In the 4 months since Donald Trump accused Mark Zuckerberg of conspiring towards him through the 2020 presidential election and threatened him with life imprisonment, the Meta CEO has gone to nice lengths to curry favor with the incoming president.
Shortly after Trump’s victory in November, Zuckerberg traveled to Mar-a-Lago to dine with the president-elect and his transition group, even donating $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund. He has additionally culled Meta’s third social gathering fact-checking program, lifting restrictions on matters like immigration and gender. And this week, Zuckerberg took his efforts to align with the incoming administration a step additional by appointing Dana White – the CEO of the Final Combating Championship (UFC) and an in depth Trump ally – to Meta’s board of administrators.
“I’ve by no means been all in favour of becoming a member of a board of administrators till I acquired the supply to hitch Meta’s board. I’m an enormous believer that social media and AI are the longer term,” White stated in Meta’s official press launch. “I’m very excited to hitch this unbelievable group and to study extra about this enterprise from the within. There may be nothing I like greater than constructing manufacturers, and I look ahead to serving to take Meta to the subsequent degree.”
Within the press launch, Zuckerberg famous how White, together with fellow new board members John Elkann and Charlie Songhurst, would assist Meta “deal with the large alternatives forward with AI, wearables, and the way forward for human connection.” Nevertheless, provided that White – a battle promoter and seasoned hype man – has little expertise in any of those areas, his appointment seems to be a calculated transfer by Zuckerberg to solidify ties with Trump by way of one in all his closest and most influential allies.
White’s friendship with Trump dates again to 2001, when the UFC president was nonetheless making an attempt to persuade the world that MMA was greater than a blood sport. Because the UFC was struggling to discover a dwelling for its occasions, Trump took an opportunity and provided up his Taj Mahal on line casino in Atlantic Metropolis for 2 consecutive occasions.
White has since credited Trump for serving to the UFC throughout a troublesome interval in its historical past. And although the story is mere advertising and marketing lore, it helped set up a compelling narrative for the rising alliance between the 2 males and their respective manufacturers.
White has stumped for Trump at three Republican Nationwide Conventions and a slew of marketing campaign rallies. He traveled with the president-elect on Air Power One and produced a UFC documentary on Trump entitled Combatant-in-Chief. White even spoke at Trump’s victory speech following the 2024 election. “That is what occurs when the machine comes after you,” White stated on the time. “That is karma, women and gents. He deserves this.”
Over the previous few years, Trump incessantly attended UFC occasions, basking within the admiration of the younger, predominantly male crowd. He cultivated relationships with fighters, leveraging their help to painting himself as a symbolic strongman. He embraced the UFC’s tradition of defiance, machismo and spectacle to assist buttress his picture as a insurgent towards liberal norms. It has additionally hastened the alternative of America’s typical political tradition with an abrasive new mix of leisure and confrontational politics, completely embodied by each Trump and White.
Whereas White even helped join Trump with the podcast hosts and influencers akin to Joe Rogan, Theo Von and the Nelk Boys, all of whom would play a big function in serving to Trump join with a youthful viewers, he later admitted he wasn’t all in favour of coming into the political area himself. “I would like nothing to do with this shit. It’s gross. It’s disgusting,” White instructed the New Yorker.
Nonetheless, White’s shut relationship with Trump has helped elevate the cage-fighting impresario right into a enterprise government with extra political cache than most of Washington’s elites. His positioning on the intersection of sports activities, enterprise, and battle tradition additionally made him a conduit to manufacturers seeking to rating factors with conservative audiences. For instance, when Bud Gentle confronted a significant right-wing backlash for that includes trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in one in all their promotional campaigns, the group signed a take care of the UFC to develop into the group’s official beer. White took it upon himself to defend Bud Gentle, arguing that “if you happen to think about your self a patriot, you have to be ingesting gallons of Bud Gentle.”
Even Zuckerberg has discovered himself drawn into White’s orbit. The 2 males have bonded over their shared curiosity in MMA, which the billionaire took up in 2022. That yr, Meta introduced a partnership with the UFC that introduced UFC’s streaming video service to Meta Horizon Worlds, a digital actuality platform. Additionally they mentioned introducing synthetic intelligence to the UFC’s troubled fighter rating system.
In 2023, White tried to dealer a battle between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, one other tech billionaire and Trump ally. Musk finally pulled out of the battle, citing a lingering harm, and blamed Zuckerberg for refusing to reschedule the bout.
Regardless of their blossoming friendship, White’s appointment to the board of administrators of Zuckerberg’s group drew criticism from Meta workers.
Shortly following Meta’s announcement, workers took to Office, Meta’s enterprise communications platform, to share their ideas. Some posed questions and criticisms, together with why Meta was working with a man who slapped his spouse in public and confronted no penalties for his actions. Others made jokes asking whether or not efficiency opinions would now contain MMA fights.
“We rent Conor [McGregor] subsequent for after work sparring?,” one worker commented in a put up reviewed by know-how outlet 404 Media. McGregor was held responsible for sexual assault in November 2024 and is at the moment interesting the choice.
In response to the slew of criticism, Meta deleted a number of of the interior posts, citing violations in tips governing worker communications. For a corporation that claimed it was “time to get again to our roots round free expression” earlier that very same day, the choice to censor a few of the worker criticism was bitterly ironic. It additionally drew parallels with the White’s personal method to dealing with criticism on the UFC.
Very similar to Trump, White is notoriously delicate and thin-skinned in the case of the media. Within the lead-up to the UFC sale in 2016, he blacklisted journalist Ariel Helwani for stealing his thunder and breaking a UFC story earlier than White had an opportunity to announce it himself. Whereas Helwani’s ban was shortly lifted, quite a few different journalists, myself included, have confronted his wrath and acquired lifetime bans from overlaying the UFC. For instance, I used to be banned for my vital protection of the group, together with reporting on its ties to Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov.
White’s strong-arm method to public relations, which incorporates abusive outbursts at media members, is a part of the promotion’s technique to manage journalists, and by extension, the narratives surrounding a specific occasion. Because of the fixed worry of getting their press credentials rescinded, beat reporters in attendance are discouraged from asking troublesome questions that might mirror poorly on the UFC. These embody matters akin to unionization, fighter pay, or the UFC’s affiliation with a number of authoritarian regimes all over the world. That is the type of expertise that White brings to Meta.
Zuckerberg’s frantic efforts to appease Trump appear to have paid off. Earlier this week, the president-elect praised Meta for altering the way it moderates political content material, even speculating whether or not the coverage shift was a direct response to the threats he directed at Zuckerberg.
“Actually, I feel they’ve come a good distance, Meta, Fb” Trump stated.
