No, Mark Zuckerberg has not donated any money to a nonprofit that is suing the Trump administration, his spokesman said Friday.
A right-wing influencer who works for Stephen K. Bannon, Natalie Winters, argued on social media in an X thread this week that Mr. Zuckerberg was indirectly funding Protect Democracy. Project Democracy is backing a lawsuit brought by labor unions against Mr. Trump to prevent the Department of Government Efficiency from getting access to government data. “If he wants to prove he’s truly MAGA, he should condemn these actions and withdraw funds,” she wrote, referencing the Make America Great Again slogan.
But Brian Baker, a spokesman for Mr. Zuckerberg, told The New York Times that neither Mr. Zuckerberg nor his wife, nor their joint philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, had ever made a donation to Protect Democracy.
Mr. Zuckerberg, a major philanthropist who has aggressively sought to make inroads with President Trump is among the largest and most prominent donors to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The foundation manages so-called donor-advised funds for many of the wealthiest people in Silicon Valley. Institutions like the foundation function like a bank, taking in money from many donors and disbursing it to recipients at the direction of each account holder.
Community foundations file tax returns publicly that list all recipients of their grants, and $3 million moved from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to Protect Democracy in 2023, the most recent year for which tax records are available. The foundation gave out $4.6 billion in grants that year.
But Mr. Zuckerberg maintaining an account at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation does not mean that he actually donated any funds to Protect Democracy. More than 1,000 other people have accounts there and could be responsible for funding it.
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