In 2012, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg proudly adopted the motto “Move fast and break things”. More than a decade on, the billionaire tech entrepreneur is now breaking liberal hearts as he cements an extraordinary transformation from an apparent Democrat ally to a Donald Trump-supporting, cage-fighting conservative whose 2025 slogan might as well be Make Facebook Great Again.

Certainly, he seems to be reshaping Meta in the MAGA image. Last week, Zuckerberg announced plans to loosen restrictions on speech on the likes of Facebook and Instagram, recommend more political content on the platforms and abandon independent fact-checking in a bid to, as he put it, “get back to our roots around free expression”. More than yet another system update, this seemed as much to be about the boss himself, aged 40, attempting a mammoth mid-life rebrand.

The big question, of course, is whether this is a genuine shift in Zuckerberg’s beliefs, or a canny, commercially minded way of currying favour with president-elect Trump. There is precedent for the latter, with Zuckerberg having seemingly shrewdly shifted strategy each time the political winds change in Washington. Yet his language of late is striking: not cold, hard business speak, but, particularly in the past couple of years, seemingly passionate. There is no zealot like the converted, after all, and it sounds as though Zuckerberg is now a full-blown Trumpian evangelist.

That conversion seems to have begun, of all places, in a cage. In 2022, Zuckerberg became a devotee of mixed martial arts (MMA) and jiu-jitsu. The pale, lanky, socially awkward Harvard graduate has since become a hulking bruiser, absorbing the boisterous, take-no-prisoners ethos of the ring. Now, he appears to have the politics to match.