving social norm." Looking back from 2026, that choice feels like a prophetic warning we all collectively ignored.
The Year We Sold Our Privacy for a Like
Why Zuck?
Time’s editor Richard Stengel basically argued that Zuckerberg was "changing the way we live every day." And he wasn't wrong. By late 2010, Facebook had hit more than 500 million users. That’s a massive number for a time when half the world was still on dial-up or early 3G. It was the year Facebook stopped being a college directory and started becoming a global infrastructure. It was the year "to friend" became a verb everyone used, even your grandma.
But there was a darker side to the 2010 Person of the Year title.
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People forget that 2010 was a year of massive privacy scandals for Facebook. They launched "Open Graph," which essentially let third-party websites scrap your data without you really knowing. Zuckerberg was sweating through his hoodies during interviews—literally, remember the D8 conference where he had to take his jacket off because he was crashing and burning on stage?
Yet, Time rewarded him. They saw the "connection" as a pure good. They didn't see the algorithmic rabbit holes or the data harvesting that would eventually lead to Cambridge Analytica or the 2016 election chaos. They saw a kid who had connected one-twelfth of the planet.
Assange vs. Zuckerberg: The Battle for the Narrative
The 2010 Person of the Year choice was a fork in the road for how we view information. On one hand, you had Julian Assange, who wanted to pull the curtain back on the powerful. On the other, you had Zuckerberg, who wanted you to pull the curtain back on yourself.
Time chose the one who made us look at each other.
Assange ended up in a basement in an embassy. Zuckerberg ended up on the cover of a magazine with a soft-focus portrait that made him look like a visionary saint. It's wild to think about how much that single editorial decision shaped the "tech bro" worship of the early 2010s. We were told that connectivity was the ultimate goal. We didn't ask what the cost of that connection would be. Honestly, we were just happy to see what our high school friends had for lunch.
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What Most People Get Wrong About the 2010 Pick
A lot of folks think Time picks the "best" person. They don't. They pick the most influential—for better or worse.
If you look at the runners-up that year, it’s a weird time capsule. You had the Tea Party, which was just starting to tear up American politics. You had Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. You even had the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped underground. Those miners were the "feel-good" story of the century, but Time went with the guy building a digital panopticon.
It was a pivot point.
Before 2010, the Person of the Year was often a politician or a world leader. By picking the Person of the Year 2010 as a tech CEO, Time acknowledged that Silicon Valley was the new Washington. Code was becoming law. Zuckerberg wasn't just a businessman; he was a sovereign of a digital nation that didn't have borders.
The Movie Influence
You can't talk about Mark Zuckerberg in 2010 without talking about David Fincher’s The Social Network. Jesse Eisenberg played him as a cold, calculating genius. The real Zuckerberg called the movie "fiction," but it defined his public persona. Time’s cover story was almost a rebuttal to the movie. It tried to humanize him. It talked about his "Chinese-speaking girlfriend" (now his wife, Priscilla Chan) and his modest apartment. It was a PR masterstroke, whether intentional or not.
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Why 2010 Still Matters in 2026
If you’re reading this now, you’re living in the world that the Person of the Year 2010 built.
The "move fast and break things" era started there. We are currently dealing with the "broken things"—eroded mental health, fractured political landscapes, and the total disappearance of anonymity. 2010 was the last year we could have potentially turned back. It was the year we decided that being "connected" was more important than being "private."
Zuckerberg himself has changed. He's no longer the kid in the hoodie; he's the guy obsessed with the Metaverse and AI, trying to pivot away from the social media monster he created. But the 2010 designation solidified his status. It gave him the "Great Man" of history stamp of approval before he was even thirty.
Lessons Learned from the Zuckerberg Era
Looking back at the Person of the Year 2010, there are a few hard truths we have to swallow.
- Influence isn't always positive. Being the most influential person on earth doesn't mean you're a hero. It means you've moved the needle. Sometimes the needle moves toward a cliff.
- Tech moves faster than ethics. In 2010, we didn't have the vocabulary to talk about "algorithmic bias" or "data sovereignty." We were just playing FarmVille.
- The "Reader's Choice" rarely wins. If you ever feel like your vote doesn't matter in these big media spectacles, remember Assange won by a landslide in 2010 and still didn't get the cover.
If you want to understand why your phone is a slot machine today, look at the Person of the Year 2010. It’s the origin story of our current reality.
To really get a handle on this history, start by looking into the "Open Graph" launch of April 2010. It was the technical shift that turned Facebook from a site you visited into a tracker that followed you across the entire web. Once you see that roadmap, the last 16 years make a lot more sense.
Dig into the old interviews from that year—specifically the one with Kara Swisher where he starts sweating through his hoodie. It’s the most honest he ever looked on camera. Understanding that moment of vulnerability helps peel back the layers of the polished, billionaire image we see today. Use that context to evaluate how we treat the current crop of AI CEOs. We're making the same mistakes again, and the 2010 archives are the best guidebook for what not to do.