The eating habits of tech execs: From Mark Zuckerberg's 'kill what you eat' routine to Elon Musk's Diet Coke obsession

Just because billionaires have the money to pay for pricey personal chefs or high-end healthy foods doesn't mean they're adhering to diets that are good for them.

While some experiment with the latest health fads —like the Paleo diet and veganism — there are other tech billionaires who enjoy eating chocolate for breakfast or skip eating altogether for days at a time.

So when it comes to wealth, you may want to follow the lead of these techies, but think twice when it comes to health.

"I'm not sure how I'd survive without English Breakfast tea," he told the Daily Mail in 2016.

Branson starts his day with fruit salad and muesli for breakfast. Occasionally, the billionaire will eat kipper, a herring-like fish, instead.

The billionaire fills his days with exercise, time with his family, and business meetings, which he prefers to schedule "over lunchtime" to help "lighten the mood," he said in a blog post on Virgin's website in 2017.

For dinner, he's said he prefers to hold group meals "where stories are shared and ideas are born." Branson said he goes to bed around 11 p.m. and gets about six hours of sleep each night.

In December, Branson said he likes to wake up around 6 a.m. to play tennis and prefers to have his personal assistant type out his emails.

Earlier this year, Bezos' fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, said that Bezos makes pancakes every Sunday morning.

"He gets the Betty Crocker cookbook out every time, and I'm like, 'OK, you're the smartest man in the world; why don't you have this memorized yet?'" Sanchez told The Wall Street Journal.

The former news anchor told the Journal that Bezos is also "extremely dedicated to his workouts" with his personal trainer Wes Okerson.

In a 2014 meeting with a small e-commerce company that Amazon eventually acquired, Bezos ordered a breakfast of Mediterranean octopus with potatoes, bacon, green garlic yogurt, and a poached egg, according to a report from D Magazine.

"You're the octopus that I'm having for breakfast," Bezos reportedly said. "When I look at the menu, you're the thing I don't understand, the thing I've never had. I must have the breakfast octopus."

The cookies are high in protein and fiber, and low in carbs, according to the company's website.

Cuban invested in the company in 2012 after its cofounder sent him a sample box of the cookies with a letter asking him to invest $50,000 in the company for a 25% stake, CNBC reported.

"I don't just eat them, I live on them," Cuban says on his company website. "It is not an exaggeration to say there are days when I have had them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner."

His favorite type of cookie is the Healthy Oatmeal Bite, according to the company.

The "Shark Tank" investor told Men's Journal in 2017 that he buys two salads from McDonald's, puts them in one big bowl, and adds "corn, cottage cheese, relish, and for croutons, some crunchy cereal."

Though in 2019, Cuban disclosed that he was a vegetarian. Cuban revealed that he had given up meat during a "Shark Tank" episode in which he invested $250,000 in a plant-based meat company.

"I'll be on the front page of it. I'll be the poster-child for it. We'll hustle. I don't mess around," Cuban said.

"All those cans also add up to something like 35 pounds of aluminum a year," Gates wrote in 2014.

Earlier this year, Michelin star chef Jordi Cruz said that Gates once reserved his entire restaurant for two days and only ordered a Diet Coke.

He's said he eats Cocoa Puffs for breakfast. Though his ex-wife Melinda Gates has said in the past that he skips the meal altogether.

He also apparently loves cheeseburgers. In a Reddit AMA from 2016, Gates responded "Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger" when he was asked about his favorite sandwich.

In the Netflix series "Inside Bill's Brain," Gates talked about his fondness for the powdered beverage, Tang. 

"I would buy a bottle of Tang, which is an orange sugary drink [mix] that they took to the moon that you know, instead of going to meals, I would just pour orange Tang on my hand and lick it off my hand as I was working on things," Gates said in the documentary, according to a report from CNBC.

The Apple cofounder would sometimes eat only one or two foods at a time, for weeks, according to Walter Isaacson's biography.

At one point, his diet was strictly carrots and apples. At another time, he was a "fruitarian" and would only eat fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and grains, the book said.

Jobs told Isaacson he "swore off meat" when he was a freshman at Reed College, and he later gave up grains and milk.

