Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg fears he will be jailed by Donald Trump, claims leading expert, citing an insider

Mark Zuckerberg genuinely believes Donald Trump will jail him, according to inside sources – and now Team Trump says the Meta chief has “more ass-kissing” to do.

Mark Zuckerberg is “genuinely scared” of being jailed by Donald Trump, according to a leading politics expert, while White House sources say the Meta boss must do “more ass-kissng” in his bid to impress the new president.

The extraordinary claim, citing a contact of Zuckerberg, comes just days after the tech leader attended the returning president’s inauguration and after he controversially dropped Facebook and Instagram fact-checkers in what has been seen by many as an attempt to curry favour with the new White House.

It was made overnight Friday on one of the world’s most-listened podcasts, The Rest Is Politics, by host and former UK cabinet minister Rory Stewart, during a discussion about the first days of the new administration.

Fellow podcaster – and former Trump sidekick, turned vocal critic – Anthony Scaramucci first speculated as to why there is so little opposition to some of the Republican president’s controversial policies from business leaders.

Jail would truly Zuck … Meta and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan attend a luncheon following the inauguration of US President Donald Trump in Washington, DC.

Wall Street moneyman and Rest Is Politics US star Scaramucci, who – like the well-connected Stewart and The Rest Is Politics co-host Alastair Campbell – had just returned from mixing with global leaders at the Davos World Economic Forum, suggested many in business want people to oppose Trump, but do not dare do so themselves.

“Why is there no dissent?” he asked. “Why are we, why is (sic) our media companies now – Jeff Bezos, etc – no dissent? And why do people in the business community come up to me at Davos and say, ‘I mean, I appreciate you speaking up, but you know, I can’t speak out. I can’t speak out’.”

Amazon boss Bezos was at the Washington, DC inauguration, along with fellow tec titans Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, while Davos was under way.

Campbell – former press chief to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair – earlier this week accused Zuckerberg and Musk of going up Trump’s “backside”, asking: “Who the f**k do these people think they are?”

Replying to Scaramucci, Stewart dropped his bombshell: “The answer is they’re scared. I mean, some of them are genuinely scared. I mean, I was talking to somebody who knows Mark Zuckerberg, and he says Zuckerberg believes he’s going to go to jail.”

Tec tribe … Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, journalist Lauren Sanchez and her partner, Amazon and Washington Post chief Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Tesla, SpaceX and X.com CEO Elon Musk at the inauguration ceremony.

Trump has previously voiced their dissatisfaction with Zuckerberg, claiming the billionaire had steered Facebook against him around the controversial 2020 election and threatening jail “if he (Zuckerberg) does anything illegal.”

Since then, Zuckerberg has been seen to change his approach to the Team Trump in a perceived bid to smooth the waters – although overnight Saturday Rolling Stone quoted an administration official as saying: “There is a lot more ass-kissing that needs to be done. He just needs to prove himself. It’s a good start, but he can’t just snap his fingers and make the past not happen.”

Former Tory MP Stewart posed a hypothetical scenario to explain Zuckerberg’s alleged fear.

“The story will be that ‘Zuckerberg conspired with the Biden crime family to steal the 2020 election’. And therefore, you have these incredibly humiliating scenes where Zuckerberg is made to wait for two hours at a dinner, and then he’s taken in for 90 seconds to see Trump, and then he’s thrown out again.

“He’s going through all this amazing bullying and humiliation partly out of fear.”

News Corp has reached out to Meta, parent company of Facebook, for comment.

I beg your pardon … President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, outgoing US President Joe Biden and outgoing First Lady Dr. Jill Biden participate in the departure ceremony for the Bidens at the Capitol on January 20, 2025.

Stewart added: “I think it’s a sign of something very, very troubling, which is that cumulatively, people are beginning to lose faith in the American justice system. I mean, theoretically, the idea of a great liberal democracy is supposed to be, okay, a president comes in and the guy doesn’t like me, but there are courts, there are juries, there are judges, there’s a functioning rule of law. He can’t actually go around simply locking up people because he doesn’t like (them).”

Stewart and Campbell then discussed how this might have arisen from the view taken by Trump and his supporters that before the recent election the Democrats went after Trump, in large part because of the January 6 riots, and now he is returning fire.

Stewart also noted that the atmosphere of mistrust in legal integrity has been “exacerbated” by Joe Biden’s controversial pardons of family members and others just before he left office, having been defeated by Trump in last year’s election.

“And of course, it’s got worse with Biden’s pardons, which have just exacerbated this, both because he’s pardoning his own family, but also because he’s giving the impression that he needs to pardon everybody because he doesn’t trust the American justice system to defend them.”

‘You blew it’ … Anthony Scaramucci has a message for the Democrats.

Scaramucci, who served briefly as White House Communications Director during Trump’s first term but lost the job after less than two weeks after criticising fellow members of the administration, joked that the pardons mean he will move higher up the returning president’s list of people to target.

In a wide-ranging discussion, he also pointed out that the Democrats are acting as if they lost to Trump by a landslide, and are now helpless, when in fact it was by a very small margin.

“Hey, guys, the Democrats, what are you guys doing?” he said.

“You lost by half a per cent to the guy, your disorganised train wreck. Yet you failed in your intergenerational transfer of leadership. You got Lady Macbeth, Jill Biden holding on to power. And you blew it. But by the way, you only lost by half a per cent. So why are they allowing him to behave like he said? Why are you so down? You’re acting like Abraham Lincoln had a baby with Ronald Reagan and they gave birth to Donald Trump. What are you guys doing? You step up the dissent.”

The Rest Is Politics is in the Top 20 shows on Apple Podcasts.

Political heavyweights … former Labour press chief Alastair Campbell (left) and Conservative veteran Rory Stewart.

Originally published as Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg fears he will be jailed by Donald Trump, claims leading expert, citing an insider