May 27, 2025 • 19 mins
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been going through a bit of a MAGA rebrand, complete with a new look — gold chains, grown-out hair, custom boxy, black T-shirts — and appearances on so-called manosphere podcasts hosted by MAGA-friendly comedians like Theo Von and Joe Rogan.
Those changes have translated to his company, too. Since January, Meta has rolled back diversity efforts, weakened hate speech policies, disbanded its civil-rights team, eliminated its outside fact-checking system and added a prominent Trump ally to its board of directors.
On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg’s Riley Griffin joins host Sarah Holder to discuss the political evolution of Mark Zuckerberg: What he hopes to gain from getting closer to Trump and what he has to show for it.
Read more: Mark Zuckerberg Loves MAGA Now. Will MAGA Ever Love Him Back?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
You might have noticed that lately Mark Zuckerberg has been
going through a bit of a rebrand. The Meta CEO
has been sporting a new look, gold chains, grown out hair,
and custom black T shirts with Greek and Latin phrases.
He's appeared on so called Manisphere podcasts hosted by MAGA
(00:28):
friendly comedians like Theo Vonn and Joe Rogan.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Just I think a lot of a corporate world is
like pretty culturally neutered, And.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
I just think that Suckerberg on rogan Show back in January,
talking about martial arts, bow hunting and what he sees
as corporate America's backlash to masculinity, the.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Kind of masculine energy I think is good. Yeah, obviously,
you know society has plenty of that, but I think
corporate culture was really like trying to get away from it.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Zuckerberg's newly conservative talking points.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a
bit more has its own merits that are really positive.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
And embrace of MAGA has led to changes at Meta too.
Since January, Meta has added Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO and
prominent Trump ally Dana White, to its board of directors.
It's also rolled back diversity efforts, weakend hate speech policies,
disbanded its civil rights team, and eliminated its outside fact
(01:37):
checking system. For outside observers, it's felt like a dramatic shift,
and according to Bloomberg Meta reporter Riley Griffin, it's felt
that way for some people inside Meta too. Zuckerberg declined
to be interviewed for the story, but Riley and our
colleague Bloomberg reporter Kurt Wagner have spoken to more than
(01:57):
thirty current and former Meta employeesout Zuckerberg's changing approach to politics,
plus a dozen government officials who engaged with Meta during
three presidential administrations. Many of their sources asked for anonymity
out of fear of retribution. Riley and Kurt learned that
these tensions came to a head at an internal meeting
(02:18):
of Meta's senior leadership in January.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Some of these senior leaders were frustrated.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Zuckerberg faced questions about those policy changes and exactly what
he meant when he spoke about masculine energy on Joe
Rogan's podcast.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
He acknowledged that maybe masculine was not the right use
of words but he said that corporate culture had become
less aggressive and should get a little bit more aggressive
and competitive. And as for the other questions about content,
policy changes and fact checking, he was unapologetic. He didn't
want to relitigate these decisions, and from everyone we speak
(02:54):
to that remains true.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Bloomberg News Today. On the show the political evolution of
Mark Zuckerberg, what he hopes to gain from getting closer
to Trump, what he has to show for it, and
how his MAGA leanings are already changing meta. Bloomberg's Riley
(03:21):
Griffin says that to understand Mark Zuckerberg's shift to the right,
you have to go back nearly two decades to the
Obama administration.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
He and Obama would have dinners, they took calls with
each other. President Obama even participated in a Facebook town hall.
There was a light touch approach to technology, a lot
of optimism and very little regulation, and in the wake
of the twenty sixteen election, all that changed.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Facebook was thrust into the center of a global scandal
around the role the social network played in spreading political
misinformation and how it may have influenced the outcome of
the election.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
In the immediate aftermath of the election, we saw Zuckerberg
experience shock and confusion around the outcome. He at the
time said that it was a crazy, quote unquote idea
that misinformation had influenced the election outcome. But we also
start to see the company make amends, if you will.
(04:22):
They shore up fact checking efforts, they focus on election integrity.
He also actually went on a nationwide tour he was
trying to understand the electorate. So it was a period
of processing but also the beginning of immense backlash for
a company that had until this time had a pretty
productive relationship to Washington and especially the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Zuckerberg appeared before Congress and said his company hadn't done
enough to prevent its platform from being used for harm.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections,
and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.
