Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta donates $1m to Trump’s inaugural fund in latest attempt to rebuild bridges
Facebook founder appears to be moving to mend fences with the president-elect after years of rocky relations
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Your support makes all the difference.Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly donated $1m to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, marking the latest twist in the complicated relationship between the tech boss and the Republican president-elect.
The donation has been confirmed by the Silicon Valley company, according to The Wall Street Journal, and comes despite Trump threatening the Facebook founder with jail just months earlier, if he attempted to influence the 2024 election.
The move is the latest example of a tech CEO moving to make a conciliatory gesture towards Trump now that his return to the White House has been confirmed and his party have secured control over both chambers of Congress.
Trump has been enjoying a very public “bromance” with Elon Musk in recent months while Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, a long-time enemy of the blustering New York property tycoon, praised his November 5 win as “an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.”
“What I’ve seen so far is that he is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled,” Bezos recently told a New York Times conference.
Now Zuckerberg appears to be continuing on his goal to build bridges with the president-elect.
The Meta boss dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, last month following the Republican’s win over Kamala Harris. Zuckerberg also sent his policy executives Joel Kaplan and Kevin Martin to meet with incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Republican strategist Brian Baker.
Zuckerberg himself is said to have given Trump a personal demonstration of Meta’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses and gifted him a pair and also met with the president-elect’s pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, plus advisers Stephen Miller, Vince Haley and James Blair.
The Meta boss has previously donated to candidates on both sides of the political divide in recent elections but has rarely made a public endorsement. He did not donate to either Trump’s 2017 inaugural fund or Joe Biden’s in 2021.
The large donation marks a drastic turnaround in the two men’s relationship from just a few years ago.
Zuckerberg was critical of the 45th president’s approach to tackling illegal immigration during his first term, writing in a Facebook post in 2017: “Like many of you, I’m concerned about the impact of the recent executive orders signed by President Trump.”
Relations remained cordial, however, with the CEO visiting the White House in 2019 and dining with Trump before banning him from his platform in the wake of the Capitol riot on January 6 2021.
Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan’s decision to donate $400 million to local election officials to ensure the integrity of the vote during the pandemic also led Republicans to accuse him of meddling in the outcome on behalf of Democrats.
Trump also declared that “Zuckerbucks” should “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he could be proven to have done so in his recent coffee table book Save America.
But Zuckerberg appears to have had a change of heart. He has since become more critical of Democrats, saying in an August letter to the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee that he regretted bowing to pressure from the Biden administration to censor Covid-19 related content on Facebook during lockdown.
The tech executive then unexpectedly praised Trump’s response to the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, calling his rising up from the platform, bleeding from the right ear and making a fist pump “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life”.
He told Bloomberg: “On some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight, and I think that that’s why a lot of people like the guy.”
He stopped short of actually endorsing Trump but the Republican nevertheless claimed Zuckerberg had subsequently called him to say: “I’ve never supported a Republican before, but there’s no way I can vote for a Democrat in this election.”
Trump then told a Barstool Sports podcast that he likes Zuckerberg “much better now”.
“I actually believe he’s staying out of the election, which is nice,” he added.
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