Three big reasons Dana White Is On the Meta Board of Directors

Mark Zuckerberg puts a marker down, but what's he up to?

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced three new board members today. Here’s what Zuckerberg posted on Facebook:

I'm excited to kick off the year with some news we've been working on for a while: Dana White, John Elkann, and Charlie Songhurst are joining Meta's board of directors.

We have massive opportunities ahead in AI, wearables, and the future of social media, and our board will help us achieve our vision.

Some background on each: Dana is the President and CEO of UFC, and he has built it into one of the most valuable, fastest growing, and most popular sports enterprises in the world. I've admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand.

This well-planned and well-executed attention-getter kicked off Meta’s 2025 with a bang.

That’s right, Meta, a company with a $1.59 TRILLION market cap has brought America’s best-known fight promoter (and wife-beater) on their board of directors.

The collective “WTF?!?” spawned headlines and social media posts all over the Internet.

Based on this round-up of headlines from Google News, the mainstream media already has a theory and it has to do with a certain newly re-elected President celebrating a big anniversary on January 6th.

Reason #1: Zuck is Sucking Up to Trump

Luke Thomas was quick to speculate along the same lines:

Luke’s referring to the antitrust case against Meta the Federal Trade Commission is taking to federal court this year.

Zuckerberg has been furiously kowtowing to Trump since the election as this December 13th Wall Street Journal report attested:

Already, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon has also planned a $1 million contribution.

The day before Thanksgiving, Zuckerberg, the billionaire CEO, dined with the president-elect on a patio at Mar-a-Lago. At one point, Zuckerberg and other attendees stood, hand over heart, as the club played a rendition of the national anthem sung by imprisoned defendants who are accused of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, according to people familiar with the matter. There was no announcement that the recording was by the Jan. 6th choir, one of the people said. Zuckerberg’s Facebook had suspended Trump’s account following the riot.

And as every reader of The MMA Draw should know, Dana White and Donald Trump are besties and have been for years.

So there’s good reason to lead this listicle with the Trump angle, but, as every reader of The MMA Draw should always know, there’s always more to the story.

Reason #2: Zuck Is Getting Based

2024 saw Mark Zuckerberg embark on what Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian called “a wider strategic overhaul of the tech mogul’s public image.” She also explained why Zuckerberg might be doing this:

Meta is embroiled in an anti-monopoly lawsuit and is being sued by dozens of states alleging that Facebook and Instagram are exploiting children to boost profits. Far better, don’t you think, that we all talk about how handsome a bearded Zuck would be rather than dwell on Meta’s less attractive business practices?

Honestly, it’s been a pretty incredible rebranding campaign for Zuckerberg, scoring wins by showing off his wakeboarding, flag-waving, and beer-drinking mastery:

Anyone who remembers Zuckerberg’s pathetic attempt to launch himself as a potential political candidate in 2017 should be impressed by how dramatically he’s improved his PR game.

He’s even gotten favorable notice from the Twitter fashion guy.

Zuck’s (seemingly genuine) fondness for training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has been a big part of this rebranding and a great excuse to pal around with Dana White.

Zuckerberg been talking up his love for BJJ since at least this 2022 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience.

Mark Zuckerberg on what he loves about BJJ: (It’s) a thing that is both super engaging physically but also intellectually and where you can't afford to focus on something else. I think (it’s) the perfect thing because if you stop paying attention for one second you're gonna end up on the bottom. So I've just found that is just really important for me in terms of what I do. Being able to maintain my energy level, maintain my focus… then after an hour or two of working out or rolling or wrestling with friends, now I'm ready to go solve whatever problem at work for the day.

Zuckerberg has also medaled in a BJJ tournament and at one point even had Dana White calling up the Roman Colosseum looking for the right venue to host a bout between himself and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

But a love for martial arts is not all that Zuck and Dana have in common.

Reason #3: Dana Can Help Him Sell AI

There’s no doubt that Dana is one of the best hype men on the planet. He can sell sand in the desert, ice in the Arctic, and lots and lots of not-so-great fights.

He’s been selling his “bio-hacker” Gary Brecka to a bunch of middle-aged men. Zach will have a major story on this in the next week for The MMA Draw.

This will come in handy for Zuck since he’s bet a fortune on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI isn’t always a crowd-pleaser, especially when it’s putting Jesus shrimp all over your mom’s Facebook feed.

The fine people at 404 Media have ably chronicled the atrocities.

Dana’s already been laying the groundwork by bragging about consulting Zuck about using AI to “fix” the UFC’s jacked fighter rankings:

“We’re working on it right now,” White said. “We’ve literally been working on it all last week and I will have some answers on that soon, but the rankings system drives me crazy. From the pound-for-pound to each division, there’s huge mistakes.

“We literally had meetings this week to work on it,” White said. “I actually talked to Mark Zuckerberg, too, about AI. So I’m totally going to fix the rankings. We’re going to make a lot of strong moves here coming in to ‘25.”

Meta stock closed up for the day on the news:

Bonus Reason:

It gives Zuckerberg a great excuse to show up (or maybe even rent out) The UFC Apex for this Friday’s UFC Fight Night: Dern vs. Ribas 2.

Just another timely reminder that the oligarchs have bought out everything, including our beloved sleazy world of fight sports.

And in case you forgot that point, The Rock reminded us — with an exclamation point — on Monday’s WWE Raw live Netflix debut when he embraced TKO CEO Ari Emanuel and COO Mark Shapiro.

Zach’s next article for The MMA Draw will have a lot more details about Endeavor’s coming out party and how the press can no longer run away from mention Ari’s name.

Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw newsletter on Substack.