In conversations over the past few years with friends, colleagues and advisers, Mark Zuckerberg has expressed cynicism about politics after years of bad experiences in Washington. Photo / Brendan Smialowski, AFP
He was once a backer of liberal causes. Then everyone seemed to turn on him. Now he wants to stay away from politics - if that’s possible.
It was only a little more than a decade ago that Mark Zuckerberg had few qualms about airing his politics.
Earnest and optimistic – perhaps naively so – he rushed on to the national stage to discuss issues he cared about: immigration, social justice, inequality, democracy in action. He penned columns in national newspapers espousing his views, spun up foundations and philanthropic efforts and hired hundreds of people to put his vast riches to work on his political goals.
That was Mark Zuckerberg in his 20s. Mark Zuckerberg in his 40s is a very different Mark Zuckerberg.
In conversations over the past few years with friends, colleagues and advisers, Zuckerberg has expressed cynicism about politics after years of bad experiences in Washington. He and others at the top of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company.
As recently as June at the Allen and Co. conference – the “summer camp for billionaires” in Sun Valley, Idaho – Zuckerberg complained to multiple people about the blowback to Meta that came from the more politically touchy aspects of his philanthropic efforts. And he regretted hiring employees at his philanthropy who tried to push him further to the left on some causes.
In short – he was over it.
His preference, according to more than a dozen friends, advisers and executives familiar with his thinking, has been to wash his hands of it all.
In public, that means Zuckerberg is declining to engage with Washington except when necessary. In private, he has stopped supporting programmes at his philanthropy that could be perceived as partisan, and he has tamped down employee activism at Meta, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to do so or did not want to jeopardise their relationships with Zuckerberg.
He has also spoken to former President Donald Trump in one-on-one telephone calls twice over the summer, these people said, a move that some have characterised as an attempt to repair a long-strained relationship between the two men.
“The political environment, I think I didn’t have much sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem,” Zuckerberg said during a recent interview at a live podcast event in San Francisco.
Last month, Zuckerberg publicly expressed regret around some of his political activity in a letter to Congress. He said that in 2021, the Biden administration “pressured” Meta into censoring more Covid-19 content than Zuckerberg felt comfortable with. And he said he would not repeat the contributions he made in 2020 to support electoral infrastructure because the gifts made him appear not “neutral”.
Zuckerberg’s evolution has drawn comparatively little attention compared with that of tech titans like Elon Musk, who have publicly attached themselves to conservatives and Trump. But it is also reflective of a larger shift in Silicon Valley, where CEOs have grown frustrated with contentious social issues. Their response has largely been to back away from it.
“Mark and his peers are probably looking at the risks of political engagement and deciding neutrality is the safer choice until this election is over,” said Nu Wexler, a principal at the political consulting firm Four Corners Public Affairs and a former Facebook employee.
Privately, Zuckerberg now considers his personal politics to be more like libertarianism or “classical liberalism,” according to people who have spoken to him recently. That includes a hostility to regulation that restricts business, an embrace of free markets and globalism and an openness to social justice reforms – but only if it stops short of what he considers far-left progressivism. And Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr Priscilla Chan, have been privately aghast about what they see as a rise of antisemitism on college campuses, including at their alma mater, Harvard University.
Zuckerberg’s and Chan’s representatives at Meta and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative declined to comment.
It is a significant shift for an executive who in 2013 helped found and became the public face of the political advocacy organisation Fwd.US, whose aim was to help create a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country without legal permission.
Two years later, taking inspiration from Bill Gates, Zuckerberg and Chan established the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organisation that poured US$436 million over five years into issues such as legalising drugs and reducing incarceration.
In 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan wrote a letter to their newborn daughter, dreaming of an egalitarian world where they could “eliminate poverty and hunger,” “provide everyone with basic health care” and “nurture peaceful and understanding relationships between people of all nations”. He hired a former top Obama adviser, David Plouffe, to oversee the work.
But over the next few years, Facebook faced accusations that Russians had used it to stoke divisions among voters. Zuckerberg and his company became a political lightning rod, with Democrats and Republicans blasting Facebook and its sister service Instagram for allowing too much – or too little – political speech.
