Meta Platforms Inc. has donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, part of an effort to build a positive relationship with the administration after a tense history.
While small, the donation is not something Meta did for President Joe Biden or Trump’s 2016 inauguration, and it follows a November dinner between Trump and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the donation, which was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, but declined to comment further.
Meta owns Facebook and Instagram, platforms that Trump used heavily during his first two presidential campaigns until his accounts were suspended following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol. Meta banned his accounts out of concern that Trump would spur further violence by denying Biden’s election victory.
Trump’s accounts were reinstated in 2023, but he continued to speak openly about perceived unfairness from Zuckerberg. In March, Trump called Meta the “enemy of the people,” and later implied that Zuckerberg should be jailed for alleged election interference.
Zuckerberg has since made a more public appeal to Trump. He called Trump’s reaction to being nearly assassinated “badass” and also called the President-elect on the phone this summer to apologize for mistakenly labeling photos of Trump with a fact check. Zuckerberg is one of several powerful tech executives and venture capitalists who, after previously criticizing Trump, have worked to build a stronger relationship now that he’s returning to the White House.
The seven-figure inaugural donation is a turnaround for Meta, which only made modest donations to a small number of state-level committees and candidates since the 2016 election. The company, then called Facebook, Inc., became embroiled in controversies stemming from Trump’s first White House victory, including an accusation that it allowed Russian actors to influence the election by running advertisements on the social media platform that criticized Trump’s Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The Trump campaign’s use of Facebook in his 2016 run stirred controversy as well. It used the platform primarily to raise money from small-dollar donors, but also used its audience targeting tools to run narrowly tailored negative ads that aimed to reduce turnout for Clinton.
In 2020, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated more than $400 million to nonprofits that gave grants to election authorities around the country to help them make sure voters were able to cast ballots during the pandemic. Trump has said the effort, derisively called “Zuck bucks” by his supporters, was a plot against him.
Those donations were controversial, and led 28 states to bar private financing of election administration. In April 2022, a spokesman for Zuckerberg said he would no longer make grants to election officials.
Meta last made seven-figure donations in 2016, when it donated to more than $1 million each to the host committees for the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention.
In the current election cycle, Meta employees donated $4.7 million, according to OpenSecrets, with 80% of that amount backing Democrats.
(Updates with details on Meta’s political donations starting in the sixth paragraph.)
