After Mark Zuckerberg told President Trump that Meta would invest $600 billion by 2028, the CEO confessed to the president that he ‘wasn’t sure what number [Trump] wanted to go with.’
It’s not unusual for tech company CEOs to make the journey to Washington, DC, and announce billion-dollar investments to curry favor with politicians in power. Apple CEO Tim Cook was in the Oval Office last month, a piece of Apple-shaped glass and a 24-karat gold base in hand, to pledge another $100 billion in US investment over the next four years, for a total of $600 billion.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg perhaps had that number on his mind this week when he joined his fellow Silicon Valley heavy hitters at the White House for a dinner with President Trump. Zuckerberg was seated next to the president, who at one point leaned over and asked him, “How much are you spending, would you say, over the next few years?”
A flustered Zuckerberg responded, “Oh gosh, um, I mean, I think it’s probably going to be something like, at least $600 billion through '28 in the US, yeah.”
“That’s a lot, that’s a lot,” Trump said.
It is indeed. Once the discussion concluded, Zuckerberg leaned over to Trump to privately admit the president had caught him off guard. “I’m sorry I wasn’t ready…I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with,” Zuckerberg said in a revealing moment caught on a hot mic.
trump was getting these tech ceos to say big investment numbers into the camera so that trump could say that he is the greatest president ever. The estimate that zuck gave was very high, and the fact that he later said ‘was 600b good?’ In the ‘hot mic’ moment suggests that the number was inflated to appease trumps ego and that these numbers are not real.
I would say it wasn’t to appease trump himself, but to influence the people watching this.