Business
On a Crenshaw Boulevard corner, old gives way to new, but it stays in the family
The corner lot on Crenshaw Boulevard and 54th Street looks like any other construction site. Inside the chain-link fence encircling the property, an excavator last week was moving a pile of rubble — the last remains of an old building that had been demolished to make room for something new.
But the mundane scene belied an unusual story in Los Angeles real estate: Instead of selling it, a Black family with deep roots in South L.A. chose to hold on to a property they’ve owned for decades and develop it themselves into a $24-million apartment and retail building.
They’ll mark their progress with a formal groundbreaking ceremony Thursday, a rare instance of a local, minority property owner participating in the redevelopment of their neighborhood, which had long been overlooked by conventional developers. In keeping a seat at the table, they are bucking the norms for how development in L.A. typically is done, in which owners sell to outside developers looking to capitalize on the rising fortunes of once-neglected historic neighborhoods.
But even with a train stop for Metro’s new light rail K line nearby, funding for the project was hard to come by. It took years of effort before siblings Jamial Clark and Bridgette Reed, who inherited the property from their parents, could start turning their mother’s former hair salon and wig shop property into a six-story building with 48 apartments and perhaps a small grocery store in the first-floor retail space.
The grind, they said, has been worth it. Their parents, Henry and Lucretia Clark, scraped together money in 1995 to buy the building and the siblings didn’t want to let go of it. Perhaps, they said, they will provide a road map to others who own properties in evolving neighborhoods near the many new transit lines being built and planned by Metro.
Co-developer Kacy Keys, left, and Clark family members Bridgette Reed and brother Jamial Clark at the site.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“There are a lot of Black-owned properties up and down Crenshaw,” Reed said. “We just want to encourage other families to do the same thing and not sell out to these developers who are coming in and actually pricing us out of our own communities.”
Key to getting their project underway was teaming with developer Kacy Keys, who has spent nearly three decades building commercial projects including apartments, offices and stores. She heads Praxis Development Group, which will have an equity stake in the project, which is named Clark on 54th.
“We were responsible for playing the developer role,” Keys said of her company, such as getting city construction approvals, overseeing the design, hiring contractors and finding financing. The Clarks “agreed to contribute their land into a joint venture with us.”
Both Praxis and the Clarks had to put up cash for the last few years to make sure the project didn’t falter, which was worrying, Jamial Clark said.
A 48-unit apartment building with ground-floor retail will be built at Crenshaw Boulevard and 54th Street in Los Angeles near the Metro K line.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“I invested over $100,000 of my money just to keep things going,” he said, “and to keep bills paid and the mortgage paid,” but he and his sister didn’t want to let go of the property their parents toiled over and where they spent many hours of their young lives.
“Selling was never going to be an option, even though we got to a point where we had to think about it” as rising interest rates and inflation drove the potential cost of the project so high it looked out of reach, Clark said.
The pair attended nearby 54th Street Elementary School and after classes they walked to their mother’s salon, where they pitched in answering the phone.
“It was like our second home,” Clark said, a place with a nurturing vibe that encouraged customers to linger and chat.
“Mom was old-school press-and-curl,” he said, referring to a popular hairstyle in the 1990s. “My mom was taking out those weaves and regrowing their hair.”
The salon had a private area where women with thinning hair could get scalp treatments that included massages from their late beautician sister Carla Taylor and oils formulated by their mother.
“It was almost like a counseling session,” he said. “The ladies would stay after they got their hair done and order lunch.”
Members of the Clark family have owned the property for decades.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
On Saturdays their mom played such “old” music as the Temptations, Al Green and the Whispers, he said. “The ladies would just love to come and sit.”
Her tenants in the building included the wig shop with a celebrity clientele, a shoe repair shop, a frame shop and a social services provider, all of which relocated in the neighborhood, he said.
Some neighbors were apprehensive about the plan to knock down a building infused with emotions and memories for so many, but Clark saw an opportunity to be part of potential economic changes coming to the area. In West Adams, another historically black community, development of new apartments, restaurants and shops was already taking place on Adams Boulevard.
“I was like, ‘Wow, Crenshaw should be comparable to that, at least.’”
In the 1920s and 1930s, Central Avenue was the center of L.A.’s black community. Later, the center shifted to the Crenshaw Corridor, particularly between Adams and Slauson Avenue, said real estate developer Philip Hart, who is familiar with the plans for Clark at 54th but not involved in the project.
