Trump’s Tech Bros: Is ‘Maga Mark’ the real Mark Zuckerberg?

0:00AI has opened infinite possibilities for customer experience and endless complexity because piloting AI tools is easy. Making them work together across a global enterprise is something else entirely. Nice is the CX AI platform that runs customer experience at scale, uniting agentic agents, human agents, and customer intelligence. So the world's leading brands can move forward with confidence. Nice, the proven CX AI leader. Learn more at nice.com. One sunny day in a San Francisco suburb, a man walks into a high school gym where they're holding an amateur martial arts competition. He's wearing a mask, dark glasses, a cap.

0:43He's going to a jiu-jitsu tournament. He's a white belt beginner's rank. He's signed up under the name Mark Elliott. That's Hannah Murphy, the FT's technology correspondent in San Francisco. I spoke to the referee for a particular match and he spotted this guy kind of doing drills, running up and down and thought, that's funny, why is he dressed that way? Maybe he doesn't quite understand the rules. Then Mark Elliott steps onto the mat, rips off the hat, the glasses, the mask, reveals that he is in fact Mark Zuckerberg.

1:18Mark Elliott Zuckerberg, the billionaire CEO of Meta. He'd been training hard for that tournament since taking up jiu-jitsu during the pandemic. It's part of a dramatic transformation in the Facebook founder. He's changed his hair, his clothes, his physique, and also, it seems, his politics. A very different mark to, you know, this geeky teenager who founded Facebook in his dorm room. He's famous for wearing kind of the hoodies, flip-flops. Visually, we now see he's wearing the gold chain. He's grown out his hair. He's wearing trendy T-shirts with Roman Empire quotes on them. and this is sort of the new MAGA mark emerging.

2:01Zuckerberg once championed social justice causes, worried about misinformation on his platforms, and even banned Donald Trump from Facebook in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I've ever seen in my life. Now he's describing Trump as badass and calling for masculine energy in the workplace. He's brought Republican lobbyists into his inner circle and appointed friends of Trump to Meta's board. And on his platforms, he's scrapped professional fact-checking, reigned in moderation, and called for a return to our roots on free expression.

2:45We've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms. Is this all an act, a strategy to get into Trump's good books and help Meta pivot from being the world's leading social media company to the world's leading AI company? Or are we finally seeing the authentic version of the Facebook founder emerging? Is Maga Mark the real Mark Zuckerberg?

3:26This is Tectonic from the Financial Times. I'm Murad Ahmed, the FT's technology news editor. And in this season of the podcast, I'm exploring the relationships between Donald Trump and some of the titans of the tech world. What's really driving those relationships? How they're playing out? And what that might mean for the future of the tech industry in the US and around the world.

3:54To help answer these questions, I sat down with Hannah Murphy and also Katie Harbour. Katie's the founder of a technology policy firm called Anchor Change, but she worked at Facebook for a decade under Zuckerberg, most recently as Director of Public Policy for Global Elections. I started by asking Katie about how she saw Zuckerberg's recent turn towards Trump in and around the 2024 election? So Mark's pivot since the 2024 election is really becoming somewhat of a trend that I've seen. You know, after the 2016 election, when Trump won the first time, the shift was really into a lot of the integrity work, into mis - and disinformation, fighting foreign interference.

4:36That's what both Democrats and Republicans were wanting. So you saw Mark do this big pivot towards that. He did a similar pivot after the 2020 election. There it was to try to pull back from politics. He sort of realized that this was not something that you could win. Everybody was just mad at you. And so he didn't want to have anything really to do with it. And this is another pivot now based upon the fact that Republicans and Trump are control in the United States. But the common theme throughout all of these, I think, is that he's doing what's best for the business at that period in time. Right.

