mark zuckerberg

Tech CEO abruptly shuts down Trump over remark about his 'political career'

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (whose company owns Facebook and Instagram) got into an uncomfortable exchange with President Donald Trump at the White House during a Thursday evening event at the Rose Garden.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg — who was seated next to the president — was asked a question about free speech laws in the United Kingdom in response to complaints about social media censorship. The reporter initially sought Trump's response, but also posed the question to Zuckerberg, who appeared to be caught off-guard.

"Sorry, I wasn't paying attention," Zuckerberg said.

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"The British government seems to be cracking down on social media posts, people being arrested for tweets, social posts. Just wondering how concerning that is for you, Mr. President, and Mr. Zuckerberg," the reporter said.

"This is the beginning of your political career," Trump said to the Meta CEO.

"No it's not," Zuckerberg quickly responded, before refusing to answer the reporter's question.

The Journal further reported that the meeting was rife with flattery from CEOs, including from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who praised Trump as a "pro-business, pro-innovation president" and that he looked forward to "a long period of leading the world." Apple CEO Tim Cook also heaped compliments on the president, telling Trump that he appreciated his "leadership and focus on innovation" while reminding him of a commitment to invest $600 billion in American manufacturing. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — who garnered controversy earlier this year for his Department of Government Efficiency — was noticeably absent from the gathering, despite his companies having multibillion-dollar federal contracts.

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Click here to read the Journal's report in its entirety (subscription required).

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These 6 corporations with 'enormous political influence' ducked $278 billion in taxes

Analysts accuse big U.S. tech firms of paying almost $278 billion less corporate income tax in the past decade compared with the statutory rate for U.S. companies making the same profits.

The Guardian reveals Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft —the “Silicon Six”— generated a combined $11 trillion in revenue and $2.5 trillion in profits over the last decade. But they paid an average of just 18.8% in combined national and federal corporation taxes, compared with an average 29.7% in the U.S., according to the Fair Tax Foundation (FTF).

“Our analysis would indicate that tax avoidance continues to be hardwired into corporate structures,” Fair Tax Foundation Chief Executive Paul Monaghan told The Guardian. “The Silicon Six’s corporate income tax contributions are, in percentage terms, way below what sectors such as banking and energy are paying in many parts of the world.”

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Analysis at FTF also discovered the companies had inflated their stated tax payments by $82 billion over the same period by including contingencies for tax they did not expect to pay. Monaghan added that these companies have "enormous political influence as well as economic power," in that they all spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying government officials on key tax-writing committees to have more say in how the tax system works.

The Guardian reports that Netflix had the lowest rate of tax actually paid compared to profit at 14.7%, while Microsoft paid 20.4%. Amazon, meanwhile, had the worst tax conduct based on factors such as the total amount of tax paid, much if it through “obvious profit shifting” such as booking a sizeable portion of its U.K. income in low-tax Luxembourg. But Amazon’s corporate tax rate was still 19.6% ahead of Netflix and Meta (15.4%) and Apple (18.4%).

The report comes as leaders of many of these same tech companies’ influence genuflect to President Donald Trump. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg all attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

Read the full Guardian story at this link.

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'Challenge accepted': MAGA officials tried to 'stiffen Trump’s spine' against Meta CEO

Although Silicon Valley billionaire Mark Zuckerberg — whose Meta owns the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram — was critical of President Donald Trump in the past, he reached out to him after the 2024 election and attended Trump's inauguration. Zuckerberg has met with Trump three times in 2025, but according to Semafor reporter Ben Smith, some of the Meta CEO's "key antagonists in the federal government" showed up in the White House Oval Office on Tuesday, April 8.

Smith, in an article published on April 14, explains, "The visitors were Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing Meta in a trial that begins today; and Gail Slater, the assistant attorney general who is responsible for the Justice Department’s anti-trust enforcement. Ferguson and Slater were there, a person familiar with the meeting said, to stiffen Trump's spine against a relentless wave of lobbying from Meta."

According to Smith, a third Trump ally was present as well: far-right MAGA attorney Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project.

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Davis is known for his inflammatory attacks on not only Democrats, but also, on conservatives he considers insufficiently MAGA.

"While none of the participants in the meeting with Trump would share its contents," Smith reports, "Davis appeared to refer to it in a pair of X posts last Tuesday: 'Challenge accepted,' he posted at 1:32 pm, responding to a Trump supporter's concern that Zuckerberg had the White House 'on lock.' That evening, Davis replied to his own post: 'Mission accomplished.'"

Davis recently railed against Zuckerberg during an appearance on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast.

The attorney told Bannon, "Mark Zuckerberg rigged and stole the 2020 election, and that's why President Trump got chased out of the WH, why he faced 4 years of unprecedented, republic-ending lawfare…. I just can’t believe that President Trump would let Mark Zuckerberg go into the Oval Office and take down his pants."

