Dina Powell McCormick gave up her Meta board seat after a walk with Mark Zuckerberg at his Kauai compound.
He told Dina Powell McCormick, who had joined the Meta board only eight months earlier, that the $1.7 trillion company was betting its future on artificial intelligence, that it would have to raise a tremendous amount of outside capital to do it, and that he needed an adviser who could smooth the way with financial institutions and governments alike. She has weighed in on Meta’s biggest legal and reputational fights, including a settlement of up to $18 billion with state attorneys general over children’s safety on Instagram and Facebook, and on the backlash to AI itself.
Give up the seat, he said, and come work inside the company instead. It would be the most important job she would ever have, he told her. Zuckerberg says it became clear “she could play a bigger role in Meta’s next chapter”.
Mark Zuckerberg took a walk around Koolau Ranch, his compound in Kauai, with one of his newest board members last December and made her an unusual offer. She resigned from the board about a week later. In January she came back as president, vice chairman and co-leader of Meta Compute, the division building and monetising the infrastructure behind the AI push. Nine months in, a Bloomberg report drawing on interviews with more than a dozen Meta insiders, outside executives and government officials describes her as the person Zuckerberg and his top deputies hand the company’s thorniest problems. That remit has stretched well past compute deals. She has appeared for Meta at Davos, travelled to China with President Donald Trump and an entourage of Silicon Valley’s best-known names, and met King Charles III.
Meta has raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from $115 billion to $135 billion, and the stock fell 9% after that disclosure. The company also plans to cut 10% of its workforce, roughly 8,000 jobs, while fighting the FTC’s appeal in the Instagram and WhatsApp antitrust case and a youth-addiction verdict over social media design. The timing explains the hire.
Meta’s AI tools, she says, are meant to “empower people like small-business owners, welders, the fiber technicians, creators”. Her pitch leans away from data centres and towards users. She has also pushed the point that women are adopting AI more slowly than men, and that Meta should fix it.