Not so long ago, Mark Zuckerberg desperately wanted the public to view him not just as an empire builder but also as a world-saver.

The Meta Platforms Inc. CEO publicly committed parts of his vast fortune to causes like immigration reform and voter access. He spoke out about combating poverty and hunger and stressed the importance of equality.

But in a flurry of announcements last week, Zuckerberg confirmed that he’s had a change of heart. Now, he’s whittled his ambitions simply to tech overlord. In getting rid of fact checkers and loosening the rules on what users can say on Meta’s platforms, Zuckerberg unleashed a new era of heightened misinformation and abusive speech. At the same time, he ended the tech giant’s commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Zuckerberg and Meta are an extreme case, as those in the tech sector often are. But across corporate America, the trend is pointing in the same direction: CEOs are spending much less time, energy and money trying to publicly position themselves as change agents.

In Silicon Valley, the make-the-world-a-better-place discourse of the early boom years has mostly disappeared. On Wall Street, big institutions from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to BlackRock Inc. have abandoned one of the world’s biggest finance groups dedicated to battling........

© Bloomberg