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Priscilla Chan met her husband, Mark Zuckerberg, at a party in the Bell Tower suite in Pforzheimer House. It’s something out of a Harvard fantasy — deciding to venture to the Quad and meeting the love of your life, who is also a future billionaire.

The rest is history: Chan and Zuckerberg have been married for over 12 years now. After their wedding, Zuckerberg changed his Facebook status to “married” — a signal that rivals the “hard launches” of today’s couples. Recently, Zuckerberg has returned to making public proclamations of love on his social media channels.

According to an Instagram post from Zuckerberg, to celebrate his “dating anniversary” with Chan, he formed Z-Pain, a rap duo with T-Pain. The duo’s only song is a cover of “Get Low” by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz, the song that Zuckerberg says was playing when the couple met. In contrast to the original’s dynamic and vibrant beat, Zuckerberg’s rendition is slow and acoustic. It is cute, almost reminiscent of a cliché high school serenade. It is also very public — his Instagram post announcing the collaboration has over 600,000 likes, and the cover has over 700,000 listens on Spotify.

The decision to release the song publicly is an interesting one — what may have been intended as a sweet token of love now just seems like another public relations maneuver. The revenue that the song generates will be donated to Save the Music, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving access to music education for children. It would be possible for Zuckerberg’s philanthropy to translate as authenticity if he embraced the sincerity that made his meet cute with Chan so compelling. Instead, the song is a flat spectacle of auto-tuned vocals and stunt collaboration.It remains unclear why Zuckerberg enlisted the help of T-Pain, who was not involved in the original recording of “Get Low.”

Earlier this year, Zuckerberg also unveiled a seven-foot-tall statue of his wife on his Instagram. This time, Zuckerberg’s mission was to revive the Roman tradition of creating sculptures of wives. The resemblance to Chan is truly remarkable; Zuckerberg employed sculpture artist Daniel Arsham to create the imposing turquoise figure. And while the post has attracted a sea of comments fawning over the artwork, such a grandiose symbol of wealth is sure to unnerve others.

It cannot be overstated how tacky both of these gestures are. Even the statue is ugly and garish, but Z-Pain is so ridiculous that the collaboration borders on satirical. Perhaps if these gestures were kept private, away from the social networking platforms Zuckerberg owns, the song and statue could be endearingly gauche. The desire to commission these trinkets of love is almost understandable. When a person has more money than they know what to do with, the results are acoustic guitar covers of rap songs and statues larger than the real people they represent.

But when these trinkets are shared with an audience of over 15 million people, it’s worth questioning why Zuckerberg is suddenly an open patron of the arts. Following the release of his cover, Zuckerberg appeared on “Track Star,” an internet show about music. In the interview, Zuckerberg correctly identified a variety of songs, from Olivia Rodrigo to Sixpence None the Richer, after listening to snippets of them. But Zuckerberg’s most impressive moment came when he was asked about the future of artificial intelligence in music.

“AI will probably be able to produce technically interesting music,” Zuckerberg said on Track Star. “But it maybe sometimes feels a little soulless because it lacks the other part of the human connection that are the background to these artists.”

There is a comfort in knowing that even the CEO of Meta can acknowledge the limitations of AI, and this statement works to separate him from his peers in the tech industry.

From an economic standpoint, Zuckerberg’s decision to appear on a web show to discuss the songs he likes is almost inexplicable. The answer is revealed near the end of the video, when Zuckerberg very unsubtly calls attention to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses both he and the host have been wearing for the duration of the interview. The team behind “Track Star” noted that Zuckerberg releasing “Get Low” signaled that he had an interest in music. From there, both parties could see a mutually beneficial financial proposition.

Through his declarations of love for his wife, Zuckerberg has been making public declarations of love for art as a concept. And while Zuckerberg may not be embarking on a noble, altruistic crusade for the arts, appreciating art is a uniquely human activity — which distinguishes him from the robotic ideas of infinite growth other tech bros propagate.