San Francisco (AFP) – Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg will attend Donald Trump’s inauguration next week, NBC News reported Tuesday, further highlighting the tech moguls’ efforts to develop closer ties with the incoming president. The network, citing an unnamed official involved in planning the January 20 ceremony, said the three men will be seated together on the platform with prominent guests, including Trump cabinet nominees.
Musk — the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the majority owner of X — has become one of Trump’s closest allies, and his planned presence at the ceremony is not a surprise. Musk shares Trump’s hard-right politics and put millions of dollars into supporting his presidential campaign. Trump has tapped Musk to co-lead an advisory commission aiming to slash federal spending and bureaucracy, which, while dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE,” will not be an official US agency.
Bezos and Zuckerberg have less close ties with Trump, but both have made moves since the election viewed as seeking to curry favor with the president-elect, including meeting with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Meta CEO Zuckerberg signaled a rightward political swerve last week when he announced Facebook and Instagram would scrap fact-checking in the United States, a response to what he characterized as censorship by governments and so-called legacy media. The pivot to Trumpian talking points shocked some Meta watchers but was also in line with past decisions by Zuckerberg aimed at preserving his dominance of social media.
In the summer, Trump threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison over Facebook’s decision to ban him from the platform in 2021. Highlighting Zuckerberg’s continued step into politics, he will be co-hosting a post-inauguration reception for Trump with several well-known Republican donors, according to an invitation obtained by the Puck news site Tuesday.
Bezos’s relationship with Trump has also seen moments of significant friction. The founder of Amazon also owns The Washington Post, one of the many newspapers Trump has railed against for years. In a decision that shocked many in US media, The Post declined to endorse a presidential candidate ahead of the November election. According to a report by the paper, Bezos intervened to block the board from publishing its editorial in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris. The paper’s leadership denied that report. Bezos’s aerospace company Blue Origin also competes for lucrative government contracts.
© 2024 AFP
