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Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has donated $1mn to a fund for Donald Trump’s inauguration events in the latest overture by the social media platform aimed at mending relations with the US president-elect.
The donation marks the first time Facebook’s owner has contributed to an inauguration fund and comes after recent jockeying to curry favour with Trump, who has previously accused the platform of censoring rightwing voices and threatened to jail its chief executive.
Last week, Meta’s head of global affairs Nick Clegg conceded the company “overdid it a bit” when moderating pandemic-related content, an admission that appeared designed to placate the president-elect’s concerns.
Clegg also said Zuckerberg was keen to play “an active role in the debates that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere”, including in areas such as artificial intelligence.
Executives in Silicon Valley, which Trump has previously considered a left- leaning constituency, have been racing to court him since his election victory last month.
Leading tech figures are also finding roles in his administration. Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has become one of Trump’s closest advisers, while David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor in Musk’s inner circle, has been named as the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency tsar for the incoming administration.
Trump and Zuckerberg have had a testy relationship, which worsened when Meta labelled and took down some of the then-president’s content in 2020, before suspending his account in the wake of the January 6 uprising at the Capitol.
In July, Trump warned that if elected, he would “pursue Election Fraudsters” and send them to “prison for long periods of time”, adding “ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” in a clear reference to the chief executive. That month, Meta lifted restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg said he wanted Meta to be politically “neutral”, and the company has reduced the prominence of political content across its apps.
However, in the months leading up to the election, Zuckerberg called Trump a “badass” for his reaction to an assassination attempt and wrote a letter to the Republican-led House judiciary committee accusing the Biden administration of repeatedly pressuring Meta to “censor” certain Covid-19 content during the pandemic.
More recently, since the election victory, he dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Meta afterwards said Zuckerberg was “grateful” for the invitation, adding: “It’s an important time for the future of American innovation.”
The donation was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
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