Why Companies Need a Chief Geopolitics Officer |
On Jan. 6, 2021, as rioters stormed the United States Capitol, Mark Zuckerberg convened an emergency call with his closest advisors. On the line were Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s then COO; Joel Kaplan, former White House deputy chief of staff; and Nick Clegg, the former British Deputy Prime Minister who was serving as Facebook’s vice president for global affairs. The question before them was unprecedented: should Facebook ban the sitting President of the United States?
Clegg emerged as the decisive voice. He had a clear plan: suspend Donald Trump indefinitely, then refer the decision to the company’s new independent Oversight Board, a body Clegg himself had shepherded into existence over the previous two years. Some at Facebook thought referring the ban to the board was too risky. But according to a New York Times account of the deliberations, when Clegg made his case, Zuckerberg responded: “I defer to you, Nick.”
That moment crystallized why Zuckerberg had hired Clegg, as a kind of Chief Geopolitics Officer, in the first place. Facebook was then reeling from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and reports that it had enabled election interference. The company needed someone who understood how governments think, how regulators operate, how political crises unfold—and how to navigate all three simultaneously. Clegg, with his experience as a Member of the European Parliament and five years near the top of Britain’s coalition government, was the rare executive who could operate at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.
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Over the next four years, Clegg proved his value repeatedly. He created the Oversight Board—a panel of former politicians, human rights officials, and journalists that Zuckerberg called Facebook’s “Supreme Court”—convincing former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt to serve as co-chair. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Clegg was central to Meta’s decision to take a hard line against Moscow, precipitating an all-out ban on Facebook and Instagram in Russia. When Frances Haugen’s whistleblower revelations threatened to engulf the company, Clegg served as Meta’s chief defender, a role that earned him criticism but also demonstrated his indispensability.
Last month, Clegg announced he is joining Hiro Capital, a London-based venture capital firm focused on AI and spatial computing. His departure from Meta—and his replacement by Joel Kaplan, a Republican operative better attuned to the Trump Administration—marks the end of the first major experiment in corporate geopolitical management.
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The lessons of that experiment deserve wider attention. For seven years, Clegg demonstrated what it looks like when a company takes political risk seriously enough to put a senior figure in charge of it. The question now is whether other multinationals will learn from Meta’s example, or whether they will........