It Won’t Age Well

Having watched Mark Zuckerberg’s week-long rollout of the new MAGAfied Facebook/Meta, let me put my chips down on none of this aging well for his company. It’s simply too clumsy and over-the-top and it places too many bets on a lame-duck President who will be governing a still sharply divided country. As much as anything else, these moves highlight Meta’s tech and global regulatory vulnerabilities — not so much vis a vis the U.S. government or even the European Union as other tech giants. These things take a long time to play out. The U.S. government and the executive branch that Trump will soon control can absolutely do a lot of favors for Zuckerberg and Meta. And Zuckerberg has been pretty transparent about what he hopes those favors are. But overall it just tells a very weak and defensive brand story as you see this playing out over the years to come.