Google is the latest California-based tech giant to make a major donation to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, which will take place on Jan. 20, or Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
On Thursday, CNBC, which cited a statement from a Google spokesperson, said that Google donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund earlier this week.
“Google is pleased to support the 2025 inauguration, with a livestream on YouTube and a direct link on our homepage,” said Karan Bhatia, Google’s global head of government affairs and public policy. “We’re also donating to the inaugural committee.”
Bhatia added that Google has donated to previous president’s inaugurations and also provided livestreams the day of.
With its $1 million donation, Google joins other tech titans in cozying up to Trump. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon; Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads; Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI; and Uber have already made similar donations. In addition to its $1 million cash to Trump’s inaugural fund, Amazon will also make a $1 million in-kind donation by streaming the event on Amazon Video.
Although it’s not unheard of for major corporations to donate to inaugural committees, Trump has already set a record in donations. President Joe Biden’s 2020 inaugural committee raised nearly $62 million, compared with the $107 million Trump’s committee raised in 2016. Already, the Trump-Vance inaugural committee has raised an eye-popping $170 million.
It’s not clear that any of these tech giants will be rewarded for their efforts, though. According to The New York Times, some of the biggest seven-figure donors won’t even receive perks such as VIP tickets because of their high demand. This seems to suggest that the companies simply see donations as a way to suck up to the president-elect, especially since many of them—specifically Bezos and Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta—had a stormy professional relationship with Trump during his first four years in the White House and Trump is reportedly keeping tabs on who cuts checks for him.
Some other Silicon Valley giants that have donated, including Perplexity AI, an artificial intelligence company, have taken notice of this apparent trend.
“Unlike other tech companies who have recently donated to President Trump’s inaugural fund, Perplexity didn’t exist during his previous term, so this is an opportunity for us to collaborate on shared goals rather than mending a frayed relationship,” Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko said in a statement in December.
Notably, this isn’t the only way billionaire CEOs are kowtowing to Trump. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg announced plans to disband its fact-checking team—a move widely interpreted as a way to curry favor with the former and incoming president. In the past, Trump has accused social media companies, including Facebook, of censorship and of having a bias against conservatives.
Unlike some of the others donating to Trump, though, Google and the president-elect appear to have a fairly decent relationship—at least for the moment. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was also among the billionaires who congratulated Trump on his win in November.
Still, that doesn’t mean Google and other tech giants are free from Trump’s ire once he’s back in the White House. Large tech companies have faced heightened scrutiny from both sides of the political aisle. After all, during his first term, the Trump administration sued Google over allegations that it violated antitrust law. He’s since signaled, however, that he might not break up the company during his second term.
Knowing Trump, though, it’s entirely possible he’ll change his stance. In a Dec. 4 post to his social media website, Truth Social, Trump accused “Big Tech” of running amok.
He wrote: “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!”
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