Mark Zuckerberg
Net Worth: $232 Billion (Forbes, 4/17/26)
Who is Mark Zuckerberg?
- Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, the company behind social media giant Facebook. Just as Facebook’s 2004 founding was laced with controversy due to allegations that Zuckerberg stole the platform’s concept from other Harvard students, so too has Zuckerberg and Meta’s journey been mired in scandals that demonstrate a reckless disregard for people and the planet. Indeed, according to Good Jobs First’s Violation Tracker, Meta has incurred $8,226,379,654 in U.S. regulatory penalties for various consumer protection, financial, safety, and employment offenses as of the date of this publication.
- Below is a timeline of the ways in which Zuckerberg has aligned himself with Trump’s second administration:
- In July 2024, Zuckerberg praised Trump’s reaction to an assassination attempt against him during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania as “badass.”
- The following month, Zuckerberg sent a letter to Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, expressing regret for some past content moderation decisions and pledging his commitment to being “neutral.”
- Over the summer, Zuckerberg reportedly called Trump “a lot.”
- After Trump’s November 2024 victory, Zuckerberg privately dined with him at Mar-a-Lago.
- In December 2024, Meta contributed $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
- In January 2025, Zuckerberg replaced Nick Clegg, a former British politician who served as Meta’s global policy head, with Joel Kaplan, a well-connected, veteran Republican lobbyist who is friends with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Also in January 2025, it was announced that pro-Trump supporter Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, would join Meta’s Board of Directors.
- That same month, Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit with Trump over suspending him from its platforms in the wake of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, $22 million of which was intended to go towards Trump’s presidential library fund. The fund has since been dissolved, prompting Democratic senators to probe Meta and other companies on the status of the money, as we wrote about in the forty-fifth issue of the Revolving Door Project’s Corruption Calendar newsletter.
- Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was getting rid of its fact-checking program, following Twitter/X’s model to instead rely on users to correct misleading and false content.
- The week after, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was scrapping its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs aimed at addressing discrimination and bias in the workplace.
- On January 20, 2025, Zuckerberg attended Trump’s second inauguration. That evening, he co-hosted a celebratory reception for Trump.
- In February, March, and August 2025, Zuckerberg visited the White House to discuss how Meta can support the Trump administration with the U.S.’ tech leadership globally.
- In October 2025, the White House disclosed that Meta was among the donors for Trump’s $300 million ballroom.
- In April 2025, it was revealed that Zuckerberg had purchased a 15,400-square-foot-mansion for $23 million in D.C., just minutes away from Vice President JD Vance’s home.
- In September 2025, Zuckerberg sat next to Trump at a posh White House dinner for Big Tech executives, assuring him that all dinner attendees were making “huge investments” in the U.S. “to build out data centers and infrastructure to power the next wave of innovation.”
- In January 2026, Dina Powell McCormick, who served as Trump 1.0’s deputy national security adviser, was selected to be Meta’s new president and vice chairman, garnering applause from Trump on Truth Social.
- Recently, Meta has come under fire for alleged harms to children.
- In March 2026, a New Mexico jury found that Meta had misled users about Instagram and Facebook’s safety in violation of state consumer protection laws and failed to protect children from predators on those platforms. Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in damages.
- Also in March 2026, a California jury determined that Meta was liable for the anxiety and depression of a woman who became addicted to the company’s Instagram app as a child. The jury found that its social media was designed to be addictive and that company executives were aware of this and yet failed to safeguard young consumers, concluding that Meta should pay the victim $4.2 million.
- Aside from alleged harms to users, Meta has also been scrutinized for alleged harms to its own workers. In 2026, Meta faced two cases in Kenya from former Facebook content moderators accusing the company and its third-party partners of human trafficking, unfair dismissal, horrible working conditions resulting in psychological and other injuries, engaging in anti-union tactics, and worker dignity and privacy violations. Those cases would not be the first time Meta has been accused of mistreating its content moderators: In 2021, the company agreed to pay $52 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of U.S. Facebook content moderators who argued they were not protected from severe trauma resulting from exposure to disturbing content.