Lately, the multibillion-dollar public investments in Metro’s Crenshaw line and the Expo line that intersects it “have had a ripple effect in terms of the communities they serve becoming desirable,” Hart said.
That economic shift puts pressure on local residents, he said. “Can they continue to pay their rent or their property taxes? The question of gentrification and displacement has become a very important question in the Crenshaw District over the past 10 years or so.”
If redevelopment doesn’t bring with it affordable housing and good-paying jobs, residents will be priced out of their neighborhoods and join a long-running exodus to Palmdale, Lancaster and the Inland Empire, where the cost of living is cheaper, he said.
The Crenshaw community, Hart said, “should retain its historic African American cultural cachet.”
Keys and the Clarks hope their project will play a small part in keeping the neighborhood intact. The building will include 10 units considered “deeply affordable” because they are reserved for tenants earning 50% of the median income in the area when they become available in late 2026.
The apartments will be bigger than average, including two- and three-bedroom units to accommodate families, said Keys, who is working on the project with her partner Charles Wise.
Work has begun on a 48-unit apartment building with ground-floor retail at Crenshaw Boulevard and 54th Street in Los Angeles near the Metro K line.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
One of the biggest challenges to getting the project underway was finding financing. A building that size typically would be funded with a loan or two, but Keys had to assemble a complicated package from seven entities including philanthropic nonprofits after approaching about 100 financing sources.
“Even though I’ve built over a billion dollars’ worth of projects over the course of my career, this was my first time as a small woman-led business that I was raising money on my own,” Keys said. “It was incredibly challenging.”
Praxis put up more than $200,000 of its own funds and worked without compensation to prove that partnering with legacy landowners to create new housing can work, she said.
Among the financiers was MSquared, a women-owned real estate development and investment firm that will retain an equity share, as will New York investment and development firm Six Peak Capital.
The need to securing financing from multiple sources dragged out the process, but the effort was worth it, Hart said.
“What they’ve done was challenging, but they’ve done it and they’re having a groundbreaking,” he said. “That’s a good thing.”
Following the political winds
Meta’s bombshell announcement on Tuesday that it would end its fact-checking program was widely read as a major shift in policy meant to please President-elect Donald Trump and other conservatives.
In reality, the move was probably less radical than it initially seemed. But the turn still serves as a reminder that many corporate leaders see their highest priority as reading the room — one that Trump now dominates.
Mark Zuckerberg has been moving in this direction for some time. In relation to the 2016 election, the Meta chief, who has a history of tacking where political winds blow, followed other tech companies in partnering with fact-checking groups to police content on its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Since then, however, the tech mogul has fumed as Meta was criticized for both failing to do enough — and for removing too many user posts.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the changes, including a move to X-style user-policing known as Community Notes. (Katie Harbath, a former communications executive at Meta, told The Times, “This is an evolved return to his political origins.”)
The changes aren’t necessarily as big as they first appeared. Politico noted that Meta had been paring back its moderation efforts in recent years. And while Zuckerberg promoted plans to move such workers to Texas to “eliminate bias,” many such workers are already based there.
Zuckerberg isn’t alone: Tech companies haven’t ever wanted to be in the business of moderating user content. Last summer, YouTube began testing a version of Community Notes, though it was described as more of a supplemental feature.
Is the political payoff for Meta worth the criticism? Trump, who had railed against the company’s moves to police his content — including briefly shutting down his Facebook account after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol — said the tech giant had “come a long way.” (He also said his threats against Zuckerberg “probably” contributed to the new policy.)
Meta executives may hope that, along with the elevation of the longtime Republican executive Joel Kaplan to lead global affairs, a $1 million donation to the Trump inaugural fund and the addition of the Trump ally Dana White to its board, may get them into the president-elect’s good graces.
A factor worth watching: Zuckerberg said he would work with Trump to “push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.” That was a thinly veiled shot against the European Union, which has sought to punish companies, including Meta, for insufficiently policing their platforms — and may increase its scrutiny of the tech giant after Tuesday’s move.
Will the move work? So far, advertisers aren’t publicly objecting. And Tuesday’s news most likely allays concerns that Trump regulatory picks, including Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission, had about Meta.
But Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, wrote on X that Meta’s change was simply “a ploy to avoid being regulated.” She added, “We will not be fooled.”
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Wildfires near Los Angeles force widespread evacuations. Parts of Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades were hit by a blaze that destroyed homes and forced at least 30,000 to flee for safety. Another fire, near Pasadena, was also causing issues as officials warned of devastating losses.
