Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Answers 'Why Wear Grey T-Shirt Every Day?' And Other Tough Questions

Ever wonder why the boyish-looking 30-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Facebook, always wears a grey T-shirt seven days a week?

Yes, it's true, the 14th richest man in the world with a net worth of $33.3 billion as November this year, has never been seen wearing a formal business attire like men of his stature usually do.

During his first public Q&A session at his Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, last Thursday, Nov. 6, Zuckerberg was asked: "Why do you wear the same grey T-shirt every day?"

"You'll be happy to know there are multiple of the same shirt," he said with a chuckle.

Explaining further, he said, "I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible, other than how to best serve this community."

Zuckerberg said he believes that making lots of trivial decisions, such as what you eat for breakfast or what you wear, can take up a lot of energy. He said allowing himself one less daily concern—like picking the right tie to match a suit coat—means he has more energy to use in running Facebook.

"Even though it sounds silly, that that's my reason for wearing a grey T-shirt every day, it's true," he said. "Steve Jobs did it."

Jobs, the late co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc., was also notorious for wearing the same black turtlenecks almost every day.

Psychologists say Zuckerberg's wardrobe choice is simply a sign of genius. According to psychologist Oliver Burkeman who has studied the habits of genius, sticking to a very fixed routine – like wearing the same shirt every day -- can help a mind focus on the more important issues.

Zuckerberg spent more than an hour responding to questions from the audience.

Here were the other interesting questions he answered:

Q: Is Facebook becoming boring or losing its charm?

Z: "My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I'm not a cool person, and I've never really tried to be cool. Our goal isn't necessarily to make it particularly exciting to use; we want to make it useful." He likened Facebook to electricity or running water: "Something you can rely on that you'd be pretty bummed if it were to disappear."

Q: Why would you force us to install the messenger app?

Z: (Laughing) "We really believe this is a better experience," adding that more than 10 billion messages are sent every day on Facebook. After the company did some research, they found that the messaging apps people used most were those that provided "dedicated, focused experiences."

Q: How accurate was the movie 'The Social Network' compared to the real life story of Facebook's beginnings?

Z: "I haven't thought about that movie in a while. I'd kind of blocked that one out. It was a very interesting experience to watch a movie that was supposedly about my life. The reality is that writing code and building a product and then building a company actually is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about, so you can imagine that a lot of stuff they probably had to embellish and make up. Because if they were really making a movie, it would have been me sitting at a computer coding for two hours straight, which probably would have been not that good of a movie."

Before ending the session, Zuckerberg talked about Facebook's new campaign to fight the spread of the deadly Ebola virus. This week, the social networking site began sending a message to users, with an option to donate to three different nonprofits working to stop the spread of disease in West Africa.