The 33-year-old billionaire hired a former White House photographer, whose images depict him, Obama-like, as a man of the people. A coterie of ex-politicos—including a former aide to Tim Kaine—were helping him orchestrate meet-and-greets. Zuckerberg met with recovering opioid addicts in Ohio. He dropped by the same quaint candy shop in Iowa where Mitt Romney once made milkshakes. He had a quick stint on an assembly line in Detroit. And it didn’t help that a month before he announced the tour, unsealed court documents revealed Zuckerberg had attempted to restructure Facebook stock to allow him to retain voting control if he served in government for two years, or served indefinitely, with a few stipulations.
Zuckerberg has twice denied during the tour that he’s running for office, and yet the rumors persist. Especially when more news emerges to support the theory: Earlier this week, Zuckerberg tapped Joel Benenson, a former Hillary Clinton pollster, to consult for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is also helping with the tour. Both CZI and Facebook maintain that Zuckerberg still has no plans to run for office.
“Mark has been very clear on why he’s doing these visits starting from his post in January on his 2017 challenge,” a Facebook spokesperson told WIRED. CZI says Benenson’s relationship with the LLC is project-based, not a long-term contract, and will dovetail with the LLC’s chosen causes. “As a philanthropic organization focused on a number of substantive issues including science, education, housing and criminal justice reform, any research efforts we undertake are to support that work,” says a CZI spokesperson.
Zuckerberg’s camp elides the obvious campaign trail parallels, and Zuckerberg himself maintains his tour is an opportunity “to get out of my little bubble in San Francisco,” as he told students at North Carolina A&T, an historically black college in Greensboro in March.
But for close observers who want to parse Zuckerberg’s motivations, he has a more loquacious body of work to rely on: The numerous dispatches he has written on Facebook sharing all the “interesting” things he’s “noticed” or “been struck by” along his route. He’s said the tour is an attempt to break out of his bubble, and perhaps that’s happening, but it’s hard to ignore his sanitized conclusions.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com