Meta and Amazon have announced donations of $1 million to celebrate Donald Trump’s first day in office. The gesture seeks to influence and curry favor with the new president, who has criticized both companies and their leaders in the past. Mark Zuckerberg already met with Trump at his Florida residence a few weeks ago and Jeff Bezos plans to do so next week, in addition to promising to broadcast Trump’s inaugural speech on Prime Video.
In a conference this week, Bezos already said that he was “very optimistic” and that he had seen Trump “calmer than the first time and with more confidence, more settled.” At his meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Zuckerberg gave him Meta’s new Orion mixed reality glasses, not yet marketed, and brought a handful of company executives to meet the likely new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and other leaders of the new administration. During the campaign, Zuckerberg already publicly praised Trump after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in July.
Although these donations for the opening day celebrations, revealed by the Wall Street Journal, They are the way in which large corporations try to sympathize with the new president, not all of them have the same level: Facebook did not give anything in 2017 to Trump or in 2021 to Biden. Zuckerberg has supported congressional candidates from both parties, but had not donated in the presidential elections. Amazon gave just $58,000 to Trump in 2017.
The donations include several tickets to the different parties and banquets of those days between January 17 and 20 in Washington. Precisely on those same dates, the United States may end up forcing Bytedance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell the social network or leave the country.
Private conversations between Meta and Amazon employees with the country’s new leaders will have many fronts. Big tech hopes that Trump’s new team will relax the pressure on their businesses that Biden had imposed. Also with Elon Musk’s profound capacity for influence, the rest of the technology leaders are running to have some type of direct line with the White House.
Bezos, owner of Washington Post, It caused controversy just before the elections by forcing the newspaper not to support any presidential candidate, breaking with a long tradition in the United States. The decision caused hundreds of thousands of subscribers to drop from the newspaper. Trump bitterly criticized Bezos for his management of the postduring his first presidency.
Facebook suspended Trump’s account after the assault on the Capitol in 2021, but reinstated it in 2023. This month, Meta announced that in the past it had moderated its networks too much and that it was now going to promote greater freedom of expression, an obvious reference to turning a blind eye to dubious or misleading headlines.
