Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is the cofounder and chief executive of Facebook, renamed Meta in 2021, the social-media company he started at Harvard University in 2004 with Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Andrew McCollum. Peter Thiel was the company's first outside investor and a member of its board for seventeen years, and Zuckerberg's network and trajectory intersect the Thiel Influence Network at several points, from the founding investment to the Trump-era political realignment.¹²

The Thiel Relationship

Thiel made the first outside investment in Facebook in 2004, five hundred thousand dollars structured as a convertible note for about 10.2 percent of the company, valuing it near 4.9 million dollars, and joined its board in 2005. He sold large blocks at and after the May 2012 initial public offering, taking roughly 640 million dollars at the IPO and several hundred million more after the lockup expired in August 2012, and remained a director until February 2022, when he declined reelection to focus on funding pro-Trump political candidates ahead of the midterms.¹³

Thiel acted as an intermediary between Zuckerberg and the political right. He attended a previously undisclosed dinner with Zuckerberg and Trump in the Blue Room of the White House on October 22, 2019, organized on short notice and reported by NBC News a month later, during the week Zuckerberg testified to Congress on Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency project. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the meeting "corruption, plain and simple."⁶

The Epstein Dinner

An August 2015 dinner in Palo Alto, hosted by Reid Hoffman and reported by Vanity Fair in 2019, placed Zuckerberg at the same table as Thiel, Elon Musk, and Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab, who brokered access to Jeffrey Epstein's money and circle. Epstein emailed the financier Thomas Pritzker on August 20, 2015, "i had dinner with zuckerburg, mu=k, thiel hoffman, wild," and emailed himself a photograph from the gathering, both of which surfaced in the document releases under the Epstein Files Transparency Act in late 2025 and early 2026. Releasers stressed that being named in the files is not evidence of wrongdoing.⁴⁷

Meta has disputed any closer connection, with a spokesman stating in 2019 that Zuckerberg "met Epstein in passing one time at a dinner" and "did not communicate with Epstein again." Hoffman apologized in September 2019 for participating in fundraising where Epstein was present, saying he had helped "repair his reputation and perpetuate injustice," while Musk has said he refused invitations to Epstein's island, a claim that reporters noted sits awkwardly against released 2012 to 2013 emails between Musk and Epstein. Ito resigned from the MIT Media Lab, the MIT Corporation, and other boards in September 2019 after Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker that the lab had concealed millions of dollars in Epstein-linked donations, referring to him internally as "Voldemort."⁸⁹

The 2025 Realignment

After Trump's 2024 election, Zuckerberg moved Meta toward the tech-right. The company donated one million dollars to Trump's inauguration fund, having given nothing to the 2017 or 2021 inaugurations. On January 2, 2025 Meta replaced its policy chief Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, a former deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush, and on January 6 it added the Ultimate Fighting Championship head Dana White to its board. On January 7 it announced it was ending its third-party fact-checking program in the United States for a "community notes" model and moving its content-moderation operations from California to Texas, and on January 10 it ended its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.⁵¹⁰

In a January 2025 appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast Zuckerberg said corporate culture had tried to "get away from" "masculine energy," which he called "good," and that companies should "celebrate the aggression a bit more," signaling an alignment with the cultural politics promoted by the Thiel network and figures such as Mike Solana and Marc Andreessen.¹¹