Born in Cairo, raised in Texas: Meet Dina Powell McCormick, the executive Mark Zuckerberg asked to trade her Meta board seat for a job
Mark Zuckerberg took a walk around Koolau Ranch, his compound in Kauai, with one of his newest board members last December and made her an unusual offer. Give up the seat, he said, and come work inside the company instead. He told Dina Powell McCormick, who had joined the Meta board only eight months earlier, that the $1.7 trillion company was betting its future on artificial intelligence, that it would have to raise a tremendous amount of outside capital to do it, and that he needed an adviser who could smooth the way with financial institutions and governments alike.It would be the most important job she would ever have, he told her. She resigned from the board about a week later. In January she came back as president, vice chairman and co-leader of Meta Compute, the division building and monetising the infrastructure behind the AI push. Nine months in, a Bloomberg report drawing on interviews with more than a dozen Meta insiders, outside executives and government officials describes her as the person Zuckerberg and his top deputies hand the company’s thorniest problems.That remit has stretched well past compute deals. She has weighed in on Meta’s biggest legal and reputational fights, including a settlement of up to $18 billion with state attorneys general over children’s safety on Instagram and Facebook, and on the backlash to AI itself. She has appeared for Meta at Davos, travelled to China with President Donald Trump and an entourage of Silicon Valley’s best-known names, and met King Charles III. Zuckerberg says it became clear “she could play a bigger role in Meta’s next chapter”.
A state senate internship in Texas led her to Goldman Sachs and then the White House
She was born Dina Habib in Cairo, Egypt and moved to Texas at the age of four, after her parents decided the United States offered their daughter better odds. She studied at the University of Texas at Austin, started with an internship in the state senate, and worked her way through Republican politics to become assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs under Condoleezza Rice.In 2007 she joined Goldman Sachs, stayed 16 years, made partner and built programmes such as 10,000 Small Businesses and 10,000 Women. She returned to Washington in 2017 as deputy national security adviser for strategy, focused on West Asia, and was the only woman at the table when Trump met Saudi Arabia’s King Salman. She left government in 2018, went back to Goldman, then to merchant bank BDT & MSD Partners. Her husband, David McCormick, is a Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Between them they have six daughters.
Meta’s AI spending is rising fast and someone has to sell it
The timing explains the hire. Meta has raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from $115 billion to $135 billion, and the stock fell 9% after that disclosure. The company also plans to cut 10% of its workforce, roughly 8,000 jobs, while fighting the FTC’s appeal in the Instagram and WhatsApp antitrust case and a youth-addiction verdict over social media design.Her pitch leans away from data centres and towards users. Meta’s AI tools, she says, are meant to “empower people like small-business owners, welders, the fiber technicians, creators”. She has also pushed the point that women are adopting AI more slowly than men, and that Meta should fix it.Zuckerberg, 42, stays in Menlo Park with the researchers. Powell McCormick, 53, handles everyone else.