Beginning in 2019, Zuckerberg began to express bewilderment about the country’s changing politics, two people close to him said. And the scrutiny caused Zuckerberg to see his more overtly political work at CZI as relatively ineffective.
Zuckerberg and Chan were caught off guard by activism at their philanthropy, according to people close to them. After the protests over the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, a CZI employee asked Zuckerberg during a staff meeting to resign from Facebook or the initiative because of his unwillingness at the time to moderate comments from Trump.
The incident, and others like it, upset Zuckerberg, the people said, pushing him away from the foundation’s progressive political work. He came to view one of the three central divisions at the initiative – the Justice and Opportunity team – as a distraction from the organisation’s overall work and a poor reflection of his bipartisan point of view, the people said.
In 2021, Zuckerberg and Chan decided to end the group’s internal political work and instead fund two bipartisan groups working on those issues. Many of its 30 or so employees who focused on politics resigned, were reassigned or were sent to those two groups.
After the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, some employees at the initiative wanted the organisation to focus on protecting abortion access. But Chan, who runs CZI day-to-day, sent a memo to employees firmly refusing to do that. “We need to stay focused and clear on what we’re here to do. That means staying focused” on science, education and community work, she wrote, according to a portion of the memo reviewed by The New York Times. “We do not have any plans to expand our grant making to new areas.”
Today, Zuckerberg, one of the initiative’s two CEOs with Chan, is less involved than he was two or three years ago, an associate said.
Other incidents piled up. After the 2020 election, Zuckerberg and Chan were criticised for donating US$400 million to the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life to help promote safety at voting booths during pandemic lockdowns. Zuckerberg and Chan viewed their contributions as a nonpartisan effort, though advisers warned them that they would be criticised for taking sides.
The donations came to be known as “Zuckerbucks” in Republican circles. Conservatives, including Trump and Representative Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who is chair of the House Judiciary Committee, blasted Zuckerberg for what they said was an attempt to increase voter turnout in Democratic areas.
In private conversations with advisers and friends, Zuckerberg and Chan have voiced some regret about the contributions and how much they backfired.
“We should be throwing them a parade and they’ve been under attack,” said David Becker, who ran another of the Zuckerberg-backed 2020 programmes, the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “I would understand if Mark Zuckerberg was frustrated at the manufactured controversy about this.”
Inside Meta, Zuckerberg and his executive team have clamped down on politics.
In late 2022, Lori Goler, Meta’s head of human resources, introduced a new internal policy called “community engagement expectations,” according to a copy of the memo reviewed by the Times. It forbade employees from raising in the workplace issues such as abortion, racial justice movements and wars. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, championed the policy and was supported by Zuckerberg, two people familiar with the matter said.
Instead of publicly engaging with Washington, Zuckerberg is repairing relationships with politicians behind the scenes. After the “Zuckerbucks” criticism, Zuckerberg hired Brian Baker, a prominent Republican strategist, to improve his positioning with right-wing media and Republican officials. In the lead-up to November’s election, Baker has emphasised to Trump and his top aides that Zuckerberg has no plans to make similar donations, a person familiar with the discussions said.
Zuckerberg has yet to forge a relationship with Vice-President Kamala Harris. But over the summer, Zuckerberg had his first conversations with Trump since he left office, according to people familiar with the conversations.
During the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump thanked the billionaire in a phone call for publicly saying that he was “praying” for Trump after the recent assassination attempt, according to a person briefed on the call.
Just a few weeks later, they talked again.
After Meta erroneously took down images of the assassination attempt that were circulating across Meta, Zuckerberg called the former President directly and apologised for the mistake, according to two people familiar with the talk. Representatives for Trump and Zuckerberg have offered differing accounts of what happened on the call.
“Private discussions between President Trump and anyone else are just that – private,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson.
Zuckerberg has not fooled himself into thinking that downplaying politics will solve all his personal frustrations or his company’s problems entirely. But he does think it is something that Meta can come back from – eventually.
“I think it’s going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand is back to the place that it could have been,” Zuckerberg said at the podcast event, “if I hadn’t messed up in the first place.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Theodore Schleifer and Mike Isaac
Photographs by: Mike Kai Chen and Jason Andrew
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Cambridge graduate and rower is a career intelligence officer.