We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility
and that was a big mistake, and it was my
mistake and I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Meanwhile, his company tried to build inroads with the new administration.
Joel Kaplan, a former GOP strategist who's now Meta's chief
Global affairs officer was focused on ensuring Zuckerberg had connections
in Trump's orbit. Joel Kaplan had been discussing with Mark
Zuckerberg the benefits of a Republican administration that was business
(05:30):
friendly and a conservative Supreme Court, and this strategy, folks
inside the company told me, came to be known as
the Clarence Thomas strategy. The idea here being that any
major existential threat to Facebook would ultimately rise to the
Supreme Court, and so the company didn't want to alienate
conservative justices who would be essentially making those key decisions.
(05:55):
But the criticism was still unrelenting, and it came from
all Sidesberg's apology tour didn't persuade Democrats that he could
be trusted to lead a social media empire that had
grown to have billions of users, and the content moderation
efforts he put in place after the twenty sixteen election
angered Trump and his allies, who increasingly complained about what
(06:16):
they saw as an anti conservative bias on Facebook. Then
came the pandemic.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
I was actually a COVID reporter at the time, and
remember those early days when we were writing a lot
about misinformation, conspiracy, theories were really proliferating on the platform.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
This was all happening in the months leading up to
the twenty twenty election, as unfounded concerns about election integrity
were swirling online. The Stop the Steel movement was already
cropping up, and the Biden campaign was really frustrated that
they felt Facebook wasn't taking that seriously. After Biden one,
the misinformation and division on Facebook just picked up steep.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
And ultimately we saw January sixth emerge.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
And within twenty four hours of rioters storming the capital,
Facebook took action.
Speaker 5 (07:06):
For the first time ever. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram suspended
President Trump's Twitter accounts yesterday and now Mark Zuckerberg is
staying in a post that quote, we believe the risks
of allowing the president to continue to use our service
during this period are simply too great.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Facebook felt it was taking a strong approach to countering
misinformation around the election and also around COVID and vaccines,
but it wasn't enough for Democrats.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Congressional probes ultimately revealed correspondence between the White House and
then Facebook that show there was a lot of skepticism
from the White House as to how effective that was
and whether they were being run around. In one email
from a White House staffer, the subject line was titled,
(07:52):
you are hiding the ball and speaking with a lot
of folks in Washington, including in the Biden administration, I've
learned that President Biden privately with his aides would call
Zuckerberg little towerp and he also used a term that
replaced the Z in Zuckerberg with an F.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
A spokesperson for Biden's office declined to comment for the story.
Riley says these long simmering tensions reached a boiling point
in July of twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
What happened on that Friday afternoon as President Biden was
walking to board his helicopter to Camp David Was, a
reporter shouted a question and asked about mis information, and Biden,
you know, walked towards the reporter.
Speaker 6 (08:40):
And said, we're killing people.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
I mean it really, well, Look.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinator and
that's and they're killing people.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
They're killing people, And that kind of comment is not
a normal thing for a president to allege a major
US company is doing, but that was how the president felt.
It was a moment of candor and having that out
in the open was a big pr crisis for the company.
Many people pulled all nighters. They were in touch with
(09:14):
the White House. We've reviewed messages between Mark Zuckerberg and
Cheryl Sandberg and others at the company. They felt that
it was disingenuous, It didn't encompass the kind of work
that they'd been doing on COVID. It was one of
those moments where this tension really spilled into the public
and showed how bad things had gotten between the administration
(09:37):
and the company during this time. Did that one moment
help lead us to Zuckerberg's magnification today? My reporting suggests so.
It's an important moment. It's a pivotal moment, but it's
one of many moments you can look to that I
think create a snowball effect. According to the people we've
(09:58):
spoken with, have increasingly pushed Mark Zuckerberg in this direction.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
By twenty twenty four, with Trump's third campaign in full swing,
Zuckerberg dropped a big hint about his new political allegiances.
In July of that year, days after Trump survived an
assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, Zuckerberg spoke with Bloomberg's Emily.
Speaker 6 (10:21):
Chang, Yeah, I mean seeing Donald Trumpet get up after
getting shot in the face and pump his fist in
the air with the American flag is one of the
most badass things I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
After the break, Zuckerberg doubles down. Since Donald Trump's reelection,
Bloomberg Meta reporter Riley Griffin says Mark Zuckerberg has put
a lot of effort into getting on the administration's good side.
