It isn’t clear why these meetings weren’t made public, but it appears that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO and one of the richest people in the world, had a secret dinner with President Donald Trump and the first lady Melania Trump while he was in Washington DC in October – and that isn’t the only time.
Zuckerberg was in the neighborhood while testifying before Congress about Facebook’s new cryptocurrency, Libra. He had given a speech at Georgetown University the week before where he spoke extensively about free speech and his social media platform.
What does the President of the United States have in common with a billionaire that some accuse of being a robot, and what could have been so secret that Trump voluntarily chose to skip making it into a publicity stunt?
A Facebook spokesperson addressed the rumor when it came to light, saying that “As is normal for a CEO of a major US company, Mark accepted an invitation to have dinner with the President and First Lady at the White House”.
Zuckerberg wasn’t the only one in attendance – according to the report, Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member with a net worth of over $2.5 billion, was also at the dinner at the White House.
Thiel is a co-founder of Facebook and an outspoken conservative in a sea of liberals in Silicon Valley. He was a big donator to the Trump campaign in 2016 and receives over a billion dollars in government contracts through Palantir, a data tech company that he is a chairman of.
There was a public meeting that same month for the two, as Zuckerberg visited the Oval Office in September during a routine visit to the capital. But something about this one caused the whole White House to be hush-hush about it.
There is no official comment from the White House right now about the meeting, but we have to assume they have their hands busy at this moment.
Facebook as a platform was widely criticized during the last election cycle for allowing politicians to make blatantly false claims in advertisements and the use of foreign “bots” to promote radical ideas.
Trump is no stranger to the platform, either. While he prefers to get his social media activity on Twitter, the Trump campaign has launched over 5,800 different Facebook ads since the Ukraine phone call news broke in mid-September. Approximately 40% of those ads mention the word “impeachment”.
