Nick Clegg leaves top Facebook job after ‘adventure of a lifetime’
He said he will be moving on to a new adventure
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir Nick Clegg is leaving his top job with Facebook’s parent company Meta.
The former UK deputy prime minister said it was “the right time for me to move on” from the role of global affairs president acting as a bridge between the worlds of technology and politics.
In an announcement made just weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president, Clegg’s replacement will be former Republican White House deputy chief of staff Joel Kaplan.
Mr Kaplan served under George W Bush from 2006 to 2009. The move is another indication yet that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seeking stronger relationship with the Trump administration.
In November, the pair had dinner together in Mar-a-Lago and just last month, Zuckerberg made a sizable donation to Trump’s inaugural committee. It’s a far cry from just four years when the president-in-waiting was booted from Facebook and Instagram in the wake of the January 6th riot.
Former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Nick said: “As a new year begins, I have come to the view that this is the right time for me to move on from my role as president, global affairs at Meta.
“It truly has been an adventure of a lifetime!”
Clegg, who joined the firm which was then called Facebook in 2018 after losing his seat as an MP in 2017, said: “My time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between ‘big tech’ and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector.
“I hope I have played some role in seeking to bridge the very different worlds of tech and politics – worlds that will continue to interact in unpredictable ways across the globe.”
He added: “Having worked previously for close to two decades in European and British politics, it has been an extraordinary privilege to gain a front row insight into what makes Silicon Valley such an enduring hub of world leading innovation.
“The pace and scale of change has been as dizzying as it has been ambitious.”
He said Kaplan, his deputy at Meta, will now become the chief global affairs officer and was “quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time – ideally placed to shape the company’s strategy as societal and political expectations around technology continue to evolve”.
Kaplan has extensive ties to the inner-workings of the Republican party thanks to his role in the Bush White House, in addition to his role in lobbying for Meta. Kaplan, who has been associated with Facebook since 2011, is known to be close to Zuckerberg.
Before working in the George W. Bush administration, Kaplan served as a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia upon his graudation from Harvard Law School.
Prior to his time at Meta, Kaplan served as an executive vice president for public policy and external affairs with Energy Future Holdings Corp.
Trump, for his part, name checked Meta specifically in his 2024 book Save America, accusing the tech giant of playing some king of nefarious role in the 2020 presidential election.
“We are watching [Zuckerberg] closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison - as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election,” he wrote.
Another Republican operative, Kevin Martin, who served as Federal Communications Commission chairman under George W Bush, will move into Mr Kaplan’s former role as vice president of global policy.
Clegg worked for Facebook since October 2018, overseeing public relations for the social networking company.
Sir Nick said he would be spending “the next few months handing over the reins” and “then – as with each chapter in my lucky career in politics, Government and the private sector – I will move on to new adventures.”