(11:00):
Made a one million dollar donation to the Inauguration Fund.
The night Trump was sworn in, Zuckerberg co hosted a
black tie reception in the president's honor. In March, he
acquired a twenty three million dollar mansion steps away from
the Vice president's residence, and Riley says flight records for
Zuckerberg's private jet show he's been making monthly trips to Washington.
(11:24):
Meta has said Zuckerberg has traveled to Washington to discuss
AI and American technology leadership, and Zuckerberg has said that
any American company should try to have a productive relationship
with whoever is running the government. Why is Zuckerberg doing
all this? Why align with Trump? What's in it for him?
Speaker 3 (11:43):
This is the question we've posed to people for months now.
We wanted to understand that too, because Mark Zuckerberg is
a man who had supported diversity initiatives, who'd supported immigration reform,
election integrity. What was happening here in terms of in
about face. What we've learned learned from the dozens of
people we've spoken with is that Mark Zuckerberg is not
(12:06):
a man with one specific political ideology or very specific
values when it comes to politics or left or right.
What's emerged instead, Sarah is a portrait of a man
who is focused on self preservation and dominance and ensuring
his company is in the best position possible.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
And there was potentially another influence at play from another
tech ceo who'd recently undergone a major political makeover.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Through our reporting and speaking with more than fifty people,
we've heard a term quite often, and this is Elon envy.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Many sources inside of Meta have described a kind of
envy that Mark Zuckerberg had for Elon Musk, feeling that
he had not faced the same kind of political scrutiny
that he was subject to, Feeling that he was able
to layoff employees from X without real consequence. Elon was
(13:05):
moving fast and breaking things and not suffering the same
kind of consequences that Mark Zuckerberg was feeling. And this
is when we see Zuckerberg move away from policies that
have infuriated Trump for years, like Meta's fact checking program.
Like we mentioned, Meta also broke up its civil rights
team and rolled back hate speech policies.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
They rolled back diversity programs at Meta, also at the
Chan Zuckerberg initiative. They also reached a settlement, a twenty
five million dollar settlement with Trump over the removal and
suspension of him from the platforms in the wake of
January sixth. A lot of that money is going to
Trump's library. But I think the question stands do these
(13:46):
moves put him in the best position possible?
Speaker 2 (13:49):
And that's a really good question, Rilly, and it's one
that I think a lot of people are wondering too, Like,
if he's making this big shift, what does he have
to show for it?
Speaker 3 (13:58):
I would say, speaking with folks in the MAGA movement,
including one Trump advisor, there's still a lot of distrust
from MAGA, from people who have seen different postures towards
Trump over the years created a lot of distrust for
Mark Zuckerberg, and I think some people are still holding
on to that. Trump as well, has over the years
(14:21):
suggested Mark Zuckerberg is a bit two faced. He called
him an ass kisser many a time.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Riley says that so far from a policy perspective, there
isn't much evidence any of this is working out to
Zuckerberg's advantage, at least not yet. Take Trump's stance on TikTok,
for instance, TikTok is a key competitor to Meta.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
There have been questions about whether it would be allowed
to remain in the United States, so on that ground,
we haven't necessarily seen him act in a way that
would benefit Meta.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Meta is also currently facing an antitrust suit from the
Federal Trade Commission, which threatens to break up Zuckerberg's one
point six trillion dollar business by forcing him to split
off Instagram and WhatsApp. Mark Zuckerberg, in the weeks before
that trial lobbied essentially both the President, the administration, and
the FTC chair himself to try to reach a settlement
(15:17):
before it went to trial.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
That didn't work. We saw Mark Zuckerberg take the stand
in April, and we will hopefully in coming weeks get
a better sense of the outcome, but that went despite
Mark Zuckerberg's please.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Even if Suckerberg's realignment hasn't won him political favors, Riley
says it has succeeded in opening up a channel to
the president.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
This is something he'd lost over the Biden years and
has now regained. For example, Mark Zuckerberg met with Vice
President j d Vance in advance of an AI summit
in Paris, and when Jade Vance spoke before European leaders,
he really hammered home a lot of the ideas that
Mark Zuckerberg had presented to him just days prior. So
(16:05):
that's the kind of soft influence we're tracking, a White
House spokesperson said in an email. The Trump quote takes
meetings with many CEOs who are eager to participate in
the Trump economy. In the meantime, Riley says Meta's new
policies are having a clear impact on its platforms. I've
spoken with several activist groups and groups that represent transfolk women,
(16:30):
the LGBTQ community, more broadly, Jewish people, and again and again,
folks are trying to assess whether hate speech is on
the rise. One organization said they anticipate millions more, hundreds
of millions more pieces of content that would have otherwise
been removed to now remain on the platform due to
these policy shifts.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Even Meta's own independent oversight board, which was created to
weigh in on complicated content moderation decisions, was concerned by
how quickly the changes were made and announced. In late April,
it advised the company to assess and report on the
potential harm of the new policies. Meta said it would
respond to the recommendation within sixty days. In a statement
(17:13):
to Bloomberg, Meta said, quote, while we will still address
content that violates our policies, we are focused on reducing
mistakes and over enforcement of our rules unquote.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Is this how it always works.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
When political tides turn that business leaders try to cozy
up to whoever they think is best positioned to help
their companies, whatever the stated values of that politician. What's
different about Trump?