5:07And one of the most obvious parts of that pivot was that the week before Trump's inauguration, Zuckerberg announces these really big changes to the way Meta's platforms, Facebook and Instagram are moderated. Just explain what those changes are. In January, Mark made a couple of announcements around content moderation, in particular, ending the fact-checking program. There was also pulling back on certain phrases and words around particularly transgendered people, women, I think people of color as well. There was the DEI changes. is, you know, Mark made these decisions with a very small group of people at the company, you know, to try to make sure they didn't have to take action on some prominent figures who are going into Trump's cabinet.

5:49The big question we have that we have not yet heard answers to is how well they are doing on executing it. We just don't know yet how impactful this is going to be. But regardless, the perception of it is a big value shift for the company. Hannah, you've been covering Mark Zuckerberg for years. These policy changes seem to come as part of a much bigger transformation in Zuckerberg. What's happened? I think we've had sort of two transformations, one, both this physical makeover and a political one. On the political side, there's a theory that he's been lambasted again and again by the Biden administration, targeted by the FTC with an antitrust case that promises to kind of break apart all his companies.

6:31When Biden came into office, he was accused by Biden of killing people for allowing misinformation around COVID to be on the platform. And this was after Mark and the Facebook team did try to jump onto COVID as an opportunity to create an information hub, to try to sort of help the public. And also behind closed doors, Biden officials were reportedly sort of shouting angry at Meta. And the die was sort of cast against Meta. There's this idea that no matter what Facebook did, they were getting hit from all sides from the Biden administration. Senator, our job and what we take seriously is making sure that we build industry-leading tools to find harmful content, take it off the services, and to build tools that empower parents.

7:16He sat in front of Congress, multiple hearings, and then you see ahead of the Trump election some inkling that maybe he wants to woo and make overtures to Trump. When the assassination attempt happens on Trump's life, Mark comes out, he calls it badass. He publishes a letter to Jim Jordan saying, yes, the Biden administration have been pressuring me to censor certain content. Jim Jordan, a Republican who is investigating these matters in Congress. Exactly. And he goes on various podcasts and live events and says, I regret being so apologetic on the integrity and safety side was the implication.

7:55And now I'm going to emerge as sort of unapologetic. So there's a sense that he kind of got boxed in and he pushes back out at the same time as coming out in favor of Trump. And then this all coincides with this very visual makeover, a glow up, if you will, where he starts working out. He takes up jujitsu. He's long been sort of involved in hobbies and sportsmanship, but he's taking it very seriously. he's posting himself topless. He's posting himself with celebrity MMA fighters, embracing figures like Dana White and Joe Rogan that speak to this so-called manosphere space. The kind of masculine energy, I think, is good.

8:34And obviously, you know, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really like trying to get away from it. And I think having a culture that like celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merit. It's a kind of anti-feminist, pro-masculinity strand of the internet, in part, which helped elect Trump and backed Trump. So you have both the physical and the political transformation in this latest pivot. If I could just add something to that, because I think that there's a couple of through lines here that are important to point out. One, on that physical and personal transformation, there's a part of me that wonders that if Mark is really looking for a community that he belongs in.

9:13After being criticized from so many different angles for so long, we have to remember at the end of the day, he's also a human being. And I think that part of this, this is a community that welcomed him. It was a place that he felt like he wasn't being criticized. And I wonder if that's a part of it, too. I, of course, never talked to him about it, but I have to think that that's a component of it, too. And then on the business and political side, I think another thing to weave throughout all of that is just how important AI is right now in determining winners and losers. And the fact that Elon is so involved in the campaign and so involved in the Trump administration, that that also shows to Mark that if he wants to be playing a role in this, he needs to find ways to make sure that he's not being shut out of this administration the same way that he was shut out of the Biden administration.

10:01I want to get back to AI and the importance of AI to Zuckerberg's future plans in a second. But I just wondered, Katie, how important you think the Biden administration's treatment of Zuckerberg and Meta, making him feel like public enemy number one, was in pushing Zuckerberg towards Trump? I think it's a secondary factor, in all honesty. I think the first and number one factor is the fact that Trump won. and where Trump and Republicans were going before the election, even in terms of the accusation of censorship about what they were expecting from business leaders in order to engage with him.

