First the CEO of Facebook, then America.
Mark Zuckerberg has disputed his ambitions to run for President, but his recent actions belie what he says. The Facebook CEO’s surrogates deny it while technology and political insiders suggest he’ll seek higher office, but probably not in 2020.
Zuckerberg’s New Year’s Resolution to “meet people in every state in the U.S.” parallels a political campaign down to the stops of his trip, many of which host an event or two on the campaign circuit. There’s also the change in Facebook policy to allow Zuckerberg to hold public office while still running the company, Vanity Fair reports.
His Harvard commencement speech this May, in which he called for universal basic income and automation-resistant jobs for Americans, sounded more like a stump speech than anything else.
According to Vanity Fair, Zuckerberg’s cross-country tour is an effort by the executive to understand the average America. His wealth has made him out of touch, he believes, to the concerns of the ordinary citizen. Nathan Hubbard, a former Twitter executive, argues this trip is Zuckerberg’s way of understanding how his platform played a large role in electing Donald Trump—and, in some sense, reckoning with that.
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