Two weeks after a private meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, Meta has donated $1 million to the U.S. President-elect’s inaugural fund, a company spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed response.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, said the donation was a departure from past practice by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Such donations are used to pay for various events when a newly-elected president takes office.
They are also seen as a way of seeking the new leader’s favour, and since Zuckerberg is nowhere close to the kind of “First Buddy” status that fellow tech titan Elon Musk enjoys vis a vis Trump, the donation perhaps makes sense.
Zuckerberg had declined to endorse either Donald Trump or Joe Biden for this year’s election, in a media interview that took place before Biden stepped down as the Democratic nominee and was replaced by Kamala Harris.
The billionaire CEO, however, had complemented Trump’s reaction to the July 13 assassination attempt as “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life,” among his recent attempts to appeal to conservative users.
Zuckerberg had met Trump after the elections in late November, according to the New York Times, a meeting that the newspaper said was the latest attempt by the Meta boss to establish a positive rapport with Trump.
Trump and Zuckerberg’s Meta have had strained relations in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
The president-elect accused Meta of suppressing content that would have hurt Biden in the 2020 election, and also criticized Zuckerberg’s donations to bolster election infrastructure.
Meta suspended Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts for about two years following the January 2021 Capitol riots. Earlier this year, he called Facebook an “enemy of the people”, and indicated that a law requiring TikTok to be banned unless sold by its parent firm ByteDance, would only benefit Facebook.
(With inputs from Reuters)