Anthropic is close to raising billions more in capital. The artificial intelligence start-up is in advanced talks to collect $2 billion in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, The Times reports. If completed, the fund-raising would value Anthropic at $60 billion — roughly three times as much as it was worth a year ago — in another sign that the deal making frenzy around A.I. shows no signs of slowing.
JPMorgan Chase reportedly plans to call employees back to the office five days a week. That’s up from the requirement of three days a week, according to Bloomberg, though about 60 percent of Wall Street giant’s staff is already at the office full time. Other major companies have already reduced or eliminated work-from-home policies instituted during the coronavirus pandemic; JPMorgan’s C.E.O., Jamie Dimon, has long criticized hybrid working arrangements.
The markets are taking Trump seriously
Coming into 2025, the big questions hanging over President-elect Donald Trump’s second term included tax cuts, the Fed’s independence and potential new trade war.
But few could have foreseen the president-elect refusing to rule out military force or economic coercion against allies as he did on Tuesday at a wide-ranging news conference at Mar-a-Lago. It underscores that for markets, a Trump presidency brings plenty of potential black swan events.
A recap: Trump revealed an expansive vision of “America First,” doubling down on calls for the United States to gain control of Greenland and the Panama Canal. And he spoke of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” though it was unclear how serious he was about that.
The Trump effect can be seen in the markets on Wednesday. The S&P 500 looks set to open lower, and sectors like green energy and companies including Tesla slumped after Trump railed on Tuesday about wind turbines and grumbled about electric vehicles.
And the yield on the 10-year Treasury note hit a roughly nine-month high on Tuesday, a worrying sign for house hunters and credit-card holders.
Some market watchers still believe that markets could check the Trump agenda. Bond vigilantes could act as a brake on Trump’s policies if they reignite inflation.
And more broadly, the Trump team cares “about the verdict of financial markets,” Holger Schmieding, an economist at Berenberg, wrote in a research note on Wednesday. “If their actions were to impair the potential for growth and corporate earnings badly enough to trigger a sell-off, they might change tack.”
There are signs that might prove true. Trump acknowledged on Tuesday that it would be “hard” to bring down consumer prices, a major shift from what he told supporters on the campaign trail. His big inflation-fighting idea, expanding oil drilling, hasn’t yet affected the markets, with crude oil prices on a steady rise in recent weeks. (President Biden’s ban on new oil exploration in vast stretches of U.S. waters has contributed to that price surge, and may be hard for Trump to undo.)
That said, the VIX volatility index, known as Wall Street’s fear gauge, has been stable for weeks, a sign that equity investors are still bullish.
Trump’s record-breaking inauguration
Donald Trump’s transition team has already amassed a mega budget to throw an inauguration bash for the ages.
And the president-elect can thank the giants of the tech industry and Wall Street — some of the same figures who’ve met with him recently at Mar-a-Lago — for the record haul of at least $150 million. Few federal rules govern how Trump and his associates can spend the money.
Donors who have gone public include: Amazon, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Meta and Uber. Executives such as Tim Cook of Apple, Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber and Sam Altman of OpenAI have also chipped in.
Contributing to inauguration funds has become a corporate America tradition. “You’re giving money directly to the incoming president with no risk of backing the wrong horse,” Craig Holman, a lobbyist with Public Citizen, a consumer rights watchdog, told DealBook’s Sarah Kessler. Donors who give $1 million to the fund receive tickets to the inauguration plus other events such as a reception with cabinet picks and a pre-inauguration dinner with Trump.
There are only a few restrictions. Foreign nationals are not allowed to donate, and donations over $200 must be disclosed. And anti-bribery laws apply. “Beyond that, it’s pretty much open in terms of who may contribute and how they may spend it,” said Kenneth Gross, a lawyer specializing in campaign finance at Akin Gump.
The inauguration fund pays for the parties, dinners and the parade, while taxpayers foot the bill for security and the swearing-in ceremony.
What will happen to unspent funds? Two people involved in the fund-raising for Trump’s inauguration told The Times that donors expected the remaining money to go to Trump’s presidential library.
The last time, Trump’s team raised $107 million (the previous record). It was later revealed that a nearly $26 million payment went to an event planning firm created by an adviser to the first lady, Melania Trump.
Lawmakers have sought to change things. One bill introduced in 2023 would limit contributions to $50,000. But such efforts have gained little traction.
