With only 17 days to go until Donald Trump’s inauguration, Sir Nick Clegg, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats and deputy prime minister of the UK, announced his decision to leave his role as president of global affairs at Meta.
The shock departure was announced in a post on Meta’s Facebook Thursday with Clegg stating it was “the right time for me to move on” after reaching his seventh year at the tech giant.
Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican and former senior adviser to George W. Bush, will take up the reins of power to replace him in a move that signifies a bow from Silicon Valley’s tech giants to the newly-elected President Trump.
Clegg spoke of his relationship with Kaplan as one that had blossomed over time since his appointment to the company and trusted in the former staffers’ ability “to build on what we have done together, and improve upon what I failed to get done.”
Meta veteran Kevin Martin will be elevated to Kaplan’s existing role as vice president of global policy, said Clegg.
The former lib-dem leader touched upon the immense shift of Meta’s role in politics since 2018, pointing out that with “rapid growth” of the Facebook empire, “came significant scrutiny and controversy” – the most notable being the sinister Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the part it played in the 2016 US presidential election.
The former prime minister had been overseeing public relations for the social networking company at the time of the scandal and Meta finally settled legal action for the data breach for $725m in December 2022.
When Clegg was promoted to Meta’s president of global affairs months before, his relationship was set to prosper as he and the tech billionaire worked alongside one another as America was led under the helm of the Democrats and President Joe Biden.
The shift in power structure echoes the significant crossover that Meta now plays in modern politics as Clegg illustrated in his announcement: “I hope I have played some role in seeking to bridge the very different worlds of tech and politics – worlds that will continue to interact in unpredictable ways across the globe.”
A poignant message that highlights Zuckerberg, a former remonstrant of Donald Trump, who banned the President-elect’s account on Facebook after the January 6 Capitol Hill insurgence, as a key player who now yields under his power and the Republican faction set to come into fruition.
It was only in August 2024 that Trump fired a powerful blow at the tech giant when he threatened to imprison Zuckerberg for life if the Meta chief executive attempted to “plot against” him in the 2024 presidential election – a monumental and decisive victory propagated by the machine of Elon Musk and his X empire.
Just a month ago, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg each cast a $1 million donation towards the Trump inauguration fund in an attempt to cool relations ahead of the new year.
With January 20 looming ever closer, could the world be witnessing the effervescence of a Trump-yielding tech triad composed of the closely allied Musk’s X, Zuckerberg’s Meta, and Bezos’ Amazon?
Clegg’s departure along with the big three’s shift to support Trump illustrates how Silicon Valley will bend over backward to survive the new Republican era that looms for the US.