Speaker 3 (17:36):
I think what's notable about Trump, and really what makes
him different from Biden before him, is a willingness to
negotiate with people he formerly saw as an enemy. This
is a president who's been quite aggressive and on the
attack against Zuckerberg in the past, and now we see
a willingness to meet with him in mar A Lago
(17:59):
and in the West Wing. And so I think that
dealmaking that detaches itself from history is a part of
what makes Trump so notable. But we find that Zuckerberg
offers a pretty revealing test case for that kind of
negotiation strategy. This is a CEO who has gone well
(18:21):
beyond many of his peers in making overtures and comments
in support of the President, calling him badass, you know,
on tape with us. So I think we still have
to wait and see what this looks like.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
While this may all serve Zuckerberg and Meta while Trump's
in office, it raises serious questions about his longer term strategy.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
In speaking with people familiar with the company and its
deliberations around It's Trump's strategy, we've learned that Meta is
working on a plan to try to gain Democrats' support
in the case that they win power in Washington, be
it a new administration or even in congressional races that
(19:06):
are upcoming.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
But Riley says, given Zuckerberg's history, the Democratic Party might
be harder to win over if he tries to pivot
himself and his company again. Someday.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
This is a guy who is always evolving and adapting
to the situation at hand, and I think we've found
it's no different when it comes to politics.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access
to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg
dot com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode,
make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever
you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show.
Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
You might have noticed that lately Mark Zuckerberg has been
going through a bit of a rebrand. The Meta CEO
has been sporting a new look, gold chains, grown out hair,
and custom black T shirts with Greek and Latin phrases.
He's appeared on so called Manisphere podcasts hosted by MAGA
(00:28):
friendly comedians like Theo Vonn and Joe Rogan.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Just I think a lot of a corporate world is
like pretty culturally neutered, And.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
I just think that Suckerberg on rogan Show back in January,
talking about martial arts, bow hunting and what he sees
as corporate America's backlash to masculinity, the.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Kind of masculine energy I think is good. Yeah, obviously,
you know society has plenty of that, but I think
corporate culture was really like trying to get away from it.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Zuckerberg's newly conservative talking points.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a
bit more has its own merits that are really positive.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
And embrace of MAGA has led to changes at Meta too.
Since January, Meta has added Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO and
prominent Trump ally Dana White, to its board of directors.