The big new corporate bet: Bitcoin
Corporate treasury departments are usually bastions of caution, preferring to invest their companies’ money in stable assets like Treasury bonds. But a growing number are choosing to go a different route by investing in crypto.
By one estimate, more than 70 publicly traded companies have invested in Bitcoin, despite some having nothing to do with crypto. At least a few have been inspired by MicroStrategy, a software company that began amassing Bitcoin in 2020 — and now sits on a stockpile worth over $40 billion. MicroStrategy’s stock price is up roughly tenfold over the past 18 months.
But it means that those companies are putting their money in a highly volatile asset that could imperil their finances if things go wrong, The Times’s David Yaffe-Bellany and Joe Rennison write:
The investments are a sharp pivot away from the cautious approach of the traditional corporate treasury department, whose focus is typically safeguarding cash rather than risking it for a higher return. Typical reserve assets include steady, predictable securities like U.S. government bonds and money market funds.
“I cannot understand how a risk-averse board could justify an investment in digital assets, given we know they swing quite significantly,” said Naresh Agarwal, an associate director at the Association of Corporate Treasurers, a trade organization. “It is quite an opaque market.”
Some investors aren’t on board with this new tactic. When Banzai, a publicly traded marketing firm, decided to invest in Bitcoin, some shareholders expressed alarm. Joe Davy, its C.E.O., told The Times: “I got a couple of phone calls from people who were like: ‘What the hell is going on over there? What are you thinking?’”
THE SPEED READ
Deals
Politics and policy
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The Justice Department added six major landlords, including Blackstone’s LivCor, to a price-fixing lawsuit against the real estate software company RealPage. (WSJ)
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Theodore Farnsworth, the former C.E.O. of MoviePass’s parent company, pleaded guilty to fraud over misleading investors about the business’ “unlimited” subscription plan. (NYT)
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For more than 50 years, as the economics of American healthcare and health insurance have evolved, one theory has persisted, unchanged: To promote better and more efficient medical treatment, patients must have “skin in the game.”
The idea is that requiring fees for doctor or hospital visits — through co-pays, deductibles and other forms of cost-sharing — will prompt people to think twice before seeking treatment for anything but a truly serious condition.
“On the question of whether patients should have to pay part of the cost of their covered medical care, our profession’s advice has been unequivocal,” health economists Liran Einav of Stanford and Amy Finkelstein of MIT wrote in their 2023 book, “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care.” “Patients must pay something for their care, otherwise they’ll rush to the doctor every time they sneeze.”
Among all advanced industrial countries, the U.S. goes furthest in using premiums, copays, and deductibles to influence access to care.
— Merrill Goozner, STAT
Einav and Finkelstein own up to having “preached the gospel” of skin-in-the-game “to generations of students.”
Now here’s their punchline: “We take it back.”
To healthcare reformers such as single-payer advocates Adam Gaffney, David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, the confessional by Einav and Finkelstein “may signal an encouraging shift in elite opinion, at least among economists,” as they wrote recently in the New York Review of Books.
Others have begun to take notice. “Among all advanced industrial countries, the U.S. goes furthest in using premiums, copays, and deductibles to influence access to care,” the veteran healthcare journalist Merrill Goozner observes. “It is time to put an end to this failed experiment.”
Yet the imposition of financial obstacles to limit access to care still exerts a powerful influence on healthcare policy in the U.S. In part, this is because it makes sense, superficially. The mantra goes: “If you want less of something, tax it more.” So it has a built-in appeal to government budget hawks and corporate executives who want to reduce healthcare spending.
For some, there’s a moral component — why shouldn’t people take personal responsibility for their own health, whether by smoking and eating less or paying for healthcare partially out of their own pockets, even if they have to be forced to make treatment choices based partially on their out-of-pocket costs?
Then there’s the empirical evidence: It’s true that the higher the co-pays and deductibles, the less medical care people seek, on average.
The seminal study on this topic was Rand’s Health Insurance Experiment, reported in 1981. Starting in 1971, Rand recruited 2,750 families — 7,700 individuals — slotted randomly into five groups: One was offered free care, three groups were offered different levels of cost-sharing, and the fifth was placed in a nonprofit HMO.
Rand found that the groups with cost-sharing made one or two fewer physician visits a year and had 20% fewer hospitalizations than the group with free care. Their dental visits, prescriptions and mental health treatments were also lower. Unsurprisingly, they spent less on healthcare.
The initial findings seemed to validate the skin-in-the-game theory. As Rand continued reporting out the results over the next few years, however, air began to leak out of the balloon.
