Toby Melville/Pool Photo via AP; BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
While Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk never did face off in that cage match, "Uncle Elon" has bested Zuck in the political arena, becoming one of the most powerful unelected figures in modern US history. Now, in hopes of forging a friendlier relationship with the Trump administration a second time around, Zuckerberg seems to be following a new mantra: If you can't beat Elon, be him.
On Tuesday Meta announced that it would end third-party fact checking and replace it with a more hands-off content moderation policy where users police one another through community notes — just like Musk's X. In a video announcing the changes, Zuckerberg said that "governments and legacy media" have pushed for more censorship in recent years, and that Meta had decided that its "complex systems" had "too many mistakes and too much censorship." "The recent elections," the Meta CEO added, "also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech." His language would have sounded natural coming out of the mouth of Musk, who shared Zuckerberg's video and dubbed Meta's move "cool" on X.
Community notes is only the latest page Zuckerberg has taken from his billionaire rival's playbook. From conducting mass layoffs to removing the guardrails to social media to joining forces with Musk against their shared competitor OpenAI to spending time in Mar-a-Lago, Zuckerberg has been following Musk's lead more often.
This isn't the first time Zuckerberg, who has helmed Facebook since he was 19, has reinvented himself. From the brash, hoodie-wearing Harvard dropout in Facebook's early days, to the suit-wearing, meat-smoking, Silicon Valley nice guy in the years after the company went public, to the hardened, martial arts-practicing "wartime" mode Zuck who emerged in the wake of the most turbulent period in company history, Zuckerberg has fashioned several personas that approximate what his company most needs him to be at the time. In 2025, don't let his longer hair, oversized T-shirts, and statement jewelry fool you. The persona Mark Zuckerberg has taken on to ensure Meta's success as his historical adversary Donald Trump returns to the White House acts a lot like Donald Trump's right-hand man, Elon Musk.
When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he shaved content moderation to bare bones in the name of free speech and cut more than 80% of its staff, sending shockwaves through the tech world. Many speculated that Twitter would crack under the pressure, and die. When it didn't and despite some hiccups the platform continued to function largely as normal, Zuckerberg, like several other tech CEOs, applauded Musk for making Twitter "leaner" (doing so on Musk superfan Lex Fridman's podcast). Meta also laid off 11,000 workers days after Musk took over Twitter, and Zuckerberg then dubbed 2023 "the year of efficiency" at Meta, cutting another 10,000 people. Zuckerberg now also plans to move trust and safety workers from California to Texas, following in step with Musk, who has relocated X from San Francisco to Texas, where he has also located Starlink and the Boring Company.
And as Zuckerberg stayed quieter throughout the 2024 presidential election after Meta took heat for misinformation in 2016 and 2020, Musk did the opposite. The world's richest man appeared on stage alongside Trump, backing Trump with more than $250 million, and posted to X incessantly in support of the now president-elect. Musk has again come out on top, as he now sits at the pinnacle of political influence and is poised to radically reshape government spending as he and Vivek Ramaswamy spearhead the Department of Government Efficiency. Big Tech's other power players who want a favorable relationship with Trump are left to follow in his path.
Since November, Apple's Tim Cook, Open AI's Sam Altman, and Amazon have each donated to Trump's inaugural fund. Zuckerberg has done that and more, including visiting Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with the president elect, naming close Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White to Meta's board, and promoting a Joel Kaplan, a longtime Republican lobbyist to chief global affairs officer. (On Tuesday Kaplan gave an interview on Fox and Friends to promote the company's content moderation changes.)
All of this is meant to quell a once adversarial relationship between Zuckerberg and Trump, who had threatened to jail Zuckerberg if his social sites interfered with the 2024 election, and years ago accused Facebook of being "anti-Trump" and colluding against him (Zuckerberg pushed back against such claims).
As my colleague Peter Kafka wrote of the community notes news: "There's no way to see Zuckerberg's moves as anything other than a straightforward attempt to please Trump and the incoming president's conservative allies, who have often complained that Zuckerberg's properties were biased against them." Even Trump said Tuesday that Meta is "probably" responding to his own past threats against Zuck by pivoting.
The very fact checkers who will soon be dismissed by Meta began with a program in December 2016, after Facebook faced harsh criticism for its role in spreading misinformation in Trump's first election a month prior. Meta actively worked to downplay political content following the January 6 insurrection, and suspended Trump from Facebook and Instagram (Meta lifted the suspension in early 2023, noting that the public should be able to access what politicians are saying. The move came shortly after Musk allowed Trump back on Twitter). When Meta launched Threads, its own Twitter competitor, in 2023, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the new app would not encourage breaking news and politics posts. But Musk, who has rebuilt X in his own image to favor conservative and far-right accounts, has found a social media site that can win when embracing the president. On Tuesday, Meta also said it will reverse course and stop downgrading political content, and start phasing politics back into users' feeds. (A Meta spokesperson referred to past public statements, but did not provide new comment for this story.)
Early research on X's community notes shows the move has led to mixed results when it comes to combating misinformation. But changes at X have certainly proved a mammoth victory for Musk, whose wealth has grown by an estimated $200 billion since the election. As he's molded himself more in Uncle Elon's image, Nephew Zuck may also find himself in Trump's favor.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
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