Shortly before the election, Donald Trump wrote in his recently released coffee table book that Mark Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he ever crossed him again. Now, with the president-elect weeks away from inauguration, the Meta billionaire is attempting to ingratiate himself to Trump, in part through a sizable donation to his inaugural fund.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Meta has gifted a $1 million donation to Trump's inaugural fund, a follow-up to a private dinner Zuckerberg and Trump had at his Mar-a-Lago golf club in November. There is no record of Meta donating to Trump's first inaugural fund, or Biden's in 2020.
Zuckerberg began laying the groundwork ahead of the election to repair his often volatile relationship with then-candidate Trump. In August, the Facebook founder wrote a letter to the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee blaming the Biden administration for his company's implementation of Covid-era content policies cracking down on the spread of misinformation about the disease.
That same month, Trump leveled his threat to imprison Zuckerberg if he stepped out of line, citing long held grievances with the billionaire over a 2020 election conspiracy theory that Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, had used a $350 million investment in voting technology to help rig the election against him.
Zuckerberg kissing the proverbial ring is not entirely unexpected. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for many social media tycoons. With Tesla and .
In an interview with Meet The Press released on Sunday, Trump indicated that he had agreed to a dinner with Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. Earlier this month, Bezos praised Trump's deregulation agenda during The New York Times DealBook conference, and claimed that Trump seemed “calmer,” and had “grown in the past eight years.”
The rush by tech giants to get on Trump's good side is likely tied to his plans to pursue an agenda of widespread regulatory cuts. “These people are just so hyped up by the fact that they're going to be able to do a lot of things and move a lot faster — definitely around AI and energy,” one tech industry source told The Washington Post last month.
While lucrative contracts and a deregulatory bonanza might be beneficial to Meta and other tech giants, in Zuckerberg's case appeasing Trump may also be about making sure the future president doesn't think too hard about throwing him in jail.
