Particularly when he's clearly motivated to find a viable alternative to Liz Warren, meaning someone who will be comfortable letting the tech oligarchy have its way. Fundraising does suggest that the rich are giving up on Biden and hoping to push Mayor Pete forward. (meanwhile sidelining Booker and Harris, who are pretty well connected on Wall Street).

>Well, I suspect that the help is not disinterested. Nor do I think it's done in a 'personal' capacity.

I won't quibble with the "not disinterested" bit, but what he's doing is introducing people that he knows to the Buttigieg campaign, so in that sense, it's quite personal:

>Zuckerberg and Chan recommended numerous potential campaign hires, and two of them are now on staff: Eric Mayefsky, senior digital analytics adviser, and Nina Wornhoff, organizing data manager.

>Mayefsky previously worked as the director of data science at Quora, a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup founded by former Facebook employees. Mayefsky worked at Facebook for almost four years starting in 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile. Wornhoff previously worked as a machine learning engineer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and in Democratic politics in Indiana, Buttigieg’s home state.

Well, of course it's personal - in the sense that it's done at a personal level, directly between individuals. My point though is that when you have Zuck's level of power and influence nothing you do can be legitimately considered separate from your business interests. Everything billionaires do w.r.t. politics should be considered in the context of their (institutional) business interests. It can't be taken in isolation. Billionaires don't just have casual private chats with old buddies. Or if they do then those buddies should not be presidential contenders...

Indeed, how can anyone? Maybe one could build some models to counter for internal biases, but at this point that's probably the very best one could hope for.