UFC CEO Dana White has joined the board of Meta, the company announced today. The addition of the mixed-martial arts impresario jives with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s well documented UFC fandombut also the larger strategy Meta appears to be using heading into Trump’s second term: tacking right.

That’s not to say that White’s seat on the board is typical, though. Most of Meta’s current board members work in the technology industry. The two members Meta added alongside White, John Elkann and Charlie Songhurst, fit the social media company’s usual bill. White may say he’s “a big believer that social media and AI is the future” in Meta’s press release, but the company he’s keeping is probably the more important reason he’s joining now.

Dana White and President-elect Donald Trump been friends for years. White is supporting Trump’s campaign for re-election, and the UFC as a whole fits his strongman preferences. Putting White on the board is as much a burnout of Zuckerberg’s self-image as it is access to the incoming Trump Administration. The President-elect can at one point thought that Zuckerberg should “spend the rest of his life in prison,” but the CEO of Meta is doing everything in his power to woo him.

Zuckerberg visited Mar-A-Lago in November 2024 to have dinner with Trump, one of several tech CEOs to do so. Meta also adjusted its executive ranks to better work with a conservative government. The company’s former President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg announced that he will step down last week, to be replaced by Meta’s most prominent Republican executive, Joel Kaplan. Among Kaplan’s credits is an eight-year stint in the Bush Administration. Zuckerberg has been in UFC mode for a while now, and it looks like for at least the next four years, Meta will too.