‘Making the world a better place’ is so last year

Not so long ago, Mark Zuckerberg desperately wanted the public to view him not just as an empire builder but also as a world-saver.

The Meta Platforms Inc. CEO publicly committed parts of his vast fortune to causes like immigration reform and voter access. He spoke out about combating poverty and hunger and stressed the importance of equality.

But in a flurry of announcements last week, Zuckerberg confirmed that he's had a change of heart. Now, he's whittled his ambitions simply to tech overlord. In getting rid of fact checkers and loosening the rules on what users can say on Meta's platforms, Zuckerberg unleashed a new era of heightened misinformation and abusive speech. At the same time, he ended the tech giant's commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Zuckerberg and Meta are an extreme case, as those in the tech sector often are. But across corporate America, the trend is pointing in the same direction: CEOs are spending much less time, energy and money trying to publicly position themselves as change agents.

In Silicon Valley, the make-the-world-a-better-place discourse of the early boom years has mostly disappeared. On Wall Street, big institutions from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to BlackRock Inc. have abandoned one of the world's biggest finance groups dedicated to battling climate change. Companies that put out statements about racial justice after the murder of George Floyd have rolled back their investments in DEI. Some of the same CEOs who stood up to Donald Trump's Muslim-majority country travel ban and condemned the 6 January riots have made $1 million donations to his inauguration fund.

You could argue that many of these initiatives were merely corporate virtue signaling. But what's clear is companies don't feel much of a need to virtue signal anymore. And no wonder: The public isn't all that interested in virtue right now (Exhibit A: the election of the country's first felon-in-chief), and business is having an increasingly hard time convincing Americans that it ever had much of it.

CEOs' attempts to portray themselves as do-gooders have typically been a business posture rather than a moral one. Starting a foundation or throwing a smidgen of a company's resources behind a popular cause has historically been a useful tool to repair corporate reputations in the aftermath of scandals and catastrophes.

Starbucks, for example, instituted a policy in 2018 that allowed anyone, not just paying customers, to hang out in its stores or use its bathrooms. The policy was instituted after the company was accused of racial bias and faced boycotts when two Black men were arrested in a Philadelphia store. "We are committed to creating a culture of warmth and belonging where everyone is welcome," the company said at the time.

This week, Starbucks said it would end the practice in order to help reinvigorate the brand. Its management does not seem particularly worried about blowback or being labeled flip-floppers.

Plenty of these corporate reversals are indeed a straightforward response to where the political winds are blowing — toward the right and President-elect Trump. Zuckerberg admitted as much in his announcement, justifying his decision by saying "the recent election also feels like a cultural tipping point." The company is doing the same calculus as many others right now: It would rather be called a hypocrite by those on the left than become a target of the right for "woke" policies.

But it's also apparent to CEOs that not only has the "#resistance" that pressured them to stand up to Trump's most egregious line-crossing in his first term gone mute, but some leaders are actually being cheered for flouting traditional expectations of decorum and civility. Case in point: Elon Musk, who has only seen his wealth and power grow, despite moves like using X to hurl obscene insults at the SEC and telling his advertisers to "go f--- themselves" from the stage of a business conference.

Now Zuckerberg seems to be following a similar playbook. His burst of activity last week included announcing new Meta board member Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a Trump loyalist who two years ago was captured on video slapping his wife; telling Joe Rogan that companies need more "masculine energy," overseeing the announcement that Meta would end its DEI efforts; and saying that it would get rid of fact checkers on its platforms — a change he acknowledged would mean they would "catch less bad stuff." (The Intercept published excerpts of the new internal training materials, which said allowed speech would now include examples like "immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of s---" and "gays are freaks.")

Will Zuckerberg too be rewarded? Users and advertisers may be grumbling, but so far there's been no mass exodus from his platforms. If this pivot succeeds, we can expect to see more CEOs exploring some of their darker urges. And why not? If the public doesn't expect more of these leaders, why bother to keep them in check.

Beth Kowitt is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering corporate America. She was previously a senior writer and editor at Fortune Magazine.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by a special syndication arrangement.