Trump and Zuck relationship status: complicated

Former President Donald Trump has expressed a newfound fondness for Mark Zuckerberg after years of railing against him.

In an interview with Fox Business that aired Friday, Trump said Mark Zuckerberg recently called him “to apologize” over Meta’s AI assistant falsely saying the assassination attempt on Trump didn’t happen. (A company blog post written by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s global head of policy, attributed the erroneous responses to “hallucinations” in the system.) In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump claimed that both Meta and Google were “RIGGING THE ELECTION!!!” by suppressing information about the shooting.

Zuckerberg’s apology could help thaw his contentious relationship with Trump, who has held a long, public grudge against Meta and its chief executive.

“I believe Mark Zuckerberg, he called me a lot. They are working on, and I think they fixed it. He’s not doing what he did five years ago, with the $500 million dollars, I don’t believe.”

Trump’s $500 million comment may have referred to incorrect claims that Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan spent $400 million in 2020 to elect Joe Biden. Zuckerberg and his wife did not donate those funds to Biden, but to two nonprofit organizations that gave grants to state and local governments to help them pay for election administration.

Trump also said Zuckerberg complimented his reaction to being shot at, adding that Zuckerberg said he wouldn’t endorse a Democrat in this year’s presidential election because of the respect he has for Trump.

“Mark Zuckerberg called me — first of all, he called me a few times,” Trump said. “He called me after the event and he said, ‘That was really amazing, it was really brave.’ And he actually announced he’s not going to support a Democrat, because he can’t, because he respected me for what I did that day.”

When reached for comment, Meta spokesperson Dany Lever directed The Verge to a post on X by Meta communications head Andy Stone, which notes that Zuckerberg hasn’t endorsed candidates in earlier elections either.

Zuckerberg — who in July declined to endorse either Trump or then-Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden — called Trump’s fist pump after being shot at “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.” But unlike other Silicon Valley elites, Zuckerberg has neither endorsed nor publicly fundraised for Trump.

Trump’s grudge against Google, however, persists.

“Google, nobody called from Google,” Trump said during the Fox Business interview. Google has been accused of “censoring” search terms related to the shooting at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania. Google communications posted a thread on X refuting those claims, but Trump and conservative media have continued to accuse it of suppressing information.

“Google has been very bad. They’ve been very irresponsible,” Trump said. He said Google could be “close to shut down” by Congress. “Google has to be careful,” he said.