10:36That was the main reason that he made this change. If you think about it before the election, yes, he was talking about being unapologetic about politics and all that, but Mark was keeping his powder pretty dry, depending upon who would win to kind of be able to make sure that no matter who went into the White House, that they'd be able to have to work with them because I don't think that you could necessarily burn those bridges with Democrats before we knew what the outcome was going to be. Once we knew that it was Trump, then I think Mark started making those moves, knowing that it's, you know, maybe Democrats come into office in 2028.

11:08It's possible. And so for him, four years is a very long time. And so you can lean in a little bit more into working with Republicans and then figure out later if Democrats take back power, you'll deal with that then. Yes, the Democrats and how they treated him played a role in this. But the bigger part of this was the fact that Democrats came out of the November election with no power. Can I ask, Katie, I'm curious your sense of Marx politics, because some folks would say, you know, he was apolitical. Others would say he seemed certainly liberal, very progressive. And others would say he was always sort of libertarian, neoclassical, whatever it was all along.

11:44I could never quite quite pin it down. Katie, I'm curious. Yeah, he definitely goes to the beat of his own drummer when it comes to politics. I kind of see a lot of myself in that too, because I call myself a Republican with a pharmaceutical level disclaimer underneath it. I don't really feel like I fit cleanly into either party. And I think Mark is very much the same way. Going way back to 2010, he was doing the donations to Newark schools. He did fundraisers for Chris Christie. But I mean, my experience was a bit more of a libertarian streak. I think he always was sort of loathed to take down too much content.

12:16He didn't pay a ton of attention to politics until probably after 2016. And he started taking more of a public role in the public policy work and stuff like that. And so he had his own issues that he cared about. And I think that's why it's hard for you to pin it down into any one way. And he's not the only one in Silicon Valley that's like that. Like Mark Andreessen has donated to folks of both parties for a lot of things. You see many business leaders that do that because they know that they need to be building up relationships with both sides and they have their own issues that they care about that they like to put money and resources into.

12:53So he doesn't wear his political stripes on his sleeve, but he's made some pretty significant appointments at Meta that seem to lean much further right than ever before. Probably the most eye-catching is he appoints Dana White, who's the CEO of UFC, the mixed martial arts competition, to Meta's board. He's a friend of Trump's. And he also promotes Joel Kaplan, a longtime Republican lobbyist, to president of global affairs, replacing a more liberal voice in Nick Clegg. Hannah, from the people around Zuckerberg that you've spoken to, is this all about, as Katie says, just doing whatever's good for business?

13:32Or are there other motivations too? There's sort of several different camps that emerge. So one is that this is all about political expediency. It's good for business. Business overall is what matters. He'll blow with the political winds where he needs to, but also spending dollars on safety isn't where he won't be putting his money if he didn't have to. The second camp is that there was this shift because he was so fed up with all this criticism. And then number three is that this is who he's been all along, that Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg, with their liberal connections, with these moderating forces on him, they've now gone.

14:09He was taking those safety and integrity decisions through gritted teeth in response to criticism. He never really wanted to. I don't know that necessarily all three cannot be combined and then it can be a bit of all of them. And then you have this sort of image question of does he just want to be liked? Folks say, you know, he really cares. There's a vanity to posting yourself topless that we'd never seen before in previous Mark. And some of that has maybe been spurred by Elon. Not that he wants to be Elon, but that he wants to have the sort of fan base that Elon has, dedicated fan base, be seen as a great innovator.

14:50And he's also been jealous of Elon's ability to kind of strip back, run a very lean, efficient operation at X and not have to invest much in moderation and safety and then face few repercussions for doing that. Yeah, and in Elon Musk, whatever you think about Musk and his politics, there are a lot of people who really want to defend him. They want to come out and publicly defend him and support him and be in his camp. And we've never really seen that, those attempts to publicly defend Zuckerberg. The first thing I would say is that Mark is a very complicated being. And I think all those different camps that you said, there's elements of truth in all of them.