It became clear that although the cost-sharing subjects cut back on ineffective or unnecessary care, they also cut back on effective and necessary treatments. The reduced utilizations, Rand found, occurred because the subjects decided to delay or forgo treatments, possibly inadvisedly. Once they initiated care, the effect of cost-sharing dropped away, as the patients ceded their decision-making to their healthcare providers.
Some decisions weren’t affected at all by cost-sharing. “The proportion of inappropriate hospitalizations was the same (23 percent) for cost-sharing and free-plan participants, as was the inappropriate use of antibiotics,” Rand reported. Nor did cost-sharing prompt subjects to seek out higher-quality care; the general quality of outpatient and dental care was “surprisingly low for all participants.”
Although Rand found “no adverse effect on participants’ health” from the reduction in services prompted by cost-sharing, the free plan led to better healthcare for plan members in four categories: improved control of hypertension, better vision care, better dental care for the poorest patients, and fewer serious health symptoms for the poorer patients, including less chest pain when exercising and fewer episodes of loss of consciousness.
Once cost-sharing became a standard element of American health insurance, Gaffney, Himmelstein and Woolhandler write, “the consequences were dire.”
The Heritage Foundation developed a model combining extreme deductibles and tax-advantaged savings accounts to pay the out-of-pocket expenses, which Heritage argued would “transform patients into prudent consumers.” The high-deductible/health savings account model was enacted into law, but plainly has failed to create an army of prudently cost-sensitive patients.
Co-pays and deductibles became permanently etched into employer-sponsored health plans. When the initial Rand findings were published, report Gaffney, Himmelstein and Woolhandler, only 30% of private health plans had a deductible for hospital stays; today 90% of workers with employer plans have annual deductibles averaging $1,735 per participant. Conservative governors and legislatures have tried to impose cost-sharing fees on patients in Medicaid, the nation’s healthcare program for low-income households.
And, of course, the cost-sharing revolution has utterly failed to control U.S. healthcare costs or bring about a healthier nation. Per capita healthcare spending in the U.S. has risen from about $350 in 1970 to $14, 470 in 2023. In inflation-adjusted terms, it has increased nearly sevenfold.
As for health outcomes, of 13 wealthy countries tracked by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the U.S. spends the most per capita by a wide margin and scrapes the bottom of the barrel on outcomes — the worst average life expectancy, worst infant mortality rate, worst rate of unmanaged diabetes, worst maternal mortality and nearly the worst heart attack mortality.
Obviously, the American healthcare system has many flaws other than its reliance on cost-sharing. But all its flaws are related in some way to its economic structure, which has produced legions of uninsured and underinsured people, as well as crushing medical debt for millions. (On Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau made final a rule requiring medical debts to be removed from consumers’ credit reports. But the debts still remain.)
In recent years, the U.S. has started to get its arms around the uninsured crisis. That’s largely due to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which has brought access to Medicaid and subsidized health plans for about 42.5 million people. The uninsured rate fell from nearly 18% (or 46.5 million people) in 2010 to 9.5% (25.3 million) in 2023.
Can these gains be advanced and sustained? The incoming Trump administration doesn’t present grounds for optimism. In his first term, Donald Trump and his acolytes worked tirelessly to undermine the ACA and Medicaid. The number of uninsured rose to 28.9 million in 2019 from 26.7 million in 2016.
It would surprise no one if the new administration takes a hands-off approach to the increasing corporatization of healthcare, including the takeover of hospitals and nursing homes by penny-pinching private equity firms and the pushing of more Medicare enrollees to join private Medicare Advantage plans, which have become known for costing the government more than traditional Medicare, and for profit-seeking through claim denials.
Still, it’s the installation of cost-sharing as a medical management tool that harms people day in and day out. That the tool has never fulfilled its promise doesn’t seem to faze policymakers. On the surface, after all, it should work, shouldn’t it?
In November 2016, as Facebook was being blamed for a torrent of fake news and conspiracy theories swirling around the first election of Donald J. Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of the social network, wrote an apologetic post.
In his message, Mr. Zuckerberg announced a series of steps he planned to take to grapple with false and misleading information on Facebook, such as working with fact-checkers.
“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” he wrote in a personal Facebook post. “There are many respected fact checking organizations,” he added, “and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.”
Eight years later, Mr. Zuckerberg is no longer apologizing. On Tuesday, he announced that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, was ending its fact-checking program and getting back to its roots around free expression. The fact-checking system had led to “too much censorship,” he said.
