Nobody wants to be left out of the party that is about to take place in Washington. The CEOs of big technology, who once treated Donald Trump as a pariah, are courting him to enter the new groups that will form in the capital. The owner of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, is the one who has monopolized the spotlight with his change in fact-checkers. He has also donated a million dollars for the magnate’s Inauguration. But he is not the only one.
On January 20, Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States in a ceremony where many big tech and other companies have put money in. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, announced late last year that he had donated $1 million to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, which is in charge of the event. Google also announced this Friday that it donated $1 million to the committee on Monday. In addition, he explained to the CNBC network that they will contribute to the event with “a streaming on YouTube and a direct link on our home page.”
Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, has also donated $1 million. Perpleixty, another company working with AI, has donated another million. The MoonPay company, which is dedicated to the purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies, has also put money in—the amount is not known. Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos, has donated one million dollars and will add another million in the form of streaming to broadcast the event. Microsoft has also contributed another million. Intuit, a business software company, has donated the same amount
Outside of technology companies, donors also include companies such as Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Pfizer and PrRMA. They have all donated a million each. Goldman Sachs and the telecommunications corporation AT&T have also contributed to the cause, although it is not known how much.
There are at least 11 companies and groups that after the assault on the Capitol publicly reconsidered their support for Trump. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, they have donated money for the inauguration. These include Generals Motors and AT&T. In addition, the media highlights how in the case of Goldman Sachs, Intuit, Toyota and PhRMa it is the first time they have made a donation to a presidential inauguration committee.
The complete list of donors that the committee must submit to the Federal Election Commission is not yet available and will likely miss the 90-day deadline after the ceremony to reveal all the names. The companies and personalities that are known so far have been filtered through the North American media.
Each of these donations is motivated by diverse interests. While companies developing AI hope that Trump does not try to impose too many regulations on its development, companies linked to cryptocurrencies hope to find legislation that favors them and does not involve too much financial regulation. Pharmaceutical companies do not want to lose a certain amount of pressure due to the prospect of a Department of Health that is going to be led by an anti-vaccine person—unless the Senate does not ratify the position at the last minute. Large corporations generally expect Trump to extend the tax breaks he approved in 2017 during his previous term. Something he promised to do during the campaign.
The conversion of Silicon Valley
Now, not everyone seeks favors. There are also those who seek redemption. Zuckerberg is the one who has now broken his neck, but before the elections Jeff Bezos already did it. The week before the elections, Bezos decided to break with the tradition of Washington Post (newspaper he has owned since 2013) to support a presidential candidate.
The owner of Amazon has long been working to improve the relationship with the Republican, who in 2019 publicly attacked him online. Likewise, Bezos wanted to get closer to the magnate so as not to revive the pressure that Trump exerted against Amazon during his first term. The company denounced that in 2019 the Republican abused his power to pressure the Pentagon not to win a military contract that represented significant income for his company.
Apple and Google also want to avoid Trump’s wrath falling on them. The president-elect and the Republican Party have repeatedly accused both companies, as well as Meta and Microsoft, of censoring conservative opinions. In November, Trump nominated Brendan Carr to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency responsible for regulating radio, television and network telecommunications.
Carr wrote a chapter in Project 2025 on the functions of the FCC where he argued that the agency should regulate the largest technology companies such as Apple, Meta, Google and Microsoft. According to Carr, these companies pose a threat to “individual freedom” in the United States through the supposed expulsion of certain political points of view from their platforms. The only platform that it does not consider a threat to freedom of expression is X, which is in the hands of Musk.
The drivers of the right turn
In this migration of billionaires under Trump’s wing, Musk was a visionary. He also had a bad relationship with the Republican and in 2020 he voted for Democrat Joe Biden. Musk’s turn to the right has an ideological aspect, but also an economic one: two of his companies, SpaceX and Tesla, have received millions of dollars in federal contracts and subsidies. Now he has obtained a privileged position at the head of DOGE, the department that will be in charge of saying how public money should be spent and where it should be cut.
Although the great driver for making Silicon Valley change sides and go from being a hub progressive to a bastion of right-wing advance was PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Thiel, who was key to future Vice President JD Vance earning a place on the Mar-a-Lago court, split with Zuckerberg in 2022 and left Meta. It was then that he changed the California sun for that of Florida.
Thiel broke with Zuckerberg in part over his approach to Trump. He was the black sheep of the progressive Silicon Valley who in 2016 publicly supported the Republican when he was a pariah. Since then he has done nothing but work to drag personalities from the technological world into the Trumpist orbit. in his book The Contrarian, Bloomberg columnist Max Chafkin explains how Thiel opted for Trump from the beginning with the aim of achieving an administration with low-tax policies for large fortunes.
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