After all he bought Instagram and WhatsApp for peanuts, and copied the best features of SnapChat.
Signal also has nothing he can emulate. Its most meaningful selling point is that it doesn't have an association or integration with a scummy social media company, and people using it for that reason are already lost to Facebook. This is a feature he cannot ever hope to copy.
Even if there is nothing to emulate, downloading the app at least gives him a feel for how close it is to WhatsApp's capabilities and would help him understand if it is a major competitive threat or not.
Both of them now have some variation on encrypted chats.
I bet the CEO of McDonalds has been to Burger King at least once to check out the customer experience. It really doesn't mean anything.
Assuming that his threat model is "my phone number will not be leaked", signing up on signal with his personal number seems fine.
Further: LAN Manager era Microsoft had a Novell Netware group, Microsoft also continued to use (Windows port) of sendmail while selling Exchange, had an entire Macintosh enthused business group.
TLDR: Of course Zuck has a Signal account.
Just consider: if you're looking for privacy-respecting, actually secure, reviewed, audited and tested to bone tech -- short of replicating the work yourself, who's assessment can you trust? Perhaps paradoxically, you should foremost trust the unspoken opinions of criminals. Because those people are likely betting their lives and freedoms on the tech choice. Barely any other group will approach such a choice with more vigor.
So, morals aside, that a technology is being used by criminals is actually a compliment to that technology.