Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions as a Washington power player have led him to another corner of the capital’s hobnobbing scene: the Business Roundtable.
In September, the Meta chief executive quietly joined the organization that lobbies on behalf of large U.S. companies after reaching out about doing so months earlier, Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, told The New York Times.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who once avoided weighing in on politics, has embraced President Trump and become a more visible presence in Washington. The night before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, where Mr. Zuckerberg had prime seating, he attended a black-tie party to celebrate the new administration at Peter Thiel’s mansion in the nation’s capital.
The Meta chief has also started speaking out on issues that have been the subjects of Mr. Trump’s talking points. On Joe Rogan’s podcast this month, Mr. Zuckerberg criticized what he considered moves to monitor speech and behavior, saying “a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered.”
A week before Mr. Trump was sworn into office, Mr. Zuckerberg announced that Meta would stop fact-checking posts on Facebook, a move that appeared designed to satisfy the incoming president and conservatives who have accused the company of censoring them on the platform. “I have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be, and this is how it’s going to be going forward,” he told Mr. Rogan. The newly vocal stance may also have reflected Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal views.
The Business Roundtable also has seen a shift. In 2019, it became a symbol for the “gentle capitalism” that Mr. Zuckerberg has recently railed against. That year, the Roundtable, then led by JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, issued a statement saying that companies should go beyond advancing the interests of shareholders in the short term, and “invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers.”
But such thinking had been falling out of favor even before Mr. Trump’s re-election. Corporate America has refocused on the bottom line. Walmart’s chief, Doug McMillon, who headed the Business Roundtable after Mr. Dimon, rolled back the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in November amid a broader cultural backlash. At this year’s World Economic Forum, where diversity initiatives were once celebrated, discussion of many social issues was nearly absent.
“Diversity in general is good for business,” Chuck Robbins, chief executive of Cisco and the current chairman of the Business Roundtable, told CNBC during the annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland. “But I think the pendulum swung.”
