Zuckerberg’s Charm Offensive on Trump Now Includes a $1M Gift
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund in the tech bro billionaire’s latest attempt to curry favor with the president-elect, according to The Wall Street Journal.
It comes after the Facebook founder also did a private demonstration of his company’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses and gave Trump a pair during a November détente at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Zuckerberg and his advisers reportedly spent two days attempting to repair the men’s relationship, which has been uneven over the past eight years.
They kept in touch during Trump’s first term, with Zuckerberg visiting Trump in the White House in 2019, but things turned sour after Facebook suspended Trump’s account following the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
Trump has also threatened to throw Zuckerberg in jail for the “crime” of donating $400 million in 2020 to bolster local, non-partisan election infrastructure to help Americans vote during the pandemic.
Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan hired a GOP strategist, Brian Baker, in the fall of 2021 to try to convince Trump and other Republicans that the money was not in fact used to elect Democrats in battleground states as Trump claimed, the Journal reported. Baker promised the donation wouldn’t happen again, but apparently Trump wasn’t convinced.
“All I can say is that if I’m elected President, we will pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time. We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social in July.
Ten days later, after a would-be assassin shot at Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, Zuckerberg called Trump’s post-shooting first pump “badass,” and the two men reportedly spoke.
During the election, Facebook stopped flagging false information about voting and eliminated one of its major fact-checking tools, leading local election officials to say they were overwhelmed by election misinformation.
In October, Trump told a podcaster he liked Zuckerberg “much better now,” according to the Journal.
Neither Zuckerberg nor Meta donated to Trump’s inaugural fund in 2016 or President Joe Biden’s in 2021.
According to The New York Times, donors who give $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund will get tickets to multiple inaugural events between Jan. 17 and Jan. 20, including some featuring Trump himself, his wife Melania, his Cabinet picks, and Vice President-elect JD Vance. It’s not clear if Zuckerberg or any other Meta officials will attend.
Of course, Meta’s $1 million contribution is rather paltry compared to the quarter of a billion dollars that his tech rival Elon Musk poured into Trump’s re-election campaign. But it’s a start.
