- Joel Kaplan's warning to the European Union comes after Mark Zuckerberg pledged to join President Trump in pushing back on governments around the world that go after American companies.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the sixth most valuable company in the world, has a message for the European Union—punish our business again and we'll call President Trump.
At the annual Munich Security Conference, during which the Trump administration pushed back on its European allies on Ukraine and other issues, the new global policy chief of Meta said he wouldn’t hesitate to enlist the aid of the White House if the company felt it had been treated unfairly by Brussels.
“When companies are treated differently in a way that is discriminatory against them, then that should be highlighted to that company’s home government. So I think we will do that with President Trump,” Joel Kaplan told the conference on Sunday. “I don’t think we’re going to shy away from saying when we think that the enforcement of these laws is being directed at us goes beyond.”
Meta has been hit with upwards of $3 billion in fines by the European Union for violation of data privacy and antitrust rules
Initially, a number of Silicon Valley’s elite did not openly endorse the president’s 2024 campaign to retake the Oval Office, but many have quickly fallen behind him since his November victory.
Weeks later, Zuckerberg joined Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk and as well as the CEOs of Apple and Google, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, in the front rows of a packed Capitol Rotunda to celebrate Trump's inauguration.
Zuckerberg replaces anti-Trump policy chief
The most prominent to switch allegiances has been Zuckerberg. Since his quick-thinking pivot to get in Trump’s good graces, Meta’s stock has now enjoyed a record 20 straight days of gains that catapulted it to the front of the Magnificent Seven.
Silicon Valley’s tech giants have jointly recognized Trump’s inherent opposition to Europe, a continent that when united is large enough to potentially thwart his America First agenda. They now appear to see this as a golden opportunity to push back against the regulations set forth by the EU Commission in Brussels.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies,” Zuckerberg explained last month. “Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.”
Leading that charge for Meta is now Kaplan. The Republican and former White House advisor to George W. Bush gained the position as its top corporate lobbyist after Meta fired predecessor Nick Clegg, most closely identified with Trump’s Jan. 6 ban across sites like Facebook and Instagram.
Meta’s warning fit perfectly with the overall theme at the conference of a newfound America comfortable with throwing its weight around, either through tariffs or through the suggestion that it could invade the Danish territory of Greenland.
The EU Commission did not respond by press time to a request by Fortune for comment.
Meta's warning piggybacks off Trump administration
The statement by Kaplan came just 48 hours after Vice President J.D. Vance shocked Europeans at the conference with a speech effectively putting western allies on notice that they had to prove their worth.
Speaking in Munich on Saturday, Senator Lindsay Graham urged Europe to support Trump’s plan to exploit the critical minerals wealth of Ukraine. That way Congress could counter the “isolationist movement” in the GOP with tangible proof the alliance with Europe can yet be profitable for the United States.
The proposed mining deal is “a gamechanger, because President Trump can go to the American people and say Ukraine is not a burden, it’s a benefit,” the Republican from South Carolina told participants at the Munich conference. “So you better be pulling for this minerals agreement.”
The crowd had already been reeling from earlier news the White House will cut both Brussels and Kyiv out of a summit meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the terms for an end to the Kremlin’s aggression. Talks come ahead of next Monday’s three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Participants like Czech president Petr Pavel subsequently likened Trump’s dealmaking to the 1938 Munich conference, when the U.K. allowed Hitler to annex an ethnic German enclave of Czechoslovakia without consequences. Prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously declared he had secured “peace for our time”.
