Silicon Valley including Meta has embraced Maga politics, says Nick Clegg

Meta’s former head of global affairs says executives pivoted right in some cases for ‘rather more self-interested’ reasons

Silicon Valley companies including Meta have decided to embrace Maga politics, some for “rather more self-interested” reasons, the former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has said.

Clegg, who spent nearly seven years at Meta as the head of global affairs, told The Rest is Money podcast that it felt like “a very good time for me to move on” when he left the company in March 2025, three months into the second Trump administration.

Executives who had previously shunned politics pivoted right; the products themselves “changed utterly: from being human-centric to being much more about content, often synthetic content, algorithmically recommended to you”, Clegg said.

He also called into question the UK’s contract with the US software company Palantir , expressing distaste for the US spyware firm’s ideology and saying there were legitimate concerns as to whether “Palantir is making itself too sticky” – inculcating dependency in its clients.

Palantir’s contracts with the UK have been a subject of mounting controversy in the past months. Last week, a report from parliament’s science, innovation and technology committee said Palantir was the “most concerning example of the public sector’s growing reliance on a small number of major technology providers”.

The committee urged the government to end its contract with Palantir in 2027, when it is permitted to do so by the contract’s break clause.

The day after that report, the former health secretary Wes Streeting described Palantir executives as “Blofeld villains” at an event at London’s SXSW conference but defended Palantir’s stewardship of UK health data and refused to say whether the contract should end.