Meta has appointed three new members to its board of directors, including Dana White, the president and CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and a familiar figure in the orbit of the incoming president, Donald Trump.
The social media company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is also adding the auto tycoon John Elkann and the tech investor Charlie Songhurst, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said in a Facebook post late on Monday.
Tapping White to join the board is Zuckerberg’s latest maneuver to improve ties with Trump, who was once banned from Facebook. After Trump won re-election in November, Zuckerberg dined at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, gifting him a pair of Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses, and Meta donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund. Other big tech companies such as Amazon have donated similar amounts. Meta has also promoted its most prominent conservative, Joel Kaplan, to the company’s top policy job in another move meant to strengthen connections to conservatives.