Dive Brief:
- Stripe’s co-founder and chief executive, Patrick Collison, will join the board of Meta Platforms effective Tuesday, according to a Friday press release from the social media company.
- Dina Powell McCormick, a former national security advisor to President Donald Trump, will also join Meta’s board on Tuesday. She is currently vice chair, president and head of global client services at BDT & MSD Partners, a merchant bank and advisory firm. She was also an assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush’s administration and a former Goldman Sachs executive.
- “Their perspective will be extremely valuable to businesses that rely on our services to grow," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Friday in a news release. The additions expand Meta’s board to 15 directors, including Zuckerberg.
Dive Insight:
Meta directors received $50,000 compensation plus additional money for serving on a committee, according to the company’s 2024 proxy statement. New directors can receive up to $2 million, including stock grants, during their first year on the board, with a $1 million limit after that.
"Between WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, Meta is one of the internet's most important platforms for businesses,” Collison said in a news release. “I look forward to helping them navigate the abundant opportunities of the coming years.”
Collison previously served on a Meta advisory board to help guide the company's artificial intelligence strategy, joining that group in May. A second member of the advisory board, technology investor Charlie Songhurst, also became a Meta director this year.
For several years, privately held Stripe, with headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin, has been the object of speculation about whether it would seek to become a publicly traded company. The company processed $1.4 trillion in payment volume last year, a 38% increase from 2023.
Stripe is profitable “and expects to remain so in the coming years,” it said in a February news release.
Collison and McCormick are part of a broad board shuffle at Meta this year. The social media giant added three new directors in January, including Dana White, the president and chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship, the mixed martial arts company.
Some of the recent board changes are widely viewed – along with Meta’s $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration and its $25 million lawsuit settlement to Trump – as efforts to help neuter a potential Trump administration crackdown on large technology companies, which some conservatives have accused of censoring their views.
White, for example, has been friendly with Trump and spoke at recent Republican national conventions.
In February, Meta’s board increased the target bonus percentage for company executives from 75% to 200% of their base salaries, excluding CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to a securities filing. Directors said they had concluded that Meta’s total cash compensation for executives “was at or below 15th percentile” of executives at a group of peer companies.