15:32But for me, what it comes down to with all of this is that it's been widely reported that Mark is scared of being out innovated. He wants to be seen as that great innovator, the Bill Gates, the Steve Jobs type thing. And this paranoia has been what has been driving him from day one. And I think that that is what continues to drive him as part of all this. I think there are definitely elements of this, these changes that go back to the way Mark was running the company before 2016 and the way that he was around content moderation. He has always been sort of loath to go too far in taking content down.

16:09I think part of the reason that you don't see people defending him is the fact that he has not made friends on both sides of the aisle. He has made decisions that have angered both Republicans and Democrats. So another way you could look at it is he's been a great unifier in the way that people don't like him and Facebook around it. And so that's why, whereas Elon has gone all in on one side, which comes with its own benefits, but also comes with its own tradeoffs of what that looks like if you're trying to appeal to a broad global base, which is what Mark and Meta and Facebook have been able to do in a way that X has never been able to do as part of all of this.

16:46So again, I think it's really hard to prescribe any one thing because to me, this has been a bunch of not necessarily little things, but a bunch of things over time that have moved Mark into this position. And there's elements of that as well as just the fact of where the power resides right now in D.C., the importance of A.I. and the importance of the business decisions that the administration makes about how they make it easier for these companies to build these A.I. models. That's really going to determine the winners and losers. And then they'll deal with if the politics change, they'll deal with that when that comes.

17:23But even, you know, there's been reporting that Mark is also wanting to be like, we can't completely burn bridges with the Democrats. We know that we have to find this balance as part of that. And I think part of that comes from the seasonality of having been CEO through so many different political cycles that you know that you can't necessarily take the full Elon route, but you can't ignore it either. But you also see you see Elon with SpaceX, with Tesla, with Neuralink. By contrast, you know, Mark changed the name of the company, went all in on the metaverse. And that has been, you know, it's been a total flop.

17:58And it's been embarrassing. And part of my reporting said, you know, that internally, even senior executives hadn't bought into it. Everyone sort of tiptoed around it. And at the same time, you have Facebook, which was his baby, maybe losing some ground, particularly among young people. Instagram, which he bought, doing perhaps a little better. But it's a kind of sensitive moment where if you want to be seen as the innovator, you are lagging. And on AI too, and we're seeing this with the fact that the models are not performing at the level that he wants them to. And now he's scrambling to try to hire people and move very quickly.

18:37And this is very classic Mark in terms of pulling all the levers that he can to try to move quickly into something where he may have been falling behind. We saw this with mobile way back in 2012. We've seen this happen many different times. And so there are absolutely stumbling blocks, which I think also feeds into the paranoia of being like, my company is not performing at the level that it should be against all these other folks. And he is seeing the very distinct possibility that they could be, you know, losers as part of all this and go the way of Sun Microsystems, which is where the Facebook campus is right now in Menlo Park.

19:13Right. Right, some microsystems, a once-dominant tech company that receded after the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, perhaps a warning for Zuckerberg and Meta. But let's take a break now, and in the second half, I want to talk more about AI, how important that is to Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, and how that might be influencing his approach to Trump.

20:03We'll see you next time. with confidence. NICE, the proven CXAI leader. Learn more at NICE.com. The new episode of The Next Five is all about the freedom to invent with AI. Steve Tarza at Amazon joins me. I think there's such a huge opportunity for innovation, as does Jim Rowan at Deloitte. We see that when the C-suite is using AI, they get their teams on board as well. And Seth Fox at S &P Global. Our data is our crown jewels. We have to draw a bit of a line around the data, but not around the idea. Listen to The Next Five wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy.

