Tech giants who vilified Trump are now giving him millions

On Jan. 7, 2021, when Meta suspended Donald Trump’s Facebook account after the U.S. Capitol riot, company chief Mark Zuckerberg said the risks of allowing the then-president to keep using the service after inciting a “violent insurrection” were “simply too great.” Trump would go on to blame Zuckerberg for his 2020 election loss, threatening him with life in prison.

On Tuesday, exactly four years later, Zuckerberg sang a different tune. As part of an announcement shared first with Fox News, Zuckerberg said that Trump’s win in the November election marked “a cultural tipping point” on speech and that he was terminating Facebook’s “politically biased” fact-checkers, who he said had destroyed public trust. Asked at a news conference that day whether Zuckerberg’s move was a response to Trump’s threats against him, Trump said, “Yeah, probably.”

Meta’s about-face on Trump reflects a broader pattern in Silicon Valley, where tech executives for years had adopted a defensive stance toward the man who had once declared them enemies of the American way of life.

Fearing retribution and craving a role in Trump’s decision-making, the tech giants have seemingly shelved old disagreements and are proclaiming their excitement for working with the incoming administration. And Trump, who has promised some donors favorable policies, has made clear that he expects nothing less.

After giving sparsely to the presidential inaugurations of Trump in 2017 and Joe Biden in 2021, the country’s biggest tech firms—Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Uber—have showered the president-elect with gifts or pledges of $1 million each. So, too, have OpenAI chief Sam Altman and Apple chief Tim Cook, the latter of whom had said that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack was “a sad and shameful chapter in our nation’s history” and that “those responsible for this insurrection should be held to account.”

The attempts at warming ties have moved beyond money. Executives have spoken fawningly of Trump’s ideas and flown to his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, for dinner. During Zuckerberg’s visit, he brought Trump a pair of Meta’s artificial-intelligence camera glasses.

American businesses have a long history of making nice with the new party in power through ostensibly nonpartisan gifts to the inaugural celebrations, and several of the companies have said they welcome the opportunity to mend bridges with a future president.

But the flood of company cash to Trump has broken even the $107 million record set for Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Trump’s fund has reportedly surpassed $150 million, with over a week left before the Jan. 20 inauguration—more than double Biden’s $61.8 million haul. Trump transition officials directed requests for comment to the inaugural committee, which did not respond.

Though the money is earmarked for the revelry that accompanies Washington’s official transfer of power, Trump’s allies can use the funds for other political pursuits. The full slate of contributions is disclosed in federal filings only after the inauguration.

The companies’ charm offensive has drawn criticism, including from conservatives, who have blasted it as kowtowing for corporate self-interest. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, said on X that Meta’s change was “a ploy to avoid being regulated.” The conservative commentator Candace Owens said in her podcast, “Now he believes in free speech because of the election results?”

But Trump has appeared to relish the friendliness. In a news conference last month after meeting with tech executives, the president-elect said, “In the first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist, said the companies were adopting a stance of “preemptive compliance” in hopes of protecting themselves from the potential attacks and challenges of a new Trump term.

“Technology companies are performing their support for an incoming administration to decrease the likelihood they’ll be targeted or persecuted,” he said. “It’s demobilizing to people who might otherwise stand up to the administration in business … and for Trump, these tactics work in a costless way. He hasn’t had to do anything. The companies will just pretend all the threats and bluster are forgotten and everyone is getting along.”

Company executives have argued that their support for Trump is fueled by love of their country—and the potential that it could gain them a competitive advantage. Altman, who personally donated $1 million, said in a Bloomberg interview that the gift was a “relatively small thing” and that “we all should wish for the president’s success.”

In 2016, Altman said he was voting against the abusive, “erratic” Trump because he represented “an unacceptable threat to America.” But in the interview, Altman noted that a dream of his industry—software with superhuman reasoning abilities, known as artificial general intelligence—could “get developed during this president’s term, and getting that right seems really important.”

Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and senior partner at the corporate consulting firm Penta Group, said companies would rather spend money than be sidelined as “spectators” by an administration whose decisions could reshape tech policy for years to come.

“They’ve all been through a decade-long learning process about Trump and the changing Republican Party,” he said. “If you have that opportunity to be at the table, you have to take it.”

The titans of other industries also have pledged support to Trump’s inauguration, including companies that criticized him in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack.

Toyota, which said in July 2021 that it would stop donating to members of Congress who contested the 2020 election, said it would give $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. The Japanese automaker, which did not donate to the last two inaugurations, has warned about the risks to its business from Trump’s pledges of steep tariffs.

In 2022, the company said it had resumed donating to election deniers but would “not support those who, by their words and actions, create an atmosphere that incites violence.” A Toyota spokesman said in a statement to The Washington Post that “the inauguration of a new president is a time-honored tradition” and that, “like many other companies, Toyota Motor North America is pleased to support” it.

