It’s becoming more and more difficult for Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s newly red-pilled CEO, to claim the rightward shift at his company reflects business as usual. According to a new report in The New York Times, Trump ally and surrogate Stephen Miller told Zuckerberg in December that the president-elect planned to go to war on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which the Meta chief has now axed just ahead of Trump taking office. At the same Mar-a-Lago meeting, the Times reported, Zuckerberg blamed Meta’s progressive culture on his “close friend” and former colleague, Sheryl Sandberg.
Zuckerberg reportedly “signaled” to Miller and other senior Trump advisers “that he would do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda,” according to the Times, and that in the coming months, his company would “focus solely on building tech products.” And as part of that shift, Zuckerberg reportedly added, Meta would soon announce layoffs and additional guidelines to “reset” the company’s culture. (Miller and Meta officials declined to comment to the Times.)
All of those things have since come to pass, less than two months after Zuckerberg and Miller’s tête-à-tête. In addition to killing its DEI program—a move the company blamed on the shifting “policy landscape” in the US—Zuckerberg has downsized Meta’s moderation efforts, cancelled a nine-year fact-checking project and railed against the “neutering” of corporate culture on Joe Rogan’s podcast. On Wednesday, Meta also announced plans to cut five percent of its workforce, or roughly 3,600 people, though it’s not yet clear which teams will be impacted. The company’s long-time global policy chief, Nick Clegg, has already departed.
The Times’ reporting sheds further light on Meta’s MAGAfication—and the larger, political realignment taking place inside Big Tech. While Silicon Valley has long served as a reliable stronghold for Democrats, many of its foremost leaders have lately cozied up to Trump and his administration. In addition to Zuckerberg, at least half a dozen prominent tech CEOs—including Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Sam Altman—will attend Trump’s inauguration on Monday, Axios reported. They join Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and TikTok CEO Shou Chew, who will sit on the inaugural dais alongside the Trump family, Elon Musk and a host of other notables.
Tech executives do potentially have much to gain from a friendship with Trump: During his first term, the president-elect showed apparent preference for companies that aligned with him. His deregulatory agenda could also benefit US tech firms, which chafed under departing President Joe Biden’s approach to antitrust law, artificial intelligence and the taxation of the ultrarich. In his farewell address on Wednesday, Biden warned about the rise of “a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers” to society. “Today,” Biden said, “an oligarchy is taking shape in America … that literally threatens our entire democracy.”
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