It's also rolled back diversity efforts, weakend hate speech policies,
disbanded its civil rights team, and eliminated its outside fact
(01:37):
checking system. For outside observers, it's felt like a dramatic shift,
and according to Bloomberg Meta reporter Riley Griffin, it's felt
that way for some people inside Meta too. Zuckerberg declined
to be interviewed for the story, but Riley and our
colleague Bloomberg reporter Kurt Wagner have spoken to more than
(01:57):
thirty current and former Meta employeesout Zuckerberg's changing approach to politics,
plus a dozen government officials who engaged with Meta during
three presidential administrations. Many of their sources asked for anonymity
out of fear of retribution. Riley and Kurt learned that
these tensions came to a head at an internal meeting
(02:18):
of Meta's senior leadership in January.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Some of these senior leaders were frustrated.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Zuckerberg faced questions about those policy changes and exactly what
he meant when he spoke about masculine energy on Joe
Rogan's podcast.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
He acknowledged that maybe masculine was not the right use
of words but he said that corporate culture had become
less aggressive and should get a little bit more aggressive
and competitive. And as for the other questions about content,
policy changes and fact checking, he was unapologetic. He didn't
want to relitigate these decisions, and from everyone we speak
(02:54):
to that remains true.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Bloomberg News Today. On the show the political evolution of
Mark Zuckerberg, what he hopes to gain from getting closer
to Trump, what he has to show for it, and
how his MAGA leanings are already changing meta. Bloomberg's Riley
(03:21):
Griffin says that to understand Mark Zuckerberg's shift to the right,
you have to go back nearly two decades to the
Obama administration.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
He and Obama would have dinners, they took calls with
each other. President Obama even participated in a Facebook town hall.
There was a light touch approach to technology, a lot
of optimism and very little regulation, and in the wake
of the twenty sixteen election, all that changed.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Facebook was thrust into the center of a global scandal
around the role the social network played in spreading political
misinformation and how it may have influenced the outcome of
the election.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
In the immediate aftermath of the election, we saw Zuckerberg
experience shock and confusion around the outcome. He at the
time said that it was a crazy, quote unquote idea
that misinformation had influenced the election outcome. But we also
start to see the company make amends, if you will.
(04:22):
They shore up fact checking efforts, they focus on election integrity.
He also actually went on a nationwide tour he was
trying to understand the electorate. So it was a period
of processing but also the beginning of immense backlash for
a company that had until this time had a pretty
productive relationship to Washington and especially the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Zuckerberg appeared before Congress and said his company hadn't done
enough to prevent its platform from being used for harm.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections,
and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.
We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility
and that was a big mistake, and it was my
mistake and I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Meanwhile, his company tried to build inroads with the new administration.
Joel Kaplan, a former GOP strategist who's now Meta's chief
Global affairs officer was focused on ensuring Zuckerberg had connections
in Trump's orbit. Joel Kaplan had been discussing with Mark
Zuckerberg the benefits of a Republican administration that was business
(05:30):
friendly and a conservative Supreme Court, and this strategy, folks
inside the company told me, came to be known as
the Clarence Thomas strategy. The idea here being that any
major existential threat to Facebook would ultimately rise to the
Supreme Court, and so the company didn't want to alienate
conservative justices who would be essentially making those key decisions.
(05:55):
But the criticism was still unrelenting, and it came from
all Sidesberg's apology tour didn't persuade Democrats that he could
be trusted to lead a social media empire that had
grown to have billions of users, and the content moderation
efforts he put in place after the twenty sixteen election
angered Trump and his allies, who increasingly complained about what
(06:16):
they saw as an anti conservative bias on Facebook. Then
came the pandemic.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
I was actually a COVID reporter at the time, and
remember those early days when we were writing a lot
about misinformation, conspiracy, theories were really proliferating on the platform.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
This was all happening in the months leading up to
the twenty twenty election, as unfounded concerns about election integrity
were swirling online. The Stop the Steel movement was already
cropping up, and the Biden campaign was really frustrated that
they felt Facebook wasn't taking that seriously. After Biden one,
the misinformation and division on Facebook just picked up steep.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
And ultimately we saw January sixth emerge.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
And within twenty four hours of rioters storming the capital,
Facebook took action.
Speaker 5 (07:06):
For the first time ever. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram suspended
President Trump's Twitter accounts yesterday and now Mark Zuckerberg is
staying in a post that quote, we believe the risks
of allowing the president to continue to use our service
during this period are simply too great.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Facebook felt it was taking a strong approach to countering
misinformation around the election and also around COVID and vaccines,
but it wasn't enough for Democrats.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Congressional probes ultimately revealed correspondence between the White House and
then Facebook that show there was a lot of skepticism
from the White House as to how effective that was
and whether they were being run around. In one email
from a White House staffer, the subject line was titled,
(07:52):
you are hiding the ball and speaking with a lot
of folks in Washington, including in the Biden administration, I've
learned that President Biden privately with his aides would call
Zuckerberg little towerp and he also used a term that
replaced the Z in Zuckerberg with an F.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
A spokesperson for Biden's office declined to comment for the story.
