President Donald J. Trump welcomes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Thursday, Sept. 19, 2019, to the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joiyce N. Boghosian)
Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, controlled by founder Mark Zuckerberg, has given $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. Zuckerberg famously spent hundreds of millions of “Zuckerbucks” to help register voters against Trump during the 2020 election, so his newfound support of Trump has raised some eyebrows. Dana Mattioli reports in The Wall Street Journal:
Meta Platforms META 2.16%increase; green up pointing triangle has donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, the latest step by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to bolster his once-fraught relationship with the incoming president.
The donation, confirmed by the company, is a departure from past practice by Zuckerberg and his company, and comes after an election campaign in which Trump threatened to punish the tech tycoon if he tried to influence the election against him.
The contribution and efforts to court the incoming administration are emblematic of the balancing act for technology CEOs whose companies have often been the target of ire from Trump and other Republicans and whose workforces tend to lean strongly to the left.
Now, with Republicans set to take control of the White House and both houses of Congress and calling for new regulation of tech, some executives are adopting a new posture toward Trump.
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, long a foe of the president-elect, congratulated Trump on X after the election for “an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” and said this month that he was “actually very optimistic this time around.” Speaking at a New York Times conference, he said: “What I’ve seen so far is that he is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled.”
Zuckerberg’s efforts to strengthen ties—which began years earlier—included a November dinner with Trump on the patio of his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., that focused on general relationship-building.
The dinner capped a two-day flurry of meetings for Zuckerberg advisers at Mar-a-Lago. Senior Meta policy executives Joel Kaplan and Kevin Martin and Republican strategist Brian Baker met with incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, according to people familiar with the matter.
Zuckerberg and his advisers met with Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, as well as with three senior incoming White House advisers: Stephen Miller, Vince Haley and James Blair.
Before the dinner, Zuckerberg did a private demonstration for Trump of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, which he gifted to the president-elect, the people familiar with the discussions said.
Zuckerberg’s team told the inaugural fund before the dinner that Meta planned to donate, one of the people said.
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