Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and ally of President-elect Donald Trump, has joined the board of directors for Meta, the parent company of Facebook.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the inclusion of Dana White in a Facebook post on Monday, hailing his work as an entrepreneur and business leader.
“Dana is the President and CEO of UFC, and he has built it into one of the most valuable, fastest growing, and most popular sports enterprises in the world. I’ve admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand,” noted Zuckerberg.
Also added to the board of directors were John Elkann, the CEO of Italian holding company Exor, and Charlie Songhurst, former Microsoft head of corporate strategy.
As noted by NBC News, Zuckerberg has been “practicing mixed martial arts in recent years and has attended several UFC events, underscoring his enthusiasm for the combat sport.”
“In 2023, Zuckerberg tore his ACL during a sparring session as part of training for a competitive MMA fight. That year, Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk traded verbal barbs and indicated that they were willing to fight each other in a match that White would help produce. But Zuckerberg later said the fight was off because Musk wasn’t ‘serious,’” it added.
Zuckerberg’s inclusion of Dana White comes weeks after the Meta CEO met with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago following his sweeping victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. The dinner also came just months after the tech entrepreneur publicly praised President-elect Trump following the July 13 assassination attempt.
“Mark Zuckerberg has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of and a participant in this change that we’re seeing all around America, all around the world with this reform movement that Donald Trump is leading,” Trump adviser Stephen Miller said to guest host Brian Kilmeade on The Ingraham Angle with Fox News.
Mark Zuckerberg, like so many business leaders, understands that President Trump is an agent of change, an agent of prosperity,” added Miller.
Miller noted that Zuckerberg “has his own interests” while emphasizing that the co-founder of Facebook sees the second Trump term as a time for “national renewal.”
“Mark, obviously, he has his own interests, and he has his own company, and he has his own agenda,” Miller said. “But he’s made clear that he wants to support the national renewal of America under President Trump’s leadership.”
While Zuckerberg issued no endorsement during the 2024 presidential election, he spoke kindly of the president-elect following the July 13 assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most bada- things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Zuckerberg told Bloomberg at the time.
“On some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight, and I think that that’s why a lot of people like the guy,” he added.
Trump previously signaled that he and Mark Zuckerberg have been on friendlier terms since the assassination attempt.
“So, Mark Zuckerberg called me. First of all, he called me two times. He called me after the event and he said that was really amazing,” he told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business in August. “And he actually announced that he’s not going to support a Democrat because he can’t because he respected me for what I did that day. I think what I did … to me, was a normal response.”
Trump even said that Zuckerberg apologized to him without specifying, most likely referring to Facebook banning his account following the January 6 Capitol Hill riot.
“He actually apologized. He said they made a mistake … and they’re correcting the mistake,” Trump said.
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