Patrick Collison joins Meta board

Nenagh-schooled billionaire Patrick Collison is to join the board of Facebook parent company Meta, along with a former advisor to Donald Trump.

RTÉ News reported that Mr Collison would be taking up his new position this week. He said he was looking forward to helping Meta - which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp - to “navigate the abundant opportunities of the coming years”.

Mr Collison is the CEO of online payments platform Stripe, which he and his younger brother John founded in 2010. The brothers are sons of Denis and Lily Collison, who ran the old Sail Inn hotel in Dromineer. Patrick and John went to school at Gaelscoil Aonach before moving to Limerick. Patrick won the Young Scientist competition in 2005 at the age of 16. The siblings became millionaires three years later when their first company, Auctomatic, was acquired for more than €3 million. In 2016, the Collison brothers were declared the world's youngest self-made billionaires when Stripe had €1.8 billion on its balance sheets.

Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg was quoted as saying,“Patrick is deeply committed to expanding economic opportunity” at Meta.

Also joining the Meta board this week is former Republican Party official Dina Powell McCormick, who served as Deputy National Security Adviser to President Trump. Other Meta board members include Dana White, President and CEO, Ultimate Fighting Championship; Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO, DoorDash; and Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox.