Meta CEO and alleged human being Mark Zuckerberg got caught by a hot mic kowtowing to president Donald Trump in the most flagrant manner imaginable.
The gaffe occurred at a White House dinner on Thursday evening attended by some of the biggest leaders in tech, including Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Apple’s Tim Cook. The CEOs and sundry were called upon by Trump to extoll their commitments to invest astronomical sums of money for building AI infrastructure in the US.
Come Zuckerberg’s turn, he was clearly was not prepared.
“How much are you spending, would you say, over the next few years?” Trump asked.
“Oh gosh,” Zuckerberg said. “Um, I mean I think it’s probably going to be something, like, I don’t know, at least $600 billion through ’28 in the US. Yeah.”
Moments later, when the formalities ended and Zuckerberg probably thought he was no longer being recorded, the centibillionaire was all apologies.
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t ready to do our… I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with!”
It’s a striking moment that exemplifies two things: 1) the tech industry’s proclivity for pulling numbers out of nowhere, especially in our breathless age of AI, and 2) its unashamed heel turn into becoming groveling courtiers for Trump.
Trump has long asserted that Facebook, owned by Zuckerberg’s Meta, had conspired against him to sabotage his 2020 presidential campaign. In August last year, Trump said that he was watching Zuckerberg “closely,” and that the Meta CEO “will spend the rest of his life in prison” if he conspires against him again.
Since then, Zuckerberg (and other tech execs) have done their utmost to signal that they’d fall in line — and it worked. Trump began to change his tone about Zuckerberg, speaking fondly about how he kept calling him over the phone to apologize about how Meta’s AI reported information about an assassination attempt he faced. (Shortly before, Zuckerberg had described Trump’s response to the failed attempt on his life as “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen.”)
In November, Trump invited Zuckerberg to dine at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Then in January, Zuckerberg made one of his most overt overtures by loosening Meta’s standards around hate speech, especially on topics like gender identity and immigration, two of Trump’s favorite punching bags. Meta also replaced its third-party fact-checkers with a community notes function that’s been broadly failing.
The seeds were arguably planted as far back as 2022, when Zuckerberg promised to no longer make political donations, after his hundreds of millions in contributions during the 2020 election were perceived as helping “steal” the election from Trump by some of his supporters.
Overall, even without the hot mic moment, the dinner was a nauseatingly sycophantic affair. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example, praised Trump for “being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president.” Per Axios: “It’s a very refreshing change,” Altman said. “I think it’s going to set us up for a long period of leading the world, and that wouldn’t be happening without your leadership.”
You get the idea. Apple CEO Tim Cook also profusely thanked Trump, as did everyone else. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai expressed his relief that his company wouldn’t have to be broken up after winning a favorable ruling in a major anti-trust case.
“Well you had a very good day yesterday,” Trump said per CNBC, alluding to the recent ruling.
“I’m glad it’s over,” Pichai said. “Appreciate that your administration had a constructive dialogue, and we were able to get it to some resolution.”
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