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Diana Yukari / Business Insider
Mark Zuckerberg is on a whirlwind tour of the US.
2017-07-09
In recent months, Facebook's CEO has dined with a family at their home in Ohio and met with former opioid addicts. He's been photographed working on an assembly line at a Ford factory, meeting with members of the military, and even feeding a calf.
Zuckerberg's stops are part of his personal goal to visit every US state in 2017.
And even though many of his outings may look like someone raising their profile for a political run, Zuckerberg insists that's not the case.
"Some of you have asked if this challenge means I'm running for public office," Zuckerberg recently wrote in a Facebook post. "I'm not."
We've collected the highlights from Zuckerberg's whirlwind US tour so far:
Zuckerberg kicked off his US tour in January in Dallas, Texas. He was there to testify in a lawsuit against his VR company Oculus, but he found time to help plant a garden with high schoolers downtown.
While in Dallas, he also met local police officers. "These officers do such important work, and it meant a lot to me to be able to thank them in person," he wrote on his Facebook page.
He also held a roundtable discussion with pastors from Waco, Texas. A few weeks earlier, Zuckerberg had told a Facebook user that he is not an atheist, despite having previously described himself as a nonbeliever.
Zuckerberg continued his tour of the South in Alabama, visiting Mobile and Bayou La Batre. While there, he met with Dominick Ficarino, a shrimp fisherman who starred in a show on the History channel called "Big Shrimpin'."
While in Selma, Alabama, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan paid a visit to the Selma Times-Journal newspaper. "It seems like a good time to say thank you to all the journalists around the world who work tirelessly and sometimes put their lives in danger to surface the truth," he wrote on Facebook.
The couple met with Anthony Ray Hinton, who was wrongfully imprisoned for 30 years on death row. "When I heard this, I apologized to him," Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. "Not because I could have helped in his case, but because it is all of our responsibility to make our society one of justice for all."
So as not to take sides, Zuckerberg visited both Duke and its arch-rival, the University of North Carolina, during the NCAA tournament. "We all need to be part of something bigger than ourselves -- whether that's a team or a community that roots for a team," he wrote.
While in Charleston, South Carolina, he attended a service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The church was the site of the massacre perpetrated by white supremacist Dylann Roof in 2015.
He talked about immigration with Muslim students from the University of Michigan-Dearborn. (Zuckerberg was one of the first tech CEOs to denounce President Trump's initial executive order on barring Muslims from entering the US.)
He and Chan visited a middle school in Providence, Rhode Island, that practices so-called personalized learning. The couple has backed the teaching method through sizable donations to schools around the country.
The couple also met military officers at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island. "I'm always impressed by our military every time I interact with them," Zuckerberg wrote after the visit. "There is so much to learn from them as a high performing organization operating under difficult conditions."
Alex was a senior reporter for Business Insider in New York City, where he mainly covered tech companies in the social media space, like Facebook, Snap, and Twitter. Before that, he covered apps and streaming services for Business Insider's consumer tech vertical, Tech Insider.
