Meta donates $1 million to Donald Trump's presidential inauguration fund

Mark Zuckerberg's big tech company, Meta, has donated $1 million to the dedicated fund for Donald Trump's presidential inauguration on Jan. 20. The Wall Street Journal was the first to echo the donation, confirmed by the company.

It could be a sign that relations between Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Trump are mending. Zuckerberg was also present during Trump's end-of-election party at Mar-a-Lago.

Trouble between the two erupted in 2020 when Meta deleted all of the Republican's accounts on the social networks he controls, accusing him of breaking the rules.

Meta claimed then that Trump was among the "people involved in violent acts on Capitol Hill on January 6" and therefore suspended his accounts. Meta reversed the decision two years later and a year after Trump filed lawsuits against the major social networks for censorship.

During this election, Donald Trump threatened Zuckerbergand assured that the tycoon would end up in jail if his company ever interfered in any way in the presidential election. In 2020, Zuckerberg and his wife went so far as to donate one $400 million to allegedly improve election infrastructure across the country. The donation was widely criticized by Republicans, who coined the term "Zuckerbucks" in 2021 to refer to that capital sum.

Throughout the Biden Administration, Zuckerberg came to have some negative comments against the Democratic federal government, when he testified before Congress for cases of White House pressure against Facebook during the covid pandemic. He also went so far as to claim that donations to election infrastructure were ill-advised and that it was not his or his corporation's place to make them.

Neither Zuckerberg nor Meta donated to Trump's inaugural fund in 2017 or President Biden's fund in 2021, according to public records viewed by the Wall Street Journal. Both funds received $1 million donations from fewer than a dozen major corporations, including many of the same companies.

There is also no record of large Meta donations to the campaign of Trump's opponent in the election, Kamala Harris. However, Meta employees and officials have donated $835,000 to Harris, which is more than 33 times the amount they contributed to Trump ($25,000).