It was only a little over a decade ago that Mark Zuckerberg had little trouble expressing his politics.
Serious and optimistic – perhaps naively – he stormed onto the national stage to discuss issues that interested him: immigration, social justice, inequality, democracy in action. He wrote columns in national newspapers espousing his views, set up foundations and philanthropic efforts, and hired hundreds of people to leverage his vast wealth for his political goals.
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That was Mark Zuckerberg, in his twenties. Mark Zuckerberg in his forties is a very different Mark Zuckerberg.
In conversations over the past few years with friends, colleagues and advisers, Mr. Zuckerberg has expressed cynicism about politics after years of bad experiences in Washington. He and others at the top of Meta, Facebook's parent company, believed that both sides hated technology and that efforts to remain committed to political causes would only bring further scrutiny to their companies.
As recently as June at the Allen and Company conference — the “summer camp for billionaires” in Sun Valley, Idaho — Mr. Zuckerberg complained to several people about the backlash for Meta stemming from the more politically sensitive aspects of his philanthropic efforts. And he regretted hiring associates from his philanthropy who tried to push him even further to the left for certain reasons.
In short: he was over it.
According to more than a dozen friends, advisors and executives familiar with his thinking, he prefers to wash his hands of everything.
Publicly, this means Zuckerberg refuses to engage with Washington except when necessary. Privately, he has stopped supporting programs in his philanthropy that could be perceived as biased, and he has curbed employee activism at Meta, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized or unwilling to do so . to jeopardize their relationship with Mr. Zuckerberg.
He also spoke with former President Donald J. Trump twice this past summer in one-on-one phone calls, these people said, a move some have characterized as an attempt to soothe a long-strained relationship between the two men. restore.
“The political climate, I don't think I had much sense, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem,” Mr. Zuckerberg said during a recent interview at a live podcast event in San Francisco.
Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg publicly expressed regret about some of his political activities in a letter to Congress. He said the Biden administration “pressured” Meta in 2021 to censor more Covid-19 content than Mr Zuckerberg was comfortable with. And he said he would not repeat the contributions he made in 2020 to support electoral infrastructure because it did not make him appear “neutral.”
Mr. Zuckerberg's evolution has attracted relatively little attention compared to that of tech titans like Elon Musk, who have publicly aligned themselves with conservatives and Mr. Trump. But it also reflects a larger shift in Silicon Valley, where top executives have grown frustrated with controversial social issues. Their response was largely to withdraw from it.
“Mark and his colleagues are likely looking at the risks of political engagement and deciding that neutrality is the safer choice until this election is over,” said Nu Wexler, a director at the political consulting firm Four Corners Public Affairs and a former Facebook employee.
Privately, Mr. Zuckerberg now views his personal politics more as libertarianism or “classical liberalism,” according to people who have spoken to him recently. That includes a hostility to regulations that restrict business, an embrace of the free market and globalism, and an openness to social justice reforms – but only if this does not go beyond what he sees as far-left progressivism. And Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, are personally dismayed by what they see as a rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses, including at their alma mater, Harvard.
The representatives of Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan at Meta and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative declined to comment.
It's a significant change for an executive who in 2013 helped found and became the public face of the political advocacy group Fwd.US, whose goal was to help create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Two years later, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan, inspired by Bill Gates, founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization that invested $436 million over five years on causes such as legalizing drugs and reducing incarceration.
In 2015, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan wrote a letter to their newborn daughter, in which they dreamed of an egalitarian world in which they could “eliminate poverty and hunger,” “provide basic health care to everyone” and “build peaceful and understanding relationships between people.” cherish'. of all nations.” He hired a former top Obama adviser, David Plouffe, to oversee the work.
But in subsequent years, Facebook faced accusations that the Russians had used it to sow division among voters. Mr Zuckerberg and his company became a political lightning rod, with Democrats and Republicans criticizing Facebook and its sister service Instagram for allowing too much – or too little – political speech.
