Dana White Joins Meta As Company’s Trump-Era Pivot Continues

Dana White is starting 2025 with a new job in addition to his current one as CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship. 

He’s now a board member of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

Meta’s CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg announced White’s appointment Monday along with two other board appointees, two weeks before Donald Trump is set to be sworn in for his second term as president in a move that appears to align Zuckerberg more with the incoming administration. 

White and Trump have been friends for years. Trump’s hotels and casinos were some of the first hosts to UFC events before the brand had the clout to sell out stadiums and arenas. Trump has been a regular at UFC events over the years and White has returned the favor. After Trump won November’s election over Vice President Kamala Harris, White was onstage with him at his Mar-a-Lago home to celebrate his victory. 

White spoke at the Republican National Convention this past summer and donated $10,000 to every state GOP, $371,700 to the Republican National Committee, $60,000 to Texas senator Ted Cruz, and $16,000 to Trump this past election cycle. 

Zuckerberg appeared on Fox News on Tuesday when he announced that Meta will get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, mirroring what Elon Musk, another Trump ally has done with X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter. In another move similar to Musk, Zuckerberg said Meta’s content moderation teams will move from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Musk previously moved Tesla, his electric car company, from California to Texas after years of feuding with the state. 

“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”

Zuckerberg and White share more than politics. Zuckerberg practices mixed martial arts and has been at a number of UFC events over the years. In 2023, Zuckerberg tore his ACL while training for an MMA fight. 

Before taking some pages out of Musk’s political playbook, the two agreed to fight in a cage match after publicly trading barbs and White even offered to help produce it. Nothing ever came of it and Zuckerberg later said the fight never occurred because Musk wasn’t “serious.” 

White has been an outspoken supporter of free speech and has dismissed any notion that UFC promotes hate speech. 

On New Year’s Eve 2023, White was filmed slapping his wife, Anne, in Mexico after she struck him at a party. While White apologized for the situation and expressed remorse, White was never publicly punished by UFC’s parent company.

“I’ve admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand,” Zuckerberg said of White in a release. 

Zuckerberg’s post-election pivot also includes elevating Republican Joel Kaplan as the company’s new president of global affairs.

White joined John Elkann, the CEO of Exor, an Italian holding company, and former Microsoft corporate strategy head Charlie Songhurst as Meta’s newest board members. 

Fittingly, White announced his new position on Instagram. “I love social media,” White wrote. “And I’m excited to be a small part of the future of [artificial intelligence] and emerging technologies.”