Riley says these long simmering tensions reached a boiling point
in July of twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
What happened on that Friday afternoon as President Biden was
walking to board his helicopter to Camp David Was, a
reporter shouted a question and asked about mis information, and Biden,
you know, walked towards the reporter.
Speaker 6 (08:40):
And said, we're killing people.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
I mean it really, well, Look.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinator and
that's and they're killing people.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
They're killing people, And that kind of comment is not
a normal thing for a president to allege a major
US company is doing, but that was how the president felt.
It was a moment of candor and having that out
in the open was a big pr crisis for the company.
Many people pulled all nighters. They were in touch with
(09:14):
the White House. We've reviewed messages between Mark Zuckerberg and
Cheryl Sandberg and others at the company. They felt that
it was disingenuous, It didn't encompass the kind of work
that they'd been doing on COVID. It was one of
those moments where this tension really spilled into the public
and showed how bad things had gotten between the administration
(09:37):
and the company during this time. Did that one moment
help lead us to Zuckerberg's magnification today? My reporting suggests so.
It's an important moment. It's a pivotal moment, but it's
one of many moments you can look to that I
think create a snowball effect. According to the people we've
(09:58):
spoken with, have increasingly pushed Mark Zuckerberg in this direction.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
By twenty twenty four, with Trump's third campaign in full swing,
Zuckerberg dropped a big hint about his new political allegiances.
In July of that year, days after Trump survived an
assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, Zuckerberg spoke with Bloomberg's Emily.
Speaker 6 (10:21):
Chang, Yeah, I mean seeing Donald Trumpet get up after
getting shot in the face and pump his fist in
the air with the American flag is one of the
most badass things I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
After the break, Zuckerberg doubles down. Since Donald Trump's reelection,
Bloomberg Meta reporter Riley Griffin says Mark Zuckerberg has put
a lot of effort into getting on the administration's good side.
(11:00):
Made a one million dollar donation to the Inauguration Fund.
The night Trump was sworn in, Zuckerberg co hosted a
black tie reception in the president's honor. In March, he
acquired a twenty three million dollar mansion steps away from
the Vice president's residence, and Riley says flight records for
Zuckerberg's private jet show he's been making monthly trips to Washington.
(11:24):
Meta has said Zuckerberg has traveled to Washington to discuss
AI and American technology leadership, and Zuckerberg has said that
any American company should try to have a productive relationship
with whoever is running the government. Why is Zuckerberg doing
all this? Why align with Trump? What's in it for him?
Speaker 3 (11:43):
This is the question we've posed to people for months now.
We wanted to understand that too, because Mark Zuckerberg is
a man who had supported diversity initiatives, who'd supported immigration reform,
election integrity. What was happening here in terms of in
about face. What we've learned learned from the dozens of
people we've spoken with is that Mark Zuckerberg is not
(12:06):
a man with one specific political ideology or very specific
values when it comes to politics or left or right.
What's emerged instead, Sarah is a portrait of a man
who is focused on self preservation and dominance and ensuring
his company is in the best position possible.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
And there was potentially another influence at play from another
tech ceo who'd recently undergone a major political makeover.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Through our reporting and speaking with more than fifty people,
we've heard a term quite often, and this is Elon envy.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Many sources inside of Meta have described a kind of
envy that Mark Zuckerberg had for Elon Musk, feeling that
he had not faced the same kind of political scrutiny
that he was subject to, Feeling that he was able
to layoff employees from X without real consequence. Elon was
(13:05):
moving fast and breaking things and not suffering the same
kind of consequences that Mark Zuckerberg was feeling. And this
is when we see Zuckerberg move away from policies that
have infuriated Trump for years, like Meta's fact checking program.
Like we mentioned, Meta also broke up its civil rights
team and rolled back hate speech policies.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
They rolled back diversity programs at Meta, also at the
Chan Zuckerberg initiative. They also reached a settlement, a twenty
five million dollar settlement with Trump over the removal and
suspension of him from the platforms in the wake of
January sixth. A lot of that money is going to
Trump's library. But I think the question stands do these
(13:46):
moves put him in the best position possible?
Speaker 2 (13:49):
And that's a really good question, Rilly, and it's one
that I think a lot of people are wondering too, Like,
if he's making this big shift, what does he have
to show for it?
