Facebook parent Meta is replacing President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, the company’s current policy vice president and a former Republican party staffer.

The shake up comes three weeks before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, and it’s the latest sign of how tech companies are positioning themselves for a new administration in Washington.

Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister, said he is stepping down, citing the new year as the right time to move on. He’ll be replaced by Kaplan, who will take on the title of Chief Global Affairs Officer.

Kaplan was a staffer under former President George W. Bush, and he appeared at the NYSE with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Trump in December. He also attended Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in 2018 as a personal friend, causing a controversy for the social media company.

“I will look forward to spending a few months handing over the reins — and to representing the company at a number of international gatherings in Q1 of this year,” Clegg wrote in a memo to his staff that he shared on Facebook on Thursday.

Clegg joined the company in 2018 after a career in British politics with the Liberal Democrats party, and he helped Meta navigate incredible scrutiny, especially over the company’s influence on elections and its efforts to control harmful content. Clegg also helped steer the company through the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook shared user data with third-party political consultants. He also represented the company in Washington and London, frequently at panels for artificial intelligence and at congressional hearings.

“My time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between ‘big tech’ and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector,” Clegg wrote.

In his note, Clegg said that former Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin would replace Kaplan as Meta’s vice president of global policy. He mentioned that Kaplan would work closely with David Ginsburg, the company’s vice president of global communications and public affairs.

“Nick: I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for Meta and the world these past seven years,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. You “built a strong team to carry this work forward. I’m excited for Joel to step into this role next given his deep experience and insight leading our policy work for many years.”

Semafor first reported the news.

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CNBC is now accepting applications for the 2025 Disruptor 50 list — our thirteenth annual look at the most innovative venture-backed companies using breakthrough technology to meet increasing economic and consumer challenges.

The deadline for submissions is Friday, Feb. 10 at 11:59 pm EST.

All independent, privately-owned companies founded after Jan. 1, 2010, are eligible, and any company founder or executive, investor in the company, or any of their communications representatives can access and submit an application.

Nominees will be put through a comprehensive and rigorous process of researching and scoring across a wide range of quantitative and qualitative criteria, including scalability, revenue and user growth, and the use of breakthrough technology.

Naturally, this means AI. Last year, roughly two-thirds of the 50 companies making the Disruptor 50 list describe artificial intelligence as “critical” to their businesses, including OpenAI, which has topped the list for the past 2 years.

But this also means that one third of last year’s Disruptors were NOT AI companies, and the 2025 list will also honor market-changing innovations in food, energy, financial services and other industries where some disruptions have been less dependent on the generative AI boom.

CNBC’s two advisory boards – one made up of leading academic thinkers in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship, the other a group of top-tier venture capitalists – will provide weighting for the quantitative criteria underpinning the list’s proprietary methodology that has made the Disruptor 50 recognition a gold standard in the startup community. The quantitative score is combined with a qualitative assessment and editorial review, performed by CNBC staff, who read every submission on the way to finalizing  the selection of this year’s fifty.

2025 honorees will be notified in April, and the list will be released in June across CNBC’s TV, digital and social platforms

Cryptocurrencies rose to start the year, rebounding from recent losses as investor optimism returned to the market.

The price of bitcoin rose 2% to $96,711.71 Thursday, bringing its new year gain to about 3% when counting trading from the Jan. 1 session.

The CoinDesk 20 index, a measure of the broader cryptocurrency market, advanced 4%. The token tied to Solana, the popular Ethereum competitor, led the gains with a 7% increase. Crypto stocks Coinbase and MicroStrategy each climbed 4% as well.

This year is expected to be a banner year for the crypto industry thanks to a more favorable regulatory environment promised by President-elect Donald Trump. Investors are hoping Congress will pass its first ever crypto focused legislation – which could be centered around stablecoins or market structure.

Traders are also keen to see the crypto public equity markets open up with more initial public offerings and progress on a potential national strategic bitcoin reserve.

Crypto assets slid into the end of 2024. Although the post-election rally that sent bitcoin to new records above $100,000 had fizzled, the flagship cryptocurrency still ended the year up more than 120%. Long-term holders took some profits while others sold amid renewed uncertainty about the direction of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts in 2025.