Zuckerberg is following in Musk's footsteps. Is it all because of AI?

MW Zuckerberg is following in Musk's footsteps. Is it all because of AI?

By Therese Poletti

The Meta CEO has gone from potentially sparring with his X counterpart to mimicking nearly his every move

Nearly two years ago, after Meta Platforms launched Threads as a "positive and creative" alternative to the increasingly toxic X (formerly Twitter), Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were talking about having a cage fight.

Now, in a complete turnaround, the Meta $(META)$ chief executive has gone from potentially sparring with Musk to mimicking nearly his every move. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg is considering leaving the state of Delaware and reincorporating Meta in Texas, just as Musk did with Tesla $(TSLA)$ and SpaceX last year.

In the last year, Zuckerberg has increasingly embraced many moves of the seemingly more politically conservative Musk. In early January, Meta said it would replace fact checking with a feature called "community notes," in an effort to prioritize speech and "restore free expression." The move was especially significant after the social-media giant had been accused of censoring conservatives with a liberal bias. On Meta's earnings call Wednesday, Zuckerberg even gave a backhanded credit to X.

"I'm not afraid to admit when someone does something that's better than us," Zuckerberg said, according to a transcript.

Read also: Meta goes MAGA: Facebook adjusts fact-checking approach as Zuckerberg touts "free expression"

Zuckerberg has also embraced the Trump administration. Along with Musk and his fellow Big Tech CEOs - including Amazon $(AMZN)$ founder Jeff Bezos, Alphabet $(GOOG)$ $(GOOGL)$ CEO Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin, and Apple $(AAPL)$ CEO Tim Cook - Zuckerberg attended President Trump's inauguration in a high-profile spot. It's worth noting that during the first Trump administration, both Musk and Zuckerberg openly disagreed with some of Trump's policies, such as America's exit in 2017 from the Paris climate agreement.

At the time, Meta was one of 25 companies that bought full-page ads in the New York Times to protest Trump's abrupt exit from the climate accord, while Musk stepped down from Trump's economic advisory council. But this time around, when Trump signed an executive order exiting the Paris accord again, not a peep of discord was heard from either CEO.

Zuckerberg explained to Meta employees in an all-hands meeting on Thursday that after the last several years, the company now has "an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government," according to a report in the New York Times. "We're going to take that," he said.

But what's different this time around versus eight years ago?

The answer could be AI. With U.S. data centers consuming enormous amounts of power, most tech companies need to keep building out their infrastructure. And as data centers continue to use up electrical power, companies are now also looking to nuclear power to help supplement their power-hungry needs. Meta, for one, plans to spend approximately $65 billion this year on building out its massive data centers to power its systems.

"We're building a 2-gigawatt, and potentially bigger, AI data center that is so big that it'll cover a significant part of Manhattan if we were placed there," Zuckerberg told analysts Wednesday.

Big data centers represent another potential threat to the world's climate problems - with many IT companies looking to nuclear power and uranium, eschewing renewable energy sources as intermittent and having reliability constraints. A country with fewer environmental requirements and more deregulation will be a boon for tech giants to continue to build out AI "factories," as Nvidia $(NVDA)$ CEO Jensen Huang likes to call the AI data center of the future.

For now, the two former foes appear to be on the same page on many issues. But whether Zuckerberg and the other Big Tech CEOs will later regret this possibly Faustian pact, it is far too early to know.

-Therese Poletti

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January 31, 2025 19:32 ET (00:32 GMT)

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