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Meta announced on Monday that Ultimate Fighting Championship president and Trump ally Dana White will join its board of directors, as the tech giant seeks to build its relationship with the incoming administration.
“Dana is the President and CEO of UFC, and he has built it into one of the most valuable, fastest growing, and most popular sports enterprises in the world,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “I’ve admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand.”
Though the pair are both successful media executives with an interest in martial arts, the move is widely seen as a larger attempt to align with the incoming administration.
Last week, the company announced that Joel Kaplan, one of the most senior Republican officials at the firm, would become Meta’s chief global affairs minister, with a Republican-appointed former Federal Communications Commission chair ascending to another key post.
The moves come after Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November.
During the campaign, Zuckberg called Trump a “badass” for standing back up immediately after being shot by a would-be assassin at a rally in Pennsylvania in July.
Trump and Zuckerberg have had a complicated relationship.
Facebook was a key platform the 2016 Trump campaign used to reach voters, though by 2021 the alliance had soured, as the social media giant indefinitely suspended the president’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram after he praised supporters who carried out the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
By 2023, Facebook reinstated Trump’s account.
Major tech companies like Meta, Uber, Amazon, and Apple have made serious overtures to the incoming administration, with executives dining with Trump at a Mar-a-Lago and lavishing his inauguration committee with a record-breaking fundraising haul.
The Trump campaign, for its part, made explicit attempts to appeal to the tech world, long considered a Democratic constituency.
It selected JD Vance, a former venture capitalist, as vice president, continues to ally strongly with X billionaire Elon Musk, and promised to be a major backer of the cryptocurrency industry.
Now that the campaigning is over, the GOP-tech alliance may face some hurdles, as Trump’s trade war priorities could imperil electroncs supply chains that depend on China, while the nativist Republican base showed signs of division earlier this year when Musk spoke about hiring immigrants for top roles at his companies.
