Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is reportedly planning to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration—mirroring a similarly large donation from Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman.
The billionaires’ respective decisions to open their pocketbooks to the incoming president come as other tech leads and media moguls have similarly begun to soften their approach toward Trump—despite his promise to exact vengeance on news outlets that anger him. On Thursday, Rolling Stone reported that Trump’s lieutenants are planning more personal lawsuits and legal threats against news outlets during his second White House stint.
News of Bezos’ planned seven-figure donation was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. But this isn’t the first time Amazon has donated to Trump; it donated a much smaller amount—$57,746—to his inauguration in 2017.
In addition to the donation, Bezos is also reportedly planning to make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago next week. With this action, Bezos joins the likes of Google CEO Sundar Pichai and “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the couple and cohosts of MSNBC’s flagship political morning program.
Notably, Trump has had a mostly tumultuous relationship with a lot of these people and their respective businesses. With Google, Trump claimed in 2018 that the search engine was “rigged” to hide positive news about him.
Trump also repeatedly clashed with Bezos during his first administration—including taunting The Washington Post owner over his divorce and the media outlet he heads. In 2017, the president-elect tore into The Washington Post and accused the newspaper of making up news in addition to being a “lobbyist weapon” for Amazon. Trump even went as far as to say that The Washington Post “fabricated” facts about a report detailing his decision to cut off U.S. aid to anti-government rebels in Syria.
And with Meta, Trump was famously suspended from its platforms after he incited the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More recently, this summer, Trump said that Zuckerberg could “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he crosses Trump again.
“He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me,” read an excerpt from “Save America,” a Trump-authored coffee-table book. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison—as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
The most recent moves from these media and tech billionaires suggest that they want to have a smoother relationship with Trump as he prepares for his second term. Altman, a cofounder of the artificial intelligence company, told “Fox News Sunday” earlier this month that he’s looking forward to collaborating with Trump’s administration.
But the donation pledge from Bezos is particularly eyebrow-raising given that he oversees a newspaper that will be covering Trump’s presidency, in what should be unbiased reporting. In November, Bezos was one of the first billionaires to congratulate Trump on his win.
A month prior, The Washington Post exposed Bezos for killing the paper’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. In the end, The Washington Post decided not to endorse either candidate—a move which cost them at least 200,000 subscribers.
Notably, Bezos isn’t the only media mogul who is seemingly warming to Trump. According to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong killed an op-ed column that was critical of Trump’s recent Cabinet picks. Soon-Shiong reportedly told his paper’s editorial board that it could only publish the piece if it ran another editorial with an opposing view.
Beyond the spiked editorial, CNN also reported that pressure from Soon-Shiong is causing some of the paper’s editors to make certain opinion section headlines “more bland.”
The fact that certain legacy media brands are showing sympathy toward Trump hasn’t gone unnoticed by the president-elect, who once labeled the mainstream press “fake news.”
“The media’s tamed down a little bit. They’re liking us much better now, I think,” Trump said on Thursday after ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. “If they don’t, we’ll have to just take them on again, and we don’t want to do that.”
Campaign Action
