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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