It should come as no surprise at this point, but NBC News is reporting that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos will all be attending President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20th.
What do all of these tech leaders have in common? They have all publicly come out with varying degrees of support for Trump’s incoming administration, and all three have donated money to his campaign or the inauguration. It represents a major pivot from Trump’s first time in office when the tech industry kept its distance from him and eventually booted him from their services altogether following the January 6 Capitol riots.
Zuckerberg in particular has gone from having a quite acrimonious relationship with Trump, who threatened him with prison over his stance on moderating conservative content, but now feels better about him as Zuckerberg has promised to loosen content restrictions on Meta’s platforms, gotten rid of the company’s DEI programs, and put in place an outspoken Republican to lead its policy arm. Bezos, as the owner of the Washington Post, regularly received barbs from Trump his first go around and saw the possibility of USPS prices charged to Amazon being raised in retaliation for his newspaper’s coverage.
Meta and Amazon have both donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, and Elon Musk of course aggressively spent money campaigning for Trump’s re-election. He will be helping to cut government spending through DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, and has been looking to hire more figures from tech to staff the initiative.
According to NBC, the three tech leaders will be seated “on the platform near cabinet officials and elected leaders.”
What is perhaps most notable about Silicon Valley’s pivot towards Trump is just how out in the open it all is. Whereas in the past an investigative journalist might have needed to do some digging to discover pay-for-play schemes, none of the tech leaders here are hiding what they are doing. They are pulling out all the stops to get on Trump’s good side, prevent any attacks he might bring, and perhaps get preferential treatment for lucrative defense contracts. This despite the fact that tech employees tend to be much more liberal than their employers. But these leaders must figure the pros of supporting Trump outweigh the cons. Especially now that the tech industry has gone through massive layoffs in recent years, rank-and-file engineers do not have the power they once had.