In a tweet on Thursday, Nick Clegg revealed that he is moving on from the role of president of Meta’s Global Affairs unit. In his words :
“As a new year begins, I have come to the view that this is the right time for me to move on from my role as President, Global Affairs at Meta,” said Clegg in his tweet. “My time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between ‘big tech’ and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector.”
Joel Kaplan, one of Meta’s most well-known Republican executives, will succeed Clegg, who has led the company’s politically centrist policies since 2018. Kaplan is “unquestionably the right person for the right job at the right time,” according to Clegg on X. Three weeks before Donald Trump, the president-elect, takes office, there is a high-profile leadership transition. Semafor was the first to report the news.
A large portion of the tech industry is attempting to win over Trump before his second term begins. In addition to personally dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave $1 million to the president-elect’s inauguration fund in December. Following his second election victory, Trump is said to have had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with several tech CEOs, including Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google.
Meta has worked hard in the past year to curry favor with Republicans. Before the 2024 election, Meta lifted all limitations on Trump’s Instagram and Facebook accounts. In a letter to House Republicans in August, Zuckerberg expressed regret for caving in to pressure from the Biden administration to “censor certain COVID-19 content.”
