Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that his employees at Meta refer to him as "The Eye of Sauron". He claims that they do this in an affectionate way, in the way you might, for example, refer to a close friend as "Cthulhu, destroyer of worlds" or "Y'Golonac, God of perversion and depravity".

Appearing on the Tim Ferriss Show, he told the host that his hands-on approach had earned him the friendly nickname, referring to the flaming all-seeing eye adopted by the Dark Lord in the Third Age of Middle Earth in JRR Tolkein's fantasy books.

“Some of the folks who I work with at the company say this lovingly," he told Ferriss. "But I think that they sometimes refer to my attention as the Eye of Sauron."

Part of the nickname could be down to his hands-on approach, and what he describes as his "unending amount of energy to go work on something", and his tendency to spring meetings on people, rather than arrange them in advance.

"I just think the engagement that you get of having, like, an immediate feedback loop around thinking about something," he told the podcast, "and then getting to go talk to the people who are working on this is so much better than going and scheduling a meeting that you’ll have three weeks later."

Well, we guess it's better than something like "Gorgon, Bringer of Death" or, far worse, "The Zuck".