Mark Zuckerberg
Net Worth: $205.3 Billion (As of April 4, 2025)
- Mark Zuckerberg is the centibillionaire CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook). Though he has previously had public spats with Trump, after the election, Zuckerberg took a hard pro-Trump turn, dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago at the end of November and ultimately attending the inauguration after Meta donated $1 million to the inaugural fund.
- Perhaps contributing to Zuckerberg’s recent capitulation, in a 2024 coffee table book, Trump wrote, “We are watching [Zuckerberg] 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.”
- Facebook was a key player in spreading disinformation during the 2016 election, with researchers finding that “Facebook was a key vector of exposure to fake news” and that fake news websites were “overwhelmingly pro-Trump.”
- While letting misinformation run rampant in 2016, Facebook censored things like a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph (“napalm girl”) posted by a Norwegian journalist and a breast cancer awareness video posted by the Swedish Cancer Society.
- In November 2017, the company estimated that up to 126 million Facebook users had been exposed to ads run by a Russian group.
- In 2018, Zuckerberg testified before a Joint Senate Committee and acknowledged the role Facebook played during the election, saying Facebook “didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy… It was my mistake, and I’m sorry.”
- In 2020, people were still consuming more fake news on Facebook than ever before.
- Zuckerberg’s Facebook has also faced scrutiny from human rights groups for its role in promoting violence against Rohingya people in Myanmar, which the US recognized as a genocide in 2022. An Amnesty International report found that Facebook’s algorithm “proactively amplified and promoted content which incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya.” A new book alleges that the company at one point relied on a single contractor who spoke Burmese to moderate content from Myanmar.
- In January, Meta settled a lawsuit that Trump had brought against the company in 2021, agreeing to contribute $22 million to the construction of Trump’s presidential library.
- As of early April, Zuckerberg has reportedly visited Trump’s White House three times, appearing to lobby the administration ahead of a potential antitrust trial regarding the company’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram. The FTC has alleged that Meta bought the companies to suppress competition. An FTC lawsuit filed under the first Trump administration included private messages and emails from Zuckerberg where he said, among other things, “It is better to buy than compete.”
For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Billionaires in Trump World tracker.