Executives sucking up to Trump now have to factor in the ‘first buddy’

Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN

New York (CNN) — The New York Times once wrote a story about how Mark Zuckerberg, the 40-year-old Meta CEO, had become disillusioned with the politics he’d once promoted. Zuck was “declining to engage with Washington except when necessary,” “stopped supporting programs at his philanthropy that could be perceived as partisan” and “tamped down employee activism at Meta.”

In short, the Times concluded, he was over it, even as he was trying to smooth over his long-strained relationship with Donald Trump.

But that was a long time ago — all the way back in September — and a quite a lot has changed.

Now, as my colleague Clare Duffy reports, Zuck is angling for an “active role” in shaping tech policy in the incoming administration — potentially setting himself up to work directly with a president who recently threatened to jail him for life and a rival tech billionaire who once challenged him to a cage match.

What happened in the two-ish months between the Times’ story and today is pretty simple: Trump won reelection, obviously.

And in this bareknuckle world of corporate executive leadership, Zuckerberg and the like have little choice but to spin up some flattery and lay it on thick.

Failing to do so risks upsetting a leader with a short fuse and the power to sink a company’s stock or ignite a boycott with a single social media post.

Trump also welcomed his faithful “first buddy” Elon Musk into his inner circle, where Musk appears to be relishing his role as a kind of gatekeeper for executives hoping to snag an audience with the president-elect, per the Wall Street Journal. (Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and the most prominent spokesman for the AI industry, is reportedly persona non grata around Mar-a-Lago because Musk “despises” him.)

The Musk factor adds a wrinkle to an already tricky diplomacy that Zuck, who has a history of beef with both men, would have had to engage in anyway.

But zooming out, it also reflects a broader shift in recent years in the way business leaders approach their job. If at one point it was cool to speak out on political issues — as many executives did during the first Trump administration and early in Joe Biden’s term — the pendulum has swung fully back.

The mood now: Bend the knee, or say nothing and pray no one notices.

We can see that happening not only in the parade of tech CEOs tweeting fawning congratulations to Trump but more broadly in the wave of companies backtracking on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Last week, while many of us were either on vacation or busy typing “let’s circle back after the holiday” emails, Walmart said it would end its employee training programs designed to promote racial equity and evaluate funding for Pride events, among other things.

To be sure, plenty of companies are still committed to DEI programs, and not all executives are morphing into insufferable suck-ups.

But now that Trump has locked up a second term, businesses feel less pressure to fake it till they make it on the DEI front.

“Trump’s election gives business leaders who were never committed to DEI an easy out,” Shaun Harper, a professor of education and business at the University of Southern California, recently told my colleague Nathaniel Meyersohn.

In other words, as the country embraces its strongman era, the idea of “stakeholder capitalism” — that companies should strive to be more than just profit machines — is losing its tug of war with the more traditional profit-at-all-costs model of “shareholder capitalism.”

Zuckerberg knows the stakes with Trump better than anyone.

This past spring, Trump called into CNBC to lash out at Facebook, calling the site an “enemy of the people” and sending Meta’s stock into a tailspin. And it’s more than just a single bad day on Wall Street that Zuck has to worry about.

Meta (META) got to be a $1.5 trillion company thanks in part to a regulatory environment that allowed it to gobble up potential competitors, including Instagram and WhatsApp. That could be the key to Meta’s future growth as it contends with TikTok and YouTube’s stranglehold on Gen Z.

Privately, Zuck may well be fed up with politics. But he seems to recognize that as the head of one of the world’s largest publicly traded companies, he doesn’t have much choice.

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