Starting in 2019, Zuckerberg began expressing bewilderment at the country's changing politics, two people close to him said. And the investigation led Zuckerberg to view his more overtly political work at CZI as relatively ineffective.
According to people close to them, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan were overwhelmed by the activism in their philanthropy. Following protests over the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, a CZI employee asked Mr. Zuckerberg during a staff meeting to resign from Facebook or the initiative because he was unwilling to moderate Mr. Trump's comments at the time .
The incident, and others like it, upset Mr. Zuckerberg, the people said, and pushed him away from the foundation's progressive political work. He came to view one of the initiative's three central divisions — the Justice and Opportunity team — as a distraction from the organization's overall work and a poor reflection of his bipartisan position, the people said.
In 2021, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan decided to end the group's internal political work and instead fund two bipartisan groups, including Fwd.us, that worked on these issues. Many of the approximately thirty employees who focused on politics resigned, were transferred, or were sent to these two groups.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, some of the initiative's staff wanted the organization to focus on protecting access to abortion. But Dr. Chan, who manages CZI on a day-to-day basis, sent a memo to employees firmly refusing to do so. “We have to stay focused and clear on what we are 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 Times. “We have no plans to expand our subsidies to new areas.”
Today, Mr. Zuckerberg, one of the initiative's two CEOs along with Dr. Chan, is less involved than two or three years ago, an aide said.
Other incidents piled up. After the 2020 election, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan were criticized for donating $400 million to the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life to help promote safety at voting booths during pandemic lockdowns. Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan viewed their contributions as a nonpartisan effort, although advisers warned them they would be criticized for taking sides.
The donations became known in Republican circles as “Zuckerbucks.” Conservatives, including Mr. Trump and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, condemned Mr. Zuckerberg for what they said was an effort to increase voter turnout in Democratic areas.
In private conversations with advisers and friends, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan have expressed some regret about the contributions and the extent to which they backfired.
The country should be hosting a parade for election officials and instead “they're under attack,” said David Becker, who led another Zuckerberg-backed 2020 program, the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “I would understand if Mark Zuckerberg was frustrated by the manufactured controversy about this.”
Within Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg and his management team have put pressure on politicians.
In late 2022, Meta's chief human resources officer, Lori Goler, introduced a new internal policy called “community engagement expectations,” according to a copy of the memo reviewed by The Times. It prohibited employees from raising issues such as abortion, racial justice movements and wars in the workplace. Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, defended the policy and was backed by Mr. Zuckerberg, two people familiar with the matter said.
Rather than engaging publicly with Washington, Mr. Zuckerberg is mending relationships with politicians behind the scenes. After the “Zuckerbucks” criticism, Mr. Zuckerberg hired Brian Baker, a prominent Republican strategist, to improve his positioning with right-wing media and Republican officials. Ahead of the November election, Mr. Baker has emphasized to Mr. Trump and his top aides that Mr. Zuckerberg has no plans to make similar donations, a person familiar with the discussions said.
Mr. Zuckerberg has yet to build a relationship with Vice President Kamala Harris. But over the summer, Mr. Zuckerberg had his first conversations with Mr. Trump since leaving 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 he was “praying” for Trump after the recent assassination attempt, according to a person briefed on the call.
Just a few weeks later they spoke again.
After Meta mistakenly included footage of the assassination attempt that circulated in Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg called the former president directly and apologized for the mistake, according to two people familiar with the speech. Representatives for Mr. Trump and Mr. Zuckerberg have issued differing statements about what happened during the phone call.
“Private conversations between President Trump and anyone else are just that: private,” said Steven Cheung, Trump's campaign spokesman.
Mr. Zuckerberg hasn't fooled himself into thinking that downplaying politics will completely solve all his personal frustrations or his company's problems. But he does think it's something Meta can eventually come back from.
“I think it will take another decade or so to fully go through that cycle before our brand is back to where it could have been,” Mr. Zuckerberg said at the podcast event, “if I hadn't done that. ruined first.”
Sheera Frenkel contributed reporting from San Francisco.
Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.