The Apple cofounder believed that as a result he didn't need to wear deodorant or shower regularly, Isaacson's book said.

Sometimes Jobs would fast for several days at a time, which he said would create feelings of euphoria, per the biography.

In 2003, when Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he tried to heal himself through his diet, eating a lot of juiced fruit and carrots.

Five years later, he reintroduced fish and other proteins back into his diet after part of his pancreas was removed. But by the time of his death in 2011, the Apple cofounder was on a mostly liquid diet. 

"If there was a way that I could not eat so I could work more, I would not eat," Musk said in Ashlee Vance's biography "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future."

Musk used to skip breakfast — or eat a Mars bar or donut to start his day.

"I'm trying to cut down on sweet stuff, and I should have an omelet and coffee," Musk said in 2017, according to Entrepreneur.

But he hasn't appeared to curb the habit much. The billionaire said on X earlier this year that he eats a donut every morning. 

"I'd rather eat tasty food and live a shorter life," Musk told Joe Rogan in 2020.

The billionaire said whatever his assistant brings him during meetings, he'll "inhale it in five minutes."

Instead, Musk focuses on dinner, which often take place over business. Musk said in a 2015 Reddit AMA that his favorite cuisines are French and barbecue. 

Last year, Musk posted a photo on X of what he claims to be his bedside table. The picture included four cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke.

Musk has expressed his love for the beverage several times over the years. 

In 2007, Inc. said in a profile of Musk that he was drinking eight cans a day at one point.

"I got so freaking jacked that I seriously started to feel like I was losing my peripheral vision," Musk said, though he added that the the electric-car maker has since begun offering caffeine-free Diet Coke at its offices.

In 2022, he wrote on X that he doesn't care if Diet Coke "lowers my life expectancy."

In 2011, he set a "personal challenge" for himself to only eat meat from animals he had killed.

He announced the goal in a Facebook post, according to Fortune. His "kill what you eat" diet included goats, pigs, chickens, and lobsters.

He once hosted Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and treated him to goat he had killed, Dorsey told Rolling Stone. Dorsey said he remembers that the goat was served cold, so he stuck to salad for dinner.

In 2012, the former Twitter CEO revealed his daily breakfast at the time was two hard-boiled eggs with soy sauce.

Dorsey has also dabbled in mainstream diet fads. He used to be a vegan, but too much beta-carotene (the orange pigment found in carrots) caused his skin to turn orange. So by 2013, he'd switched to the Paleo diet, the hunter-gathering regimen that forbids eating refined sugars, grains, and processed foods.

In 2019, Dorsey said he only eats one meal a day — dinner — during the work week, then fasts the entire weekend, following a diet trend popular in Silicon Valley at the time called "intermittent fasting."

The Twitter cofounder said it helps him focus.

By 2020, though, Dorsey said he was eating seven meals a week — just dinner.

"The first time I did it, like day three, I felt like I was hallucinating," Dorsey said.

"It was a weird state to be in. But as I did it the next two times, it just became so apparent to me how much of our days are centered around meals and how — the experience I had was when I was fasting for much longer, how time really slowed down," he said on a 2019 episode of the podcast "Ben Greenfield Life."

Johnson, the founder of Kernel, hopes to rewind the clock of his body a few decades through a program he started called Project Blueprint.

He takes two dozen medicines and supplements in the morning, and maintains a vegan diet of soft and solid foods. He restricts his daily intake to 1,977 calories a day.

Johnson also drinks a smoothie as soon as he wakes up called "the green giant," which includes compounds like spermidine, creatine, collagen peptides, and cocoa flavanols.

In the post, he also noted that he takes methyl B-12, Omega-3, Iron, and Vitamin D-3 as supplements.

Recently, Altman said he also takes the diabetes drug metformin, which has become popular with biohackers as a way to slow aging.

While he usually consumes his first can with "potato stix" he sometimes switches it up with ice cream, Fortune said.

Buffet has jokingly said he eats "like a six-year-old" because actuarial tables say six-year-olds have the lowest death rate, Fortune noted. 

Bill Gates, a friend of Buffet's, has observed that his fellow billionaire largely has a diet of McDonald's hamburgers and Oreos, Fortune noted. 

Paige Leskin contributed previous reporting to this story.