Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta donates $1m to Trump’s inaugural fund

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Meta Plat­forms has donated $1 mil­lion to pres­id­ent-elect Don­ald Trump’s inaug­ural fund, the latest step by CEO 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 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’s “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 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 Senator 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 Ray­Ban smart glasses, which he gave as a present 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.

Fed­eral cam­paign-fin­ance reports show Zuck­er­berg has sup­por­ted con­gres­sional can­did­ates in both parties over the years and has largely stayed out of pres­id­en­tial races.

Neither Zuck­er­berg nor Meta donated to Trump’s inaug­ural fund in 2017 or to Pres­id­ent Biden’s fund in 2021, accord­ing to pub­lic records. Both of those funds drew $1m dona­tions from fewer than a dozen major cor­por­a­tions.

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