[10] Zucker also was president of his sophomore, junior, and senior classes,[11] running on the slogan "The little man with the big ideas.

As such, he encouraged the Crimson's decades-old prank rivalry with the Harvard Lampoon, then headed by future NBC employee Conan O'Brien, which culminated in Zucker having O’Brien arrested.

[14] When he was not admitted to Harvard Law School, he began working at NBC by accepting an internship at the 1988 Summer Olympics.

[16] He introduced the program's trademark outdoor rock concert series and was in charge as Today moved to the "window on the world" Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza in 1994.

During Zucker's tenure, shows that he championed such as Father of the Pride and the Friends spinoff Joey were considered failures.

[21] Zucker was responsible for all programming across the company's television properties, including network, news, cable, sports and Olympics.

In 2010, in response to a public controversy over the network's reported rescheduling of late-night hosts Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, Los Angeles Times reporters Meg James and Matea Gold wrote that Zucker's tenure had led to "a spectacular fall by the country's premier television network" and dubbed the intra-network feud and subsequent public relations fallout "one of the biggest debacles in television history".

She explained that Zucker "is a master at managing up with bosses and calculating cost-per-hour benefits, but even though he made money on cable shows, he could not program the network to save his life.

In an interview with The New York Times, Zucker stated that aspects of its election coverage were influenced by sports channels (with the Times citing, specifically, debates between pundits reminiscent of shows such as ESPN's First Take, and large outdoor "pre-game" shows for the presidential debates), explaining that "the idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way.

[41] In August 2021, however, it was reported that he did not plan to leave until the completion of the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, Inc.[42] In March 2019, CNN parent WarnerMedia announced a reorganization in which Zucker would become chairman of the company's news and sports division, overseeing Turner Sports, Bleacher Report and AT&T SportsNet, in addition to maintaining his role as head of CNN.

In his resignation letter, Zucker acknowledged that he did not disclose a consensual relationship he had with CNN's Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Allison Gollust, when it began.

[48] In December 2022, Zucker was named an executive with Redbird IMI, a consortium with majority funding from Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Vice President of the UAE.

[50] The position also includes an active role in the XFL, a professional football league partially owned by RedBird.

[53] In 1996, Zucker married Caryn Stephanie Nathanson, then a supervisor for Saturday Night Live,[1] with whom he has four children; the two divorced in 2017.