Amazon’s executive chair Jeff Bezos is reportedly set to donate $1m to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund – following in the footsteps of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who did the same earlier this week.
Bezos’s gesture was first reported by The Wall Street Journal and dwarfs the $57,746 the company donated to Trump’s first inauguration in 2017.
Amazon will also make a second in-kind donation worth $1m by streaming the inauguration on its Prime Video platform, a source told the paper.
Trump told CNBC on Thursday that Bezos is also traveling to Mar-a-Lago to meet with him next week.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is also expected to hold a meeting with Trump in Florida while Zuckerberg paid him a visit last month.
During Zuckerberg’s visit, he reportedly gave Trump a personal demonstration of Meta’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses, gifted him a pair and also met with the president-elect’s pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, plus advisers Stephen Miller, Vince Haley and James Blair.
Bezos, the world’s second-wealthiest man behind Trump ally Elon Musk, was once an enemy of the Republican, who repeatedly derided his ownership of The Washington Post newspaper, but appears to have warmed to him in recent months.
Bezos praised Trump’s November 5 election victory over Democrat Kamala Harris as “an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory”.
“What I’ve seen so far is that he is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled,” he recently told a New York Times DealBook conference, expressing his “optimism” about the incoming second Trump administration.
“I think it’s very interesting, I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and my point of view – if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him. Because we do have too much regulation in this country.”
The moves by Bezos, Zuckerberg and Pichai are just the latest examples of Big Tech CEOs moving to make conciliatory gestures towards Trump now that his return to the White House has been confirmed and his party has secured control over both chambers of Congress.
Zuckerberg’s conversion to his cause is perhaps the most startling given that Trump threatened the Facebook founder with jail earlier this year if he attempted to influence the 2024 election.
The Meta boss was critical of the 45th president’s approach to tackling illegal immigration during his first term, writing in a Facebook post in 2017: “Like many of you, I’m concerned about the impact of the recent executive orders signed by President Trump.”
Despite that, relations remained cordial until Zuckerberg found himself forced to ban Trump from his platform in the wake of the Capitol riot on January 6 2021.
Trump then declared in his recent coffee table book Save America, published this summer, that “Zuckerbucks” should “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he could be proven to have interfered in the vote.
But then the tech executive unexpectedly praised the former president over his response to the near-fatal assassination attempt he suffered in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, calling Trump rising from the platform, bleeding from the right ear and making a fist pump “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life”.
The president-elect duly told a Barstool Sports podcast that he likes Zuckerberg “much better now”.
Zuckerberg previously donated to candidates on both sides of the political divide but rarely made a public endorsement. He did not donate to either Trump’s 2017 inaugural fund or Joe Biden’s in 2021.