20:47So we've already mentioned AI. Meta is spending massive amounts of money on AI right now. It's got its own model called Llama. and AI seems like Zuckerberg's next big plan after the metaverse failed to take off. Hannah, what does Zuckerberg want to do with AI first of all? What's the plan? He said he wants Meta to be the AI leader, that in time we will be talking to AI online, we'll have AI-generated friends, tasks, agentic tasks like shopping will be handled by AI. He wants Meta's own code to be written by AI. Eventually, down the line, the next computing platform beyond mobiles, he believes will be, or at least he's betting on augmented reality, that we'll have some form of headset and be able to sort of overlay images that will need AI in order to see the world around us and feedback and interact with that system.

21:43Katie, why do you think the next four years in particular are going to be so important to Meta's AI ambitions? Yeah, I think this administration is so important to Meta's AI ambitions for a couple of reasons. One is pure timing. The fact that ChatGPT blew onto the scene in November of 2022, it has become this AI arms race. The next couple of years are just incredibly important, again, in terms of the winners and losers. And this happens to be the administration that they're having to deal with. The other thing, too, is that this is a Republican administration with a Republican Congress, which means it is a lot easier for them to pass legislation, which could either hurt or help these companies, particularly Meta, in this quest around AI, particularly around issues of copyright.

22:27And that's important because the more data sources that you can include in training the AI, including copyrighted works, means the stronger that it can be. There's going to be a lot on the energy front that they're going to need to do to be able to build data centers, to be able to have electricity, et cetera, to fuel all of this. There's the geopolitics of all this around chips and tariffs that are a part of this. And so there's a lot of levers that the Trump administration has that could really make or break some of these efforts for the tech community and particularly Mark. And so that's what makes this administration more powerful and more important than even the Biden administration or previous administrations were.

23:06And however the chips fall, whoever is the winner or if there will likely be multiple winners but whoever those winners are are going to set the course of history how we live the rest of our lives how the news environment works entertainment you know you will change the world if you are the one or two or three companies that develop these products that inevitably we will be one day using and will be ubiquitous right those are the stakes that's why it's worth spending billions of dollars now for the multi-trillion dollar opportunity down the line. Right. To be the innovator, but also to make the money and win.

23:42So Katie, are Zuckerberg's changes working? Can Zuckerberg be the winner? It is way too soon to know whether or not we've had the desired effect or not. Like, I think we have to remember we're barely six months into the Trump administration. We have three and a half years left in all of this, which is a long, long time when it comes to the world of tech. And so I think that all of this right now has been very much foundational setting. I think Trump knows that he wants to be able to have as many options as possible when sort of coming up with deals and doesn't want to do anything too soon on all of this.

24:19And I think, again, the major prize is going to be on AI. And there, we still haven't seen a ton from the administration. Their AI action plan is due on July 22nd. I think that'll give us a good sense of where they're going to be on things like copyright, on energy, many other places to know how industry supportive that's going to be. Based upon what we're seeing with the budget bill in Congress at the moment, we know that they're trying to help make it so that states cannot pass AI legislation for 10 years to try to make it easier for companies to comply with any sort of regulation that is happening.

24:52So I think it is way too soon to call winners or losers on all of this. I just wanted to broaden things out a bit. You know, when you worked at then Facebook, you came from a Republican political background and Silicon Valley then was seen as very liberal. Does the change in Zuckerberg that we're seeing now also reflect a change in the political culture of the valley? Somewhat, because I think the Valley's always been very libertarian as well. I think the fact that it was seen as liberal really came out of the Obama campaign and the fact that they hired many people from Silicon Valley to help them with social media and particularly in 2012 around data and all of that.

25:37But there's always been sort of this streak going throughout Silicon Valley. And like I said, many executives were donating both to Republicans and Democrats throughout all of this. What we are seeing now is definitely a more overt and public shift towards Republicans, not just from Mark, but from many of these executives. And a lot of that is based upon what we talked about earlier with the way the Biden administration was treating them, how they saw what they did with crypto and really making it challenging for crypto to get off the ground. And they didn't want to have the same thing happen with AI.

