Mark Zuckerberg celebrated “masculine energy” in corporate culture on Friday after a week that saw Meta making several policy and program changes including the company trashing its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
“I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” said the tech billionaire in an extensive interview with podcaster Joe Rogan.
“The kind of masculine energy I think is good and obviously society has plenty of that but I think that 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.”
Zuckerberg added that women could feel as though a company’s culture is “too masculine” if there’s not enough of the energy they may “naturally have” and things could feel as though they’re “biased” against them.
“And that’s not good, either, because you want women to be able to succeed and like have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people no matter what their background or gender is but I think these things can all always go a little far,” he said.
Zuckerberg’s comments come as Silicon Valley billionaires try to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump, a staunch critic of DEI initiatives, ahead of his inauguration in just over a week.
The DEI programs at Meta — which oversees Facebook and Instagram — were dropped immediately on Friday, according to an internal memo that referred to the term as “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’d abandon its fact-checking program in favor of a “community notes”-like system as fact-checkers were “too politically biased.”
The DEI 180 adds to recent changes to the company’s content moderation policies, which now allow users to refer to women as “household objects” and OKs the use of “it” to refer to transgender or nonbinary people.
Meta isn’t alone in winding down its DEI initiatives as McDonald’s, Ford and Walmart have made similar moves in recent months.
Zuckerberg told Rogan that he now feels a “much greater command” over Meta’s policies and dismissed those pointing to the changes happening after November’s election.
The tech billionaire — who met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and donated $1 million to his inauguration fund — reportedly caught up with the president-elect at his Florida estate on Friday, according to Semafor.
Zuckerberg’s talk with Rogan, a UFC color commentator and Trump backer, comes just days after the tech billionaire named Dana White, UFC’s president and CEO and a pal to the president-elect, to Meta’s board of directors.
Zuckerberg, who Trump once reportedly threatened with “life in prison” after claiming that he “steered” Facebook against him in the 2020 election, used Rogan’s podcast to move closer to the president-elect.
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He said Biden White House officials “screamed” and cursed at Meta employees over its content moderation efforts tied to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It was brutal, it was brutal,” said Zuckerberg, who later claimed he was “optimistic” about Trump who he thinks “just wants America to win.”