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Read the full Semafor article at this link.


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'Ploy to avoid being regulated': GOP senator and MAGA podcaster rip Zuckerberg’s pro-Trump turn

Tech CEOs have lined up to show fealty to President-elect Donald Trump by showering his inaugural committee with $1 million donations. But their obeisance isn't convincing some of Trump's diehard supporters.

The Washington Post reported Saturday on the tech industry's about-face from almost unilaterally backing Democrats to giving large sums to Trump. Silicon Valley cornerstones like Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Threads), Google, Amazon and others have all lined up to pay respects to the incoming administration with seven-figure donations despite only giving a fraction of that amount to President Joe Biden's inauguration.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in particular has been subjected to criticism over his decision to stop fact-checking content posted to Facebook, suspend diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, allow users to get away with saying LGBTQ+ people are mentally ill and for putting Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan in charge of global affairs. Zuckerberg also appointed UFC owner Dana White — a prominent Trump supporter — to Meta's board of directors (Zuckerberg is a practitioner of mixed martial arts and tore his ACL while sparring in 2023).

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Zuckerberg's decision to stop moderating content is provoking fears of Facebook taking a sharp turn to the right, as X did after billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk purchased the platform formerly known as Twitter. Intercept tech reporter Sam Biddle posted to Bluesky that he obtained a leaked internal Meta document that examples of posts that are now considered acceptable. This reportedly includes "calling children 'trannies,' 'Jews are flat out greedier than Christians,' and 'immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of s—.'"

"[Meta's] document also provides ample examples of newly permissible insults aimed at specific gender identities or sexual orientations, including 'Gay people are sinners' and 'Trans people are immoral,'" Biddle wrote in his report. "A post stating 'Lesbians are so stupid' would remain prohibited as a 'mental insult,' though 'Trans people are mentally ill' is marked as allowed."

However, progressives aren't the only ones angry with Zuckerberg. In a post to her official X account, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said she was suspicious about Zuckerberg's true motivation after he announced the changes to Meta.

"Now that President Trump is about to take office, Meta has allegedly decided to stop censoring conservatives," Blackburn tweeted. "This is a ploy to avoid being regulated. We will not be fooled."

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Podcaster Candace Owens also cast doubt on Zuckerberg's new embrace of right-wing politics. The Post reported that Owens was skeptical of the tech CEO who once suspended Trump's account after the January 6 insurrection and banned accounts that propagated election denialism.

"Now he believes in free speech because of the election results?" Owens said.

In a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg expanded on his pro-MAGA shift. He complained that Biden administration officials would 'curse' and 'scream' at him in conversations about content moderation, though Techdirt reporter Mike Masnick found that the only instance of this happening was in an email from Biden official Rob Flaherty. In that email, Flaherty was referring to a bug on Instagram that prevented people from following Biden's official account, which Meta apologized for and corrected.

Click here to read the Post's article in full (subscription required).

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'It was your own White House': Trump says '2020 presidential election was rigged'

Donald Trump is being mocked for suggesting the White House “rigged” the 2020 presidential election, which he lost. Trump was President in 2020, as critics rushed to remind him.

Trump was referring to a report, originally published by the Wall Street Journal, which states Meta/Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan saying he wants his platforms to be “neutral” in politics, and that he regrets removing or downplaying some content, including COVID disinformation, in response to White House pressure. Zuckerberg also referenced a now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop article in the New York Post. Zuckerberg writes in his letter, “the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.”

Trump on his Truth Social platform wrote:

“Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary Committee.”

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(That post has a quotation mark at the beginning but nowhere else, making it unclear where the quote ends.)

And in response to a screenshot of The New York Post’s cover story, Trump wrote: “This is what everyone’s been waiting for — THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED!”

That headline reads: “Zuckerberg admits Biden admin pressured Facebook to censor COVID content, says it was wrong to suppress The Post’s Hunter laptop coverage.”

Zuckerberg’s letter to Chairman Jordan is clear.

He writes that in “2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire…”

The election was in November of 2020.

Zuckerberg then goes on to say: “In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply…”

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But Trump’s posts appear to miss that he was President in 2020.

Responding to Chairman Jordan’s Judiciary Committee’s posting of Zuckerberg’s letter, The Atlantic’s David Frum asked, “who was president of the United States in the year 2020?”

Veterans advocate and former intelligence officer Travis Akers post a screenshot of Trump’s post and some commentary:

Progressive social media user Alex Cole, who has over 250,000 followers on X wrote: “That means it was your own White House, dumbass. You were president in 2020!”

See the social media posts above or at this link.

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