Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has donated $1 million to the inauguration fund for President-elect Donald Trump.
The tech giant’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in November, having sought to repair his relationship with Trump following the election.
Trump had previously been highly critical of Zuckerberg and Facebook, calling the platform “anti-Trump” in 2017.
It is not believed that Meta made similar donations to President Joe Biden’s inauguration fund in 2020 or to Trump’s previous inauguration fund in 2016.
The company confirmed its $1 million donation to the inauguration fund to several media outlets on Wednesday.
Inauguration funds are used to finance events and activities when a new president takes office; some consider them an attempt to gain favor with a new administration.
Trump will be sworn in as the 47th U.S. president on January 20.
Trump and Mark Zuckerberg’s History
Relations between Trump and Zuckerberg have historically been far less cordial.
Things soured particularly when Facebook and Instagram suspended Trump’s accounts in 2021, after claiming he had praised those involved in the violence at the Capitol on January 6.
Since then, Trump has waged a war of words against Meta, calling Facebook an “enemy of the people” in March.
He also claimed that a law banning TikTok in the U.S. unless its parent company ByteDance sold it would unfairly benefit Facebook.
In August, Zuckerberg told Republican lawmakers in a letter that he regretted bowing to pressure from the Biden administration to “censor” certain Facebook and Instagram content during the coronavirus pandemic.
In a book published in September, Trump wrote that Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he tried to intervene in the 2024 election.
However, the President-elect seems to have softened his stance since then.
In an October podcast, he said it was “nice” that Zuckerberg was “staying out of the election” and thanked him for a personal phone call after he faced an assassination attempt.
Still, Zuckerberg remains far less close to Trump than fellow tech mogul Elon Musk.
Musk, the owner of Tesla and X, has been dubbed Trump’s “First Buddy” due to his extensive donations to Trump’s election campaign.
This has led to Musk being appointed to head the new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
There has been no such rapprochement between Musk and Zuckerberg—although the cage fight between them, once rumored, now seems to be off.
