Like the rest of the tech billionaire class, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has decided to give up any pretense of ethics in order to cozy up to President-elect Donald Trump.
Zuckerberg killed Meta’s fact checking and ended all of the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
In order to do some damage control—and to audition for the Trump administration’s favor—Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which has become a forum for billionaires to act aggrieved as they take control of the country. When Rogan asked Zuckerberg to elaborate on how he has become a victim of a politicized government, Zuckerberg rambled on.
“So we had organizations that were looking into us that were, like, not really involved with social media. Like I think like the CFPB like, this, financial—I don’t even know what it stands for. It’s the … it’s the financial organization that Elizabeth Warren had set up. And, and it’s basically, it’s like, we’re not a bank,” he said.
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which started under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act , has been investigating Meta over allegations that it misuses private data for financial gain.
The idea that Zuckerberg doesn’t know what the CFPB is or that it doesn’t exclusively involve banks (having also investigated Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.) is incredibly disingenuous. He’s either so outrageously dumb that shareholders must force him to leave the business, or he’s lying on Rogan’s show for a reason.
“They kind of found some theory they wanted to investigate. And it’s like, okay, clearly they were trying really hard, right? To like, to like, find, find some theory, but it, like, I don’t know. It just, it kind of, like, throughout the, the, the, the, the party and the government, there was just sort of, I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know how this stuff works. I mean, I’ve never been in government,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.
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Is the CEO of Meta talking about the CFPB’s investigation? Or maybe he’s talking about the upcoming anti-trust trial between Meta and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Since Trump’s first term, Meta has been fighting to keep anti-trust laws from breaking up its control of Facebook and Instagram.
Outgoing FTC Chair Lina Khan told CNBC that she wasn’t surprised companies like Meta are trying to “get some type of sweetheart deal” from the incoming Trump administration.
While on Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg cravenly appealed to the insecure and aggrieved male audience, telling Rogan that the “corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” before arguing that “masculine energy” was lacking in the workforce today.
“It’s one thing to say we want to be kind of, like, welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and I think it’s another to basically say that ‘masculinity is bad,’” he said.
According to The New York Times, the ever-masculine Zuckerberg followed that up a few days later by throwing his former COO Sheryl Sandberg under the bus for Meta’s previous DEI policies.
Zuckerberg has secured his special VIP seat at Trump’s inauguration, along with fellow oligarchs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Now he just needs all of those pesky consumer protection watchdogs to go away.
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