Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stopped in the Capital City on Thursday to dine at Smokin Aces BBQ in Mid City, and while here the social media mogul had a chance encounter with local ballet dancer and entrepreneur Roxi Victorian.
Victorian spotted Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, seated at a table with three other people eating lunch. She struck up a conversation with him about her 9-year-old son’s love for programming, and Zuckerberg encouraged her to continue to be a supportive mother.
“It’s nuts—you don’t see people like that every day,” Victorian told Daily Report.
The Baton Rouge stop was part of Zuckerberg’s road trip throughout the southern U.S., a self-imposed challenge to seek out and meet people in every U.S. state by the end of 2017. In a Jan. 3 post on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said he needs to travel to around 30 states this year to have visited them all.
Before his brief visit to Baton Rouge, Zuckerberg and Chan toured Alabama (meeting with Crimson Tide football coach Nick Saban at one point) and Mississippi. Last night, Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself and his wife celebrating Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
Zuckerberg, 32, founded Facebook in 2004 while a student at Harvard. The social network had nearly 1.9 billion users by the end of 2016.
In his post earlier this year, Zuckerberg said he wants to “get out and talk to more people about how they’re living, working and thinking about the future.”
“Going into this challenge, it seems we are at a turning point in history,” he wrote. “For decades, technology and globalization have made us more productive and connected. This has created many benefits, but for a lot of people it has also made life more challenging.”
Daily Report broke news of Victorian’s encounter with Zuckerberg. The chance meeting has since been retold by other publications.
—Sam Karlin
