Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg is celebrating “masculine energy” in corporate culture amid news that his company is making several policy and program changes, including trashing multiple initiatives around diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
“A lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” the tech billionaire told podcaster Joe Rogan in an extensive interview released Friday.
“The kind of masculine energy I think is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it.”
He later continued, “I do think that if you’re a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it’s too masculine, it’s like there isn’t enough of the kind of the energy that you may naturally have,” saying that his could lead to the perception that things are “biased against you.”
“That’s not good, either, because you want women to be able to succeed and have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people,” regardless of “background or gender,” he said, but added that “these things can always go a little far.”
Zuckerberg’s comments come as Silicon Valley billionaires try to curry favor with GOP President-elect Donald Trump, a staunch critic of DEI initiatives, ahead of his inauguration in just over a week.
Major DEI programs at Meta — which oversees Facebook and Instagram — were dropped immediately Friday, according to an internal memo saying that the term “DEI” had become “charged,” partially due to it being “understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”
The memo, first reported by Axios, arrived after Meta announced that it was abandoning its fact-checking program, as fact-checkers were “too politically biased.”
The DEI turnaround follows recent changes to the company’s content moderation policies, which now allow for women to be called “household objects” and for a transgender or nonbinary person to be called “it.”
Meta isn’t alone in winding down diversity initiatives, as McDonald’s, Ford Motor Co. and Walmart have made similar moves in recent months.
Zuckerberg told Rogan that he now feels a “much greater command” over what Meta’s policies should be, and dismissed the idea that the changes are “purely political” due to their proximity to last year’s elections.
The tech billionaire — whose company donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund after Zuckerberg met with him in late November — caught up with the president-elect at his Florida estate Friday, according to Semafor.
Zuckerberg’s discussion with Rogan, a UFC color commentator and Trump supporter, comes just days after the tech billionaire named Dana White, the MMA organization’s CEO and a pal to the president-elect, to Meta’s board of directors.
Though Trump once threatened Zuckerberg with “life in prison” after claiming that he’d “steered” Facebook against him amid the 2020 elections, the Meta CEO seemed to use Rogan’s podcast to move closer to the president-elect.
He said that administration officials under Democratic President Joe Biden would “scream” and “curse” at Meta employees over content moderation, including around the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was brutal,” Zuckerberg said, recalling government bodies “investigating and coming after our company.” He later added that he was “optimistic” about Trump, saying that the president-elect “just wants America to win.”