For the last few months, Mark Zuckerberg has been using his role as the CEO of Meta to announce a sort of cultural reset in his company and on the platforms it owns, beginning with an enthusiastic note of congratulations to President Donald Trump after he won the 2024 election. Earlier this month, he sat by himself in the videos that shared a spate of new policies, which included an end to DEI programs, changes to the rules that protect LGBTQ+ users, and an end to the fact-checking program meant to prevent misinformation. The seemingly abrupt U-turn in the CEO’s beliefs and appearance prompted viewers to wonder what on earth Zuckerberg’s wife of 12 years, Priscilla Chan, was thinking about the turn of events. Though Chan has no formal ties to the social media platform, even her Instagram comments weren’t safe from the backlash. “No one would blame you if you got a divorce,” said one commenter on a picture of the couple’s Halloween costumes. (Zuck was John Wick, Chan was a ballerina.) “Please, help Mark come to his senses,” read another.
Chan’s name reportedly didn’t appear on the invitation to the pre-inaugural-ball reception Zuckerberg cohosted with Republican mega-donor Miriam Adelson (who contributed to Trump’s legal defense fund for aides during the Mueller investigation). But on Monday, the pediatrician turned philanthropist stood by her husband’s side during the ceremonies, wearing a fuzzy sky blue cardigan from Bottega Veneta and two demure strands of pearls. The couple was seated alongside Jeff Bezos, his fiancée Lauren Sánchez, and Elon Musk in a position of honor, rows ahead of the members of the new Trump administration and other high-ranking Republicans, all of them representing the neo-MAGA aristocracy. (Chan’s representatives at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative didn’t respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.)
Chan seemed to be enjoying herself during the inauguration, and she was spotted in conversation with newly sworn-in secretary of state Marco Rubio. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the mother of three—a former elementary school science teacher who quoted Dr. Seuss in her high school valedictorian speech—would have an awesome time hanging out with UFC CEO Dana White and Kid Rock. Zuckerberg claims his marriage has only improved since he underwent his now notorious two-year evolution that began with a foray into jiujitsu and culminated with his longer curly locks.
In a three-hour interview with anti-woke conversationalist Joe Rogan earlier this month, Zuckerberg railed against Joe Biden’s administration for its concern with COVID-19 misinformation—and discussed his wife. When Zuckerberg tore his ACL while training back in November 2023, he was concerned that Chan might be upset with him. Instead, she just wanted him back in the octagon. “She was like, ‘No. You heal your ACL. When you heal, you better go back to fighting,’” Zuckerberg said. “She’s like, ‘You’re so much better to be around now that you’re doing this. You have to fight.’”
Chan and Zuckerberg first met as Harvard students in 2003, when she was a freshman studying biology and he was a sophomore taking computer science classes. As Facebook evolved from a dorm room project into a real company, he dropped out, but she stayed behind, graduating in 2007 and going on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. They wed in 2012, soon after Facebook’s high-wattage IPO and right before Chan started her pediatrics residency. She finished in 2015, around the time the couple announced that Chan was pregnant with her first child.
For more than a decade, Chan has seemed in lockstep with her husband in his public priorities. In December 2015, coinciding with their daughter Maxima’s birth, the couple launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The organization aimed to “solve society’s toughest challenges,” and its initial investments were in biomedical science and education. Chan and Zuckerberg are co-CEOs of the initiative, which has more than 500 employees, but Chan runs day-to-day operations. Originally, the couple were broadly liberal in their philanthropic choices, making generous donations to low-income school districts. But by 2017, education experts were already debating whether Zuckerberg’s earliest philanthropic investment was a wash or an abject failure. Though Zuckerberg gave the Newark schools nearly $100 million, test scores made only mixed improvements.
