HAS META GONE MAGA?

Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s sprint to remake Meta for the Trump era

Mark Zuckerberg, then chief executive of Facebook, appears at a joint U.S. Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington in April 2018. | TOM BRENNER photo

by MIKE ISAAC, SHEERA FRENKEL AND KATE CONGER
January 11, 2025

SAN FRANCISCO – Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small.

Last month, Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, tapped a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to online speech. He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to turn those changes into policy.

Over the next few weeks, Zuckerberg and his hand-picked team discussed how to do that in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates stole away from family dinners and holiday gatherings to work while Zuckerberg weighed in between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Hawaiian island of Kauai.