Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s sprint to remake Meta for the Trump era

In December 2024, Mr Zuckerberg tapped a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to online speech. PHOTO: AFP

Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel and Kate Conger

UPDATED Jan 12, 2025, 06:12 PM

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SAN FRANCISCO – Mr Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small.

In December 2024, Mr Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer of Meta, tapped a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to online speech.

He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to turn those changes into policy.

Over the next few weeks, Mr Zuckerberg and his hand-picked team discussed how to do that in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates stole away from family dinners and holiday gatherings to work while Mr Zuckerberg weighed in between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Hawaiian island of Kauai.