Silicon Valley’s donations are especially notable given Trump’s long-standing attacks on Big Tech. He has accused top tech companies of mass censorship and of secretly participating in his 2020 election loss, calling it “the crime of the century.”

After Trump’s loss, Zuckerberg was repeatedly slammed by Republican lawmakers and influencers, who claimed that he had silenced conservatives and conspired to rig the vote by donating to local election efforts during the pandemic. Facebook, Trump said last year, is “a true Enemy of the People.”

Since then, Zuckerberg has called Trump a “bada–” for his response to an assassination attempt in July and said in an August letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that the Biden administration was “wrong” in 2021 when it “repeatedly pressured” his company to take down some covid-related misinformation.

In the weeks since Zuckerberg congratulated Trump on his “decisive victory,” Meta has donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, named the Trump-allied Ultimate Fighting Championship chief Dana White to its board of directors, and tapped longtime Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan to lead its global affairs. On Meta’s Threads last month, Kaplan posted a selfie with Vice President-elect JD Vance during a Trump event at the New York Stock Exchange. Meta’s antitrust trial begins in April.

Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post, also has pledged to give $1 million through Amazon to Trump’s inaugural fund. Amazon gave about $58,000 to the first Trump inauguration and roughly $276,000 worth of “technology services” to the Biden inauguration, which its Prime Video service streamed online.

Bezos, who has clashed with Trump and criticized the then-candidate’s behavior as inappropriate in 2016, has since said that Trump is “calmer” and has “grown in the past eight years.”

He directed The Post’s editorial board to pull a planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris before the election, saying such endorsements undermined news organizations’ credibility, and chatted in December with Trump at a Mar-a-Lago dinner joined by the only man richer than Bezos, X owner Elon Musk.

Bezos’ business interests, including the cloud-computing giant Amazon Web Services and rocket firm Blue Origin, benefit from billions of dollars in federal contracts. But he has argued that his support of Trump is rooted in optimism that the incoming administration will successfully tackle its “regulatory agenda.”

“Why be cynical?” he said in an interview last month. “I think it’s going to be great.”

Some tech companies halted their political spending after the short-lived insurrection. On Jan. 6, 2021, Microsoft President Brad Smith retweeted a statement slamming the “unlawful efforts” to overturn the election and called it a “day to speak up for our Constitution and its values.” The tech giant paused its political action committee donations and in 2022 pledged to withhold funding that election cycle from any congressional Republican who had objected to the election results.

This week, Microsoft said it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, on par with what it had given to Barack Obama’s second inauguration but more than the $500,000 it had given Trump in 2017 and Biden in 2021. The Federal Trade Commission launched an antitrust investigation into Microsoft in November that could take shape during Trump’s term.

Beyond money, the companies are offering to help spotlight Trump’s resurgence to power. Google, which gave $285,000 in cash to the Biden and Trump inaugurations, upped its donation this year to $1 million, and Google’s YouTube – the second-most popular website in the world – will live-stream Trump’s swearing-in with a featured spot on its homepage.

Trump’s Justice Department sued Google over antitrust concerns in 2020, and Trump himself sued the company in 2021, claiming his suspensions on YouTube and other platforms amounted to “blacklisting, banishing and canceling.” Last year, on his Truth Social platform, Trump said that as president he would call to “criminally prosecute” the company “at the maximum levels” for “only revealing and displaying bad stories” about him.

Biden’s Justice Department has pushed to force Google to sell off its Chrome browser to resolve what a federal court said was an illegal online monopoly, and the Trump administration will decide the next steps in the case. Trump, who has recently expressed skepticism about the idea of breaking up the company over fears of Chinese tech gains, dined last month at Mar-a-Lago with Google chief Sundar Pichai and Google founder Sergey Brin, who once said he was “deeply offended” by Trump’s first election win.

By giving $1 million, the companies guarantee their executives access to an assortment of exclusive inaugural festivities: a “candlelight dinner” with Trump and his wife, Melania; an “intimate dinner” with Vance and his wife, Usha; and tickets to such prized gatherings as the “Cabinet Reception” and “Starlight Ball.”

But signing a check could also bring future rewards. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, a Biden appointee whose agency has brought antitrust lawsuits against Amazon and Meta, said Tuesday that the attempts to court favor with the incoming administration suggested the companies were angling for “some type of sweetheart deal.”

The moves have drawn ridicule from left-leaning advocacy groups, who said the “capitulation” to Trump even before he took the White House would only deepen in the years ahead.

“These companies have flourished because of a lack of regulation, and these leaders are now making choices that can insulate them down the road,” said Nicole Gill, director of Accountable Tech. She compared Zuckerberg to a school kid who befriends the class bully: “He is willing to do whatever he thinks it will take to stay afloat.”