Mark Zuckerberg Desperately Wants to Get on Trump’s Good Side

Meta donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, marking CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s descent from the president-elect’s target to the backer of his party-planning committee.

Ahead of the presidential election, Trump issued direct warnings to Zuckerberg, while chastising him for Meta’s efforts to prevent the spread of his own misinformation.

“We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison—as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote in his book Save America, which was published in August.

That wasn’t even the first time that Trump had made this kind of threat against the social media mogul. The president-elect called out dear old “ZUCKERBUCKS” in a July post on Truth Social, promising to “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time.”

Zuckerberg responded to Trump’s comments in July by fawning over his “badass” response to his attempted assassination, because when someone threatens you, you should immediately start sucking up to them as much as possible. Trump claimed in September that after the attempted shooting, Zuckerberg privately told him that he would “never vote for the people running against” Trump. Publicly, Zuckerberg issued neither an endorsement nor an explicit denial.

Now that Trump has been elected, Zuckerberg seems to be following this instinct with his wallet. And so, Meta, which Trump once called “the Enemy of the People,” (he says this so much it loses all meaning), has now poured $1 million into a fund for a spate of massive events to celebrate his victory.