Dana White, the CEO of the Final Preventing Championship (UFC) in addition to an ally to Republican candidate and the brand new US President-elect Donald Trump, can be becoming a member of Meta’s board of administrators, the corporate introduced on Monday, January 7, 2025.
CEO of the Final Preventing Championship (UFC) Dana White speaks throughout an election evening occasion for Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump on the Palm Seashore Conference Heart on November 06, 2024 in West Palm Seashore, Florida.(Win McNamee/Getty Photos by way of AFP)
“I’ve never been interested in joining a board of directors until I got the offer to join Meta’s board,” White mentioned in a press release. “I am a huge believer that social media and AI are the future.”
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He additional added that he was “very excited to join this incredible team and to learn more about this business from the inside. There is nothing I love more than building brands, and I look forward to helping take Meta to the next level.”
This comes at a time when the political leaning of Meta’s board appears to be in transition, in keeping with a Enterprise Insider report.
For instance, Nick Clegg, a former chief of the UK’s Liberal Democrats celebration and Meta’s ex-president of world affairs left the corporate earlier this month, being changed by Joel Kaplan, who’s presently the corporate’s vp of world public coverage and one linked to the Republican celebration.
White has been an in depth ally of Trump, with the pair recurrently having been noticed collectively at occasions going all the best way again to 2001.
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Trump has additionally appeared at a number of UFC matches and White has spoken on the 2016, 2020, and 2024 Republican conventions.
This variation in Meta’s management can also be in stark distinction to the years of battle seen between the corporate and Trump, with Meta banning Trump in 2021 for what the corporate claimed as praising “people engaged in violence at the Capitol on January 6.”
Trump then sued Fb, Google, and Twitter, together with their CEOs, accusing them of unlawfully censoring him.
Nonetheless, regardless of his accounts being reinstated two years later, Trump had continued to publicly assault the platforms together with founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
This all modified with Meta since pledging $1 million to Trump’s presidential inauguration fund upon his victory.
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Meta additionally included John Elkann, the CEO of Exor, which is likely one of the largest European funding corporations, and likewise tech investor Charlie Songhurst.
“Dana, John, and Charlie will add a depth of experience and perspective that may assist us deal with the huge alternatives forward with AI, wearables, and the way forward for human connection,” Zuckerberg mentioned.