Zuckerberg Has a Bad Haircut Night Seated Near Karlie Kloss
Facebook co-founder gets teased at Breakthrough Prize ceremony.
(Bloomberg) -- Mark Zuckerberg dashed across the red carpet so fast, his wife, Priscilla Chan, had to call him back for a photo op.
But Zuckerberg still had plenty of moments in the spotlight at the ceremony for the eighth annual Breakthrough Prize -- the so-called Oscars of Science -- Sunday night in Mountain View, California.
Actor James Corden gave him a ribbing at the top of the program.
“We have some of the smartest minds and the worst haircuts in the history of humanity,” Corden said as the camera froze on Zuckerberg.
Other shots showed the Facebook chief executive at his dinner table, sitting next to Jeffrey Friedman, a scientist at Rockefeller University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Chan sat next to Drew Barrymore, parsing Pacific halibut with braised radishes and steamed carrots with model Karlie Kloss nearby.
Then Zuckerberg came up to the stage with LeVar Burton. A scene from “Star Trek” played before the duo awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to a team that built eight telescopes across the planet to photograph a black hole. Shep Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics won the prize along with more than 300 other scientists, who’ll share the $3 million purse.
“Science and technology and the imagination behind them can help us solve a lot of our problems,” Zuckerberg said. “But for that to happen we have to invest in science.”
Zuckerberg and Chan co-founded the prize with billionaire venture capitalist Yuri Milner and his wife Julia, Tencent’s Pony Ma, 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki and Alphabet President Sergey Brin, who was wearing a jacket that looked like it could have been in the show “Star Trek” (it was from Morocco) when he and Tyra Banks presented an award.
More than $20 million was handed during the ceremony, including prizes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for younger scientists. Guests included Marissa Mayer, Brian Grazer, David Foster and Katharine McPhee, Wendi Deng Murdoch and Adriana Lima.
Meanwhile, just a couple hours north in Sonoma County, the Kincade fire burned for a 12th consecutive day. Sonoma also had two earthquakes this weekend.
"It’s a bit apocalyptic," said David Julius, a physiologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco. He lives in Walnut Creek, which is close to Lafayette, a small city that was evacuated due to fires. Julius won a 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Julius said he thinks entities like Facebook would have an “enormous effect” if they took a public stance on climate change and put a “face on that pressures politicians to really get their act together.”
Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy and partner in the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, said he hasn’t been affected by the fires this year, but he’s unsettled.
“Fire season is turning into real fires every year now so there’s clearly some things we have to think about in a very deep way that’s hitting very close to home,” Khan said.
“The air quality is tragic, it’s awful," Wojcicki said. "The most important thing you can do is be involved politically," she added, without saying who she might support for president in 2020. “There’s a lot of impressive people so I don’t know yet.” Wojcicki donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.
Wojcicki, along with Edward Norton, presented Friedman his prize for discovering a biological basis of obesity.
--With assistance from Amanda Gordon.
To contact the reporter on this story: Sophie Alexander in New York at salexander82@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Peter Eichenbaum at peichenbaum@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill
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