Priscilla Chan, in Bottega Veneta for inauguration, aligned with Mark Zuckerberg and Trump’s world order

In the last few months, Mark Zuckerberg has used his role as CEO of Meta to announce a cultural reset of sorts at his company and the platforms it owns, starting with an enthusiastic note of congratulations to the president Donald Trump after he won the 2024 election. Earlier this month, he sat by himself in the videos sharing a wave of new policies that included an end to DEI programs, changes to rules that protect LGBTQ+ usersand an end to the fact-checking program designed to prevent misinformation. The seemingly abrupt U-turn in the CEO’s beliefs and appearance left viewers wondering what on earth Zuckerberg’s wife of 12 years, Priscilla Chan, thought about the turn of events. Although Chan has no formal ties to the social media platform, even her Instagram comments weren’t safe from the backlash. “No one would blame you if you got divorced,” one commenter said on a photo of the couple’s Halloween costumes. (Zuck was John Wick, Chan was a ballerina.) “Please help Mark come to his senses,” read another.

Chan’s name reportedly did not appear on the invitation to the pre-inauguration reception Zuckerberg co-hosted with the Republican mega-donor Miriam Adelson (which contributed to Trump’s legal defense fund for aides during the Mueller investigation). But on Monday, the pediatrician-turned-philanthropist stood by her husband’s side during the ceremonies, wearing a fuzzy sky blue cardigan by Bottega Veneta and two demure strings of pearls. The couple sat next to it Jeff Bezos his fiancée Lauren Sanchez, and Elon Musk in a position of honor, ranks ahead of members of the new Trump administration and other senior Republicans, all of whom represent the neo-MAGA aristocracy. (Chan’s representatives at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative did not respond Vanity Fair‘s request for comment.)

Chan seemed to be enjoying themselves during the inauguration and she was discovered in conversation with the newly sworn-in foreign minister Marco Rubio. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the mother of three—a former elementary school science teacher who quoted Dr. Seuss in her high school speech– would have a great time hanging out with the UFC CEO Dana White and Kid Rock. Zuckerberg claims his marriage has only gotten better since he went through his now infamous two-year evolution that began with a foray into jiujitsu and culminated in his longer curly locks.

In a three-hour interview with anti-vigilante interlocutor Joe Rogan earlier this month Zuckerberg raged against Joe Biden‘s administration for its concern with COVID-19 misinformation — and discussed his wife. When Zuckerberg tore his ACL while training back in November 2023, he worried that Chan might be upset with him. Instead, she just wanted him back in the octagon. “She said, ‘No. You’re healing your ACL. When you heal, you better go back to fighting,'” Zuckerberg said. “She says, ‘You’re so much better to be around now that you’re doing this. You have to fight.'”

Chan and Zuckerberg first met as Harvard students in 2003, when she was a freshman studying biology and he was a sophomore studying computer science. As Facebook evolved from a dorm room project into a real company, he dropped out, but she stayed, graduated in 2007 and went on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. They married in 2012, shortly after Facebook’s high-watt IPO and just before Chan started his pediatric residency. She graduated in 2015, around the time the couple announced Chan was pregnant with their first child.

For more than a decade, Chan has seemed in lockstep with her husband in his public priorities. In December 2015, coinciding with their daughter Maximums birth, the couple launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The organization aimed to “solve society’s toughest challenges” and its first investments were in biomedical science and education. Chan and Zuckerberg are co-CEOs of the initiative, which has more than 500 employees, but Chan runs day-to-day operations. Initially, the couple was largely liberal in their philanthropic choices, making generous donations to low-income school districts. But before 2017education experts were already debating whether Zuckerberg’s earliest philanthropic investment was a wash or an abject failure. Although Zuckerberg gave Newark schools nearly $100 million, test results showed mixed improvements.

Zuckerberg and Chan’s original ideals faced their first major challenge during 2020. First, they clashed with some of their employees in the initial aftermath of the George Floyd protests in June 2020. Vox reported that a worker at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative publicly asked Zuckerberg to do one of three things: moderate Trump’s inflammatory posts, resign from his role at Facebook, or resign from the organization. (In response, Zuckerberg said, “I mean, no. None of those things would make sense.”) That same year, Chan and Zuckerberg donated more than $400 million to nonpartisan election nonprofits to ensure voting access during the pandemic. In the heady days of 2020 election denial, this became a scandal on the right-wing internet, earning the nickname “Zuckerbucks”, inspiring some aggressive Trump posts on Truth Social and earning a full hearing by the Committee for House Administration.

For Zuckerberg, the wounds began to heal. “Mr. Zuckerberg complained to several people about the backlash to Meta that came from the more politically sensitive aspects of his philanthropic efforts,” reported New York Times in September 2024. “And he regretted that he hired associates in his philanthropy who tried to push him further to the left for some reason.” They added that the CEO identifies politically with “classical liberalism,” which may be a fireproof sign that he has dealt with the so-called Intellectual Dark Web.

As for Chan, her political leanings have primarily been described in the media as instrumental to her husband’s. The first sign that things were changing for both members of the couple came in 2021, when they apparently made a move to repair their reputations. Zuckerberg and Chan hired longtime GOP strategist Brian Baker to serve as their adviser — and help them make inroads with his fellow Republicans, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In 2015, Zuckerberg mentioned that he and Chan had experienced miscarriages before their eldest daughter was born, and the next year Chan said Today‘s Savannah Guthrie why they decided to speak publicly about them. “Sharing our experience with pregnancy was incredibly important because we realized how challenging and difficult it was,” she said in September 2016. “Knowing that you’re not alone was incredibly important to us and we wanted others should know that they were not alone either.”

No later than June 2022, when the Supreme Court Dobbs decision allowed states to ban abortion, Chan wanted to keep CZI out of the reproductive health care conversation. Shortly after the decision, Chan reportedly sent a memo to her staff saying she would not use the institute’s funding to address access to abortion. “We need to stay focused and clear about what we are here to do,” the paper said Times. “We have no plans to expand our grants to new areas.”

Now, the couple is very publicly aligned with an administration that is working hard to strip rights over bodily autonomy and, in some cases, restrict medical treatments used to treat both miscarriages and abortions. Such limitations have already put women’s lives at risk. Tuesday morningthe new Trump administration took reproductiverights.gov, the government website dedicated to reproductive care, offline.

Although we may never know how Chan felt about her husband’s performance The Joe Rogan Experience, we already know that she is used to waiting for her husband to come. “As life partners, our relative optimism comes through because Mark is just overly optimistic about his time management and will get consumed by interesting ideas and he’s late,” she said in an episode of Scientist Andrew Huberman‘s podcast in 2023. “And because he’s late, I have to channel Mark as an optimist every time I wait for him.”