Dana White now has another major business venture alongside being the UFC’s CEO and up-starting his “Power Slap” league: A spot on the Meta board of directors.
Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, and Threads, announced White’s addition to the board this week along with two others.
The move was unveiled in a social media post by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has a brief but notable history with White and MMA as a whole.
White’s arrival to Meta gives the company close ties to an ally of U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump, a piece of protection which may come in handy as he is set to regain high-level political powers later this month.
Trump has gone after Meta’s Zuckerberg in the past, claiming he had a “plot against the President” during the 2020 U.S. election, and that he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if seen doing anything illegal in the recent most recent election. Being in the crosshairs of Trump has been seen by many as a heightened threat ahead of his upcoming term in office, especially considering his frequent talks of prosecuting political enemies.
Now aligned with White – who has helped elevate Trump’s status through visibility at UFC events, introduced him at the 2024 Republican National Convention and spoke at his acceptance speech following the election in November – Meta has another strong ally on their side from the right, among other additions they have tapped to join the company as of late.
Apart from the unavoidable politics of the situation, the agreement furthers a growing history between Zuckerberg and the sport of MMA.
Zuckerberg has expressed great interest in combat sports in recent years, hiring ex-Bellator talent Khai Wu as a personal MMA trainer, participating in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu tournaments and sitting cageside at numerous UFC events. At UFC 298 last year, Zuckerberg even appeared as part of the walk-out for then-featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski.
White has previously expressed hopes of changing UFC’s ranking system with the help of Zuckerberg, brainstorming the idea of moving it from a vote-based panel of media members to an artificial intelligence-controlled leaderboard.
With Zuckerberg’s growing fandom of MMA, plus his need to find prominent conservative voices on his side, a formal business partnership with White to start 2025 was a moment of all the stars aligning for the tech billionaire.
However, White’s appointment reportedly hasn’t gone swimmingly within the company. 404 Media wrote Tuesday that some employees expressed disappointment with White’s hiring, with few mentioning an early 2023 incident of White slapping his wife while inside a nightclub.
“Kind of disheartening to see people in the comments celebrating a man who is on video assaulting his wife,” an employee reportedly said.
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