Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook, donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The donation comes just weeks after Zuckerberg traveled to Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with Trump and some of his top White House advisers.
Zuckerberg’s contribution also comes as Big Tech reaches out to Trump after his November election victory to establish relationships with the incoming president who has often been critical of Silicon Valley.
Zuckerberg joined Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, OpenAI’s Sam Altman offering Trump congratulations.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, played a major role in the 2024 presidential campaign, contributing at least $250 million to get Trump elected.
Trump rewarded Musk by picking him to head up a government efficiency committee with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Since the election, Musk, already the world’s richest person, has added another $100 billion to his net worth.
At their meeting last month in Florida, Zuckerberg tried to rebuild the fraught relationship he had with Trump, whom he banned from Facebook after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Trump was reinstated on the platform in July.
While in West Palm Beach, Zuckerberg and top Meta executives also met with Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state nominee, incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and other senior advisers to the president-elect, the Wall Street Journal reported.
According to the report, while Zuckerberg has supported congressional candidates, he has not gotten involved in presidential races.
Zuckerberg did not donate to Trump’s inaugural fund in 2017 or to President Joe Biden’s in 2021.
Neither did Meta.
