Clegg banks £10m bonus following Meta promotion
Sir Nick Clegg bags a £10m bonus after taking Meta top spot as the president of global affairs alongside Mark Zuckerberg.
According to Bloomberg, the former deputy prime minister raked in a stock package worth $12.3m (£9.4m), which comes on top of his annual salary at Facebook’s parent company.
Clegg’s salary is reportedly £2.7m, and this new bumper package has doubled the total value of shares he has received since joining the company in 2019.
Crucially, Clegg has been the mouthpiece for the company’s policy during Ukraine crisis. He has led the block of Russian state broadcasters RT and Sputnik in Europe and the UK, and also changed Facebook’s rules to allow Ukrainians to call for violence against Russian soldiers.
Clegg tweeted last week about the rationale for the easing of Meta’s hate speech policy.
“I want to be crystal clear: Our policies are focused on protecting people’s rights to speech as an expression of self-defense in reaction to a military invasion of their country,” he wrote.
“The fact is, if we applied our standard content policies without any adjustments we would now be removing content from ordinary Ukrainians expressing their resistance and fury at the invading military forces, which would rightly be viewed as unacceptable.
“To be clear, we are only going to apply this policy in Ukraine itself. We have no quarrel with the Russian people. There is no change at all in our policies on hate speech as far as the Russian people are concerned. We will not tolerate Russophobia or any kind of discrimination, harassment or violence towards Russians on our platform”, Clegg added.