Zuckerberg and Chan’s original ideals faced their first big challenge during 2020. First, they came into conflict with some of their employees in the initial aftermath of the George Floyd protests during June 2020. Vox reported that a worker at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative publicly asked Zuckerberg to do one of three things: moderate Trump’s inflammatory posts, step down from his role at Facebook, or resign from the organization. (In response, Zuckerberg said, “I mean, no. None of those things would make sense.”) That same year, Chan and Zuckerberg donated more than $400 million to nonpartisan election nonprofits to ensure voting access during the pandemic. In the heady days of 2020 election denial, this became a scandal on the right-wing internet, getting the nickname “Zuckerbucks,” inspiring some aggressive Trump posts on Truth Social, and earning an entire hearing by the Committee on House Administration.
For Zuckerberg, the wounds started to fester. “Mr. Zuckerberg complained to multiple people about the blowback to Meta that came from the more politically touchy aspects of his philanthropic efforts,” reported The New York Times in September 2024. “And he regretted hiring employees at his philanthropy who tried to push him further to the left on some causes.” They added that the CEO identifies politically with “classical liberalism,” which may be a surefire sign that he has engaged with the so-called Intellectual Dark Web.
As for Chan, her political tendencies have primarily been described in the media as auxiliary to her husband’s. The first sign that things were changing for both members of the couple came in 2021, when they seemingly made a move to repair their reputations. Zuckerberg and Chan hired longtime GOP strategist Brian Baker to serve as their adviser—and help them make inroads with his fellow Republicans, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In 2015, Zuckerberg mentioned that he and Chan had experienced miscarriages before their oldest daughter was born, and the next year Chan told Today’s Savannah Guthrie why they decided to speak publicly about them. “Sharing our experience with pregnancy was incredibly important because we realized how challenging and difficult that was,” she said in September 2016. “Knowing that you’re not alone was incredibly important for us, and we wanted others to know that they weren’t alone either.”
By June 2022, when the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision allowed states to ban abortion, Chan wanted to keep the CZI out of the conversation about reproductive healthcare. Soon after the decision, Chan reportedly sent a memo to her staff saying that she would not use the institute’s funding to address abortion access. “We need to stay focused and clear on what we’re here to do,” it read, according to the Times. “We do not have any plans to expand our grant making to new areas.”
Now, the couple is very publicly aligned with an administration that is working hard to strip back rights over bodily autonomy, and in some cases, restrict medical treatments that are used to treat both abortions and miscarriages. Such restrictions have already put women’s lives in danger. On Tuesday morning, the new Trump administration took reproductiverights.gov, the government website dedicated to reproductive care, offline.
Though we might never know how Chan felt about her husband’s performance on The Joe Rogan Experience, we already know that she’s used to waiting for her husband to come around. “As life partners, our relative optimism comes through as Mark just is overly optimistic about his time management and will get engrossed in interesting ideas, and he’s late,” she said on an episode of scientist Andrew Huberman’s podcast in 2023. “And because he’s late, I have to channel Mark as an optimist whenever I’m waiting for him.”
Priscilla Chan, wife of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, made a bold fashion statement at the Presidential Inauguration by wearing a stunning outfit from luxury brand Bottega Veneta. While many were impressed by her sartorial choice, others couldn’t help but draw connections between her high-profile appearance and her ties to the Trump World Order.
As a prominent figure in the tech world, Priscilla Chan has often been associated with her husband’s controversial decisions and political affiliations. With Mark Zuckerberg facing scrutiny for his handling of misinformation on Facebook and his perceived alignment with the Trump administration, Priscilla’s choice to wear a designer outfit at such a high-profile event raised eyebrows and sparked conversations about her own allegiances.
Some saw her outfit choice as a subtle nod to the elite circles she and Zuckerberg move in, while others speculated that it was a deliberate move to align herself with the Trump World Order. Whatever the intention behind her fashion statement, one thing is clear: Priscilla Chan’s appearance in Bottega Veneta at the Inauguration has sparked a heated debate about power, privilege, and politics in the digital age.
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