Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he likes to surf every morning before he starts work because he finds it hard to get “hit” by bad news.

“When you’re in the water, it’s pretty hard to focus on anything else,” Zuckerberg told The Tim Ferriss Show.

“When you’re on the board, you focus on staying on the board and not messing anything up.”

Zuckerberg said shortly after waking up in the morning, he was checking his emails about his company’s internal activities – which is normally “a fair amount of bad news and new stuff for me to absorb”.

He said he wouldn’t be able to dive into the work after seeing the emails because “it’s almost like getting hit with a ton of new context.”

In order to get in the right frame of mind, Zuckerberg said he started foiling, or riding a hydrofoil board that lifts you above the surface of the water.

Zuck’s surfing habits have fed netizens.

On July 4, Zuckerberg was widely ridiculed on social media after posting a video showing him foiling on a lake while holding an American flag. John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” played in the background.

The previous year he had been photographed surfing while wearing a thick layer of white sunscreen, drawing comparisons to the Joker, the Phantom of the Opera and Queen Elizabeth I, England’s Renaissance monarch.

Zuckerberg has also been photographed repeatedly foiling the coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where he owns some 1,500 acres of land much to the chagrin of many locals.

The Meta co-founder said he plans to spend nearly half of his time this year working remotely from his Hawaiian compound rather than at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

Zuckerberg, whose net worth is valued by Forbes at $81 billion, making him the 15th richest person in the world as of Thursday, had plenty of reasons to want to relax.

Meta’s stock has lost about a third of its value since announcing its last earnings report, which found that its flagship social media platform Facebook was losing younger users to rivals such than TikTok and Snapchat.

The plummeting value of its shares also has many employees, who received options as one of the perks of their jobs, looking for exits.

The company appears so threatened by TikTok that it hired a major GOP consultancy to incite rage against TikTok and deflect political scrutiny from Facebook and Instagram, according to a report on Wednesday.

Meta has also been on the defensive over allegations that its executives knew Facebook and Instagram were hurting young users but did nothing.