It was the latest step in a transformation of Mr. Zuckerberg. In recent years, the chief executive, now 40, has stepped away from his mea culpa approach to problems on his social platforms. Fed up with what has seemed at times to be unceasing criticism of his company, he has told executives close to him that he wants to return to his original thinking on free speech, which involves a lighter hand in content moderation.
Mr. Zuckerberg has remolded Meta as he has made the shift. Gone is the CrowdTangle transparency tool, which allowed researchers, academics and journalists to monitor conspiracy theories and misinformation on Facebook. The company’s election integrity team, once trumpeted as a group of experts focused solely on issues around the vote, has been folded into a general integrity team.
Instead, Mr. Zuckerberg has promoted technology efforts at Meta, including its investments in the immersive world of the so-called metaverse and its focus on artificial intelligence.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s change has been visible on his social media. Photos of him uncomfortably clad in a suit and tie and testifying before Congress have been replaced by videos of him with longer hair and in gold chains, competing in extreme sports and sometimes hunting for his own food. Long, heavily lawyered Facebook posts about Meta’s commitment to democracy no longer appear. Instead, he has posted quips on Threads responding to celebrity athletes and videos showing the company’s newest A.I. initiatives.
“This shows how Mark Zuckerberg is feeling that society is more accepting of those libertarian and right-leaning viewpoints that he’s always had,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook. “This is an evolved return to his political origins.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has long been a pragmatist who has gone where the political winds have blown. He has flip-flopped on how much political content should be shown to Facebook and Instagram users, previously saying social networks should be about fun, relatable content from family and friends but then on Tuesday saying Meta would show more personalized political content.
Mr. Zuckerberg has told executives close to him that he is comfortable with the new direction of his company. He sees his most recent steps as a return to his original thinking on free speech and free expression, with Meta limiting its monitoring and controlling of content, said two Meta executives who spoke with Mr. Zuckerberg in the last week.
Mr. Zuckerberg was never comfortable with the involvement of outside fact-checkers, academics or researchers in his company, one of the executives said. He now sees many of the steps taken after the 2016 election as a mistake, the two executives said.
“Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video on Tuesday about the end of the fact-checking program, echoing statements made by top Republicans over the years.
Meta declined to comment.
Those who have known Mr. Zuckerberg for decades describe him as a natural libertarian, who enjoyed reading books extolling free expression and the free market system after he dropped out of Harvard to start Facebook in 2004. As his company grew, so did pressure to become more responsive to complaints from world leaders and civil society groups that he was not doing enough to moderate content on his platform.
Crises including a genocide in Myanmar, in which Facebook was blamed for allowing hate speech to spread against the Muslim Rohingya people, forced Mr. Zuckerberg to expand moderation teams and define rules around speech on his social networks.
He was coached by people close to him, including Meta’s former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to become more involved in politics. After the 2016 election, Mr. Zuckerberg embarked on a public campaign to clear his name and redeem his company. He held regular meetings with civic leaders and invited politicians to visit his company’s headquarters, rolled out transparency tools such as CrowdTangle and brought on fact-checkers.
In 2017, he announced that he was conducting a “listening tour” across the United States to “get a broader perspective” on how Americans used Facebook. The campaign-like photo opportunities with farmers and autoworkers led to speculation that he was running for political office.
Despite his efforts, Mr. Zuckerberg continued to be blamed for the misinformation and falsehoods that spread on Facebook and Instagram.
In October 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg began to push back. In an address at Georgetown University, he said Facebook had been founded to give people a voice.
“I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression,” he said.
In 2021, when the Jan. 6 riot broke out at the U.S. Capitol after the presidential election, Meta was again held responsible for hosting speech that fomented the violence. Two weeks later, Mr. Zuckerberg told investors that the company was “considering steps” to reduce political content across Facebook.
His evolution since then has been steady. Executives who pushed Mr. Zuckerberg to involve himself directly in politics, including Ms. Sandberg, have left the company. Those closest to him now cheer his focus on his own interests, which include extreme sports and rapping for his wife, as well as promoting his company’s A.I. initiatives.
In a podcast interview in San Francisco that Mr. Zuckerberg recorded live in front of an audience of 6,000 in September, he spoke for nearly 90 minutes about his love of technology. He said he should have rejected accusations that his company was responsible for societal ills.
“I think that the political miscalculation was a 20-year mistake,” he said. He added that it could take another decade for him to move his company’s brand back to where he wanted it.
“We’ll get through it, and we’ll come out stronger,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
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