Some of the biggest companies and business leaders in the world are looking to start their standing with President-elect Donald Trump on the right foot as he prepares to take office in January with a series of meetings and donations.
Amazon will be donating $1 million to the 78-year-old president-elect’s inauguration and making another in-kind contribution by streaming the inauguration on Amazon Prime.
The e-commerce giant’s founder Jeff Bezos will also be meeting with Trump next week in person, the president-elect revealed on Thursday.
Bezos is one of several billionaire tech company and business leaders that are shelling out big donations to the Trump inauguration ahead of the Republican taking over the White House on January 20.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, also made a $1 million donation to the Trump inauguration, the company confirmed after it was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
It comes as multiple tech giants including Amazon, Meta, Google and Apple have all been the target of Trump and GOP wrath in recent years.
Amazon founding Jeff Bezos is set to meet with President-elect Donald Trump next week as the e-commerce giant donates $1 million for Trump’s inauguration
During his first term, Trump lashed out at Amazon on multiple occasions including targeting Bezos and complained about the coverage by the Washington Post, which is owned by the billionaire personally.
The Amazon founder faced some public backlash in October after it was announced The Washington Post editorial board would not make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election after it endorsed Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton in the last two presidential elections.
Bezos defended the eleventh hour decision in an op-ed and claimed it was not part of ‘some intentional strategy’ but a ‘principled decision’ and ‘the right one’ in an effort to end the ‘perception of bias.’
But critics blasted the move as cowardly and questioned the timing of the decision which came just hours after Trump met with executives from Blue Origin, a space company also founded by Bezos. He denied there was any connection.
Last week, Bezos said he was ‘optimistic’ about Trump’s second term and backed plans to cut regulations while speaking at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York.
Amazon and Blue Origin have a series of contracts with the federal government worth billions.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaking in September 2024. Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and the pair had dinner together last month
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, had dinner with Trump last month at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
The Facebook founder did not endorse either Trump or Harris in the 2024 presidential election, but he praised the president-elect after the assassination attempt in July, calling his raised fist after the shooting ‘badass.’
Zuckerberg has long been a target of Trump’s ire online. He has called him ‘Zuckerschmuck’ and written ‘Zuckerbucks’ in posts, and the president-elect even threatened to imprison the Meta CEO for life in his book.
In 2021, Trump was kicked off of Facebook and other social media accounts after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
That summer, Trump sued Facebook, Google’s YouTube and Twitter claiming he was the victim of censorship.
His Facebook and Instagram accounts were reinstated in 2023. Elon Musk restored his account on Twitter, now X, in November 2022.
After the dinner last month, a spokesperson for Meta said Zuckerberg was ‘grateful’ to join the president-elect for dinner and meet with members of his team.
Meta did not make donations to the Biden inauguration or Trumps first inauguration in 2017.
Amazon contributed a much smaller roughly quarter of a million to Biden’s inauguration in 2021, but it also streamed the event on Prime Video as well that year.