Speaker 3 (13:58):
I would say, speaking with folks in the MAGA movement,
including one Trump advisor, there's still a lot of distrust
from MAGA, from people who have seen different postures towards
Trump over the years created a lot of distrust for
Mark Zuckerberg, and I think some people are still holding
on to that. Trump as well, has over the years
(14:21):
suggested Mark Zuckerberg is a bit two faced. He called
him an ass kisser many a time.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Riley says that so far from a policy perspective, there
isn't much evidence any of this is working out to
Zuckerberg's advantage, at least not yet. Take Trump's stance on TikTok,
for instance, TikTok is a key competitor to Meta.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
There have been questions about whether it would be allowed
to remain in the United States, so on that ground,
we haven't necessarily seen him act in a way that
would benefit Meta.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Meta is also currently facing an antitrust suit from the
Federal Trade Commission, which threatens to break up Zuckerberg's one
point six trillion dollar business by forcing him to split
off Instagram and WhatsApp. Mark Zuckerberg, in the weeks before
that trial lobbied essentially both the President, the administration, and
the FTC chair himself to try to reach a settlement
(15:17):
before it went to trial.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
That didn't work. We saw Mark Zuckerberg take the stand
in April, and we will hopefully in coming weeks get
a better sense of the outcome, but that went despite
Mark Zuckerberg's please.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Even if Suckerberg's realignment hasn't won him political favors, Riley
says it has succeeded in opening up a channel to
the president.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
This is something he'd lost over the Biden years and
has now regained. For example, Mark Zuckerberg met with Vice
President j d Vance in advance of an AI summit
in Paris, and when Jade Vance spoke before European leaders,
he really hammered home a lot of the ideas that
Mark Zuckerberg had presented to him just days prior. So
(16:05):
that's the kind of soft influence we're tracking, a White
House spokesperson said in an email. The Trump quote takes
meetings with many CEOs who are eager to participate in
the Trump economy. In the meantime, Riley says Meta's new
policies are having a clear impact on its platforms. I've
spoken with several activist groups and groups that represent transfolk women,
(16:30):
the LGBTQ community, more broadly, Jewish people, and again and again,
folks are trying to assess whether hate speech is on
the rise. One organization said they anticipate millions more, hundreds
of millions more pieces of content that would have otherwise
been removed to now remain on the platform due to
these policy shifts.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Even Meta's own independent oversight board, which was created to
weigh in on complicated content moderation decisions, was concerned by
how quickly the changes were made and announced. In late April,
it advised the company to assess and report on the
potential harm of the new policies. Meta said it would
respond to the recommendation within sixty days. In a statement
(17:13):
to Bloomberg, Meta said, quote, while we will still address
content that violates our policies, we are focused on reducing
mistakes and over enforcement of our rules unquote.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Is this how it always works.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
When political tides turn that business leaders try to cozy
up to whoever they think is best positioned to help
their companies, whatever the stated values of that politician. What's
different about Trump?
Speaker 3 (17:36):
I think what's notable about Trump, and really what makes
him different from Biden before him, is a willingness to
negotiate with people he formerly saw as an enemy. This
is a president who's been quite aggressive and on the
attack against Zuckerberg in the past, and now we see
a willingness to meet with him in mar A Lago
(17:59):
and in the West Wing. And so I think that
dealmaking that detaches itself from history is a part of
what makes Trump so notable. But we find that Zuckerberg
offers a pretty revealing test case for that kind of
negotiation strategy. This is a CEO who has gone well
(18:21):
beyond many of his peers in making overtures and comments
in support of the President, calling him badass, you know,
on tape with us. So I think we still have
to wait and see what this looks like.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
While this may all serve Zuckerberg and Meta while Trump's
in office, it raises serious questions about his longer term strategy.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
In speaking with people familiar with the company and its
deliberations around It's Trump's strategy, we've learned that Meta is
working on a plan to try to gain Democrats' support
in the case that they win power in Washington, be
it a new administration or even in congressional races that
(19:06):
are upcoming.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
But Riley says, given Zuckerberg's history, the Democratic Party might
be harder to win over if he tries to pivot
himself and his company again. Someday.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
This is a guy who is always evolving and adapting
to the situation at hand, and I think we've found
it's no different when it comes to politics.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access
to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg
dot com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode,
make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever
you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show.
Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.