- Moreover, Meta has been accused of destroying communities and the planet. In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), Meta has ramped up construction of AI-powering data centers. One of its data centers in Newton County, Georgia consumes roughly 500,000 gallons of water daily, drying up water supplies for residents. Another Meta data center project in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where the over 25% impoverished community is mostly black, will reportedly emit 5,862 tons of climate change-driving greenhouse gases. This initiative is “compounding the harms of decades of environmental racism,” Jai Dulani, senior research specialist at tech accountability group MediaJustice, wrote for Truthout, a nonprofit news organization.
What does Mark Zuckerberg have to gain from the Trump administration?
- Zuckerberg’s courting of Trump 2.0 has paid off in more ways than one. Trump once threatened that Meta’s CEO would “spend the rest of his life in prison” for allegedly working against him in the 2020 presidential election but now gushes about Zuckerberg as if he is a close pal. In March 2026, Trump tapped Zuckerberg to serve on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, to advise him on AI policy and other tech issues. “The United States has the opportunity to lead the world in AI,” Zuckerberg said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal. “I’m honored to join the President’s council and work with other industry leaders to help make this happen.”
- Meta is currently embroiled in a historic antitrust suit with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which alleges that Meta illegally maintained a monopoly by buying up former competitors, Instagram and WhatsApp. In November 2025, a federal judge appointed by Obama sided with Meta in concluding that Meta lacked monopoly power, prompting the FTC to appeal the ruling. Nevertheless, FTC Chair and Trump loyalist, Andrew Ferguson, has previously indicated that if Trump ordered the agency to drop the suit, he would “obey lawful orders.” In addition, former FTC Chair Lina Khan expressed concerns that the Trump administration could very well enter a “sweetheart deal” with Meta. Such outcomes are still within the realm of possibility.
- On January 20, 2025, the day of his second inauguration, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” which effectively instructs federal agents to not pressure platforms like Meta to take certain content moderation actions. This was a huge boon to Zuckerberg, who had previously aired out his frustration with the Biden administration’s reluctance to cozy up to Big Tech and with its requests demanding that Meta do more to counter COVID-19 misinformation.
- In February 2025, following Zuckerberg’s visit to the White House imploring the Trump administration to tell Europe that its regulators were being too tough on Meta, Vice President JD Vance passed on Zuckerberg’s message. During a speech in Paris, Vance said he was ruffled by reports about Europe “considering tightening the screws” on U.S. tech companies, adding that “America cannot and will not accept that, and we think it’s a terrible mistake.”
- That same month, Trump issued a memorandum titled “Defending American Companies and Innovators From Overseas Extortion and Unfair Fines and Penalties,” which threatened retaliation against countries that levied digital services taxes and “burdensome” fines on U.S. businesses. As a result, Meta escaped a 6% digital ads tax in India, a 3% digital services tax in New Zealand and Canada, and a similar digital services tax proposed by the European Commission.
- The Trump administration has taken various other steps to pressure countries into taking a hands-off approach to the tech industry, which if successful, would permit Meta to carry on with business as usual without regard to the potential harmful consequences of its operations on consumers. Those steps include the following:
- In May 2025, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. would ban foreign officials who censor Americans. “It is similarly unacceptable for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. This came after Zuckerberg said that the European Union’s (EU) Digital Services Act (DSA), an EU regulation aimed at pushing tech companies to do more to stop the spread of content deemed illegal under national or EU laws, was “institutionalising censorship.”
- In July 2025, the White House initiated an investigation into Brazil’s digital trade practices, among other practices, accusing the country’s actions of being “unfair” towards U.S. social media and other companies. Public Citizen, a government watchdog group, has pushed back against such accusations, testifying at a U.S. Trade Representative hearing that “Brazil’s General Data Protection Law, social media regulations, and digital payments regulations are not unjustified, unfair, unreasonable, or arbitrary, and they do not discriminate against U.S. companies.”
- The next month, Rubio instructed U.S. diplomats in Europe to lobby against the EU’s DSA. Trump also threatened to impose extra tariffs on countries with digital taxes or regulations, which he said were “all designed to harm or discriminate against American technology.”
- In January 2026, the Trump administration imposed visa restrictions on five EU officials accused of being “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex.” These individuals were involved in drafting the DSA and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), an EU regulation designed to spur competition in Europe’s digital markets. Like with the DSA, Meta has been outspoken about not being a fan of the DMA.
For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Oligarchs in Trump World tracker.