26:08And so you saw many of these executives decide to go all in on Trump and trying to help Trump win in order to help their business objectives. Hannah, I'm wondering what the response has been to all of this from within Meta. I think Mark has a pretty tight, close-knit inner circle of loyalists. They will back him come what may. It would be quite shocking to see someone turn against him publicly. That said, internally, liberal staff and also former staff that I've spoken to have, you know, they use words like betrayal, devastated. They feel like they had to defend Facebook. It was sort of like a black mark against your name if you worked at Facebook.

26:50And they'd gone around saying, no, no, it's not that bad. We just want to connect people. We're not sort of terrible for democracy. and now they're seeing their boss do this pivot in a way that some, particularly, for example, LGBTQ community has not chimed with them, obviously. Others who sort of backed progressive causes. There's been a shift internally at Meta in that as well. It used to be there would be an uprising. There have been internal sit-outs, walk-outs, protests, if you will. A lot of people putting criticism on the internal workplace discussion boards. Right, particularly in the first Trump administration, that happened a lot.

27:30Yes, for years. It was one of those startups that had this culture of, you can be open and questioning, we're going to have all hands every week with the bosses and you can ask anything you want. There's a feeling that those have become more sort of stage managed over time, only taking the questions that a mark would want to answer. Like it or lump it, you either are on board and fully in or you're out.

27:56so hannah going back to that jiu-jitsu tournament that zuckerberg went to back in 2023 how did he get on the referee said he was good let me put that up front he won one fight the second fight according to the referee he lost the fight because he made a snoring sound which is an indication that you are losing uh consciousness and the jiu-jitsu referee said you That's his equivalent to a tap out, surrendering. Mark, on the other hand, when he came to, or maybe was always conscious all along, he claimed that he had not passed out, that he was just making a grunt and that this had been misinterpreted.

28:34So he disputed it pretty loudly. There was a bit of a disagreement there and then on the mat. Mark also got his people to go over and try and dispute with the referee, but to no avail, the match was called. So he lost that particular one. What do you think that incident tells you about both Mark Zuckerberg, the character, and Mark Zuckerberg's approach to competition. I think it tells you that he does not like to lose and he does not like to be told that he has lost.

29:04That was the FT's Hannah Murphy and Katie Harbaugh, formerly of Facebook, but now the CEO of Anchor Change, speaking to me about the emergence of MAGA Mark. We put some free-to-read articles from the FT in the show notes of this episode, including Hannah's magazine piece on Mark Zuckerberg's embrace of martial arts, the Manosphere and the Trump administration. In the next episode of Tectonic, the last in this season, we'll turn our attention to a man Mark Zuckerberg has credited as a mentor, Peter Thiel. Thiel is one of the tech industry's biggest investors, but he's also a man with an ideology.

29:43His libertarian instincts are changing minds in Silicon Valley and Washington. I'm not a politician, but tonight I urge all of my fellow Americans to stand up and vote for Donald Trump. Tune in for more on Teal, where he came from, what he thinks, and the impact he's had and continues to have on America's political and tech worlds. You've been listening to Tectonic with me, Murad Ahmed. The producer is Josh Gabbard-Doyon, and the senior producer is Edwin Lane. Flo Phillips is the executive producer. The sound design is by Odin Ingebergsen and Breen Turner. Original music by Metaphor Music, Manuela Zaragoza and Topher Forges are the FT's acting heads of audio.

30:51The new episode of The Next Five is all about CFOs in an AI world. Patrick Villanova at Blackline joins me. CFOs are inherently risk averse. We have to be very prudent when we implement AI. As does Olya Brasi at Highgate. My rule is no human owner means no go live. And Gina Gutsight at FTI Consulting. There's no excuse. You're the CFO. You're signing the name to the financial statements. Listen to The Next Five wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy.