Zuckerberg, Bezos donate $1 million to Trump following in Musk's footsteps, but what's the endgame?

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon donated $1,000,000 each to Trump’s inaugural fund on Thursday, in what appears to be the latest move by big tech leaders to court the newly re-elected President and stay in his good graces.

The Wall Street Journal, which broke both stories and revealed the Meta donation late Wednesday night, said the corporate handout was a departure for the Zuckerberg-run company, which had previously refused to endorse a candidate in this year's presidential race.

Zuckerberg had met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago compound in Florida last week, speculatively the precursor for the million-dollar gift.

It’s the second time the Meta CEO had met with Trump at the Palm Beach estate since the November win, likely proving that Zuckerberg’s attempt to start healing the historically strained relationship between the two is full steam ahead.

Following the Trump assassination attempt in July, Zuckerberg extended his first olive branch by calling Trump’s reaction "one of the most badass things I've ever seen in my life."

Meanwhile, months before the election, Trump had publicly threatened the tech billionaire with “life in prison” for any potential “actions” Trump would consider “illegal” during the campaign.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, had suspended Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts after the 2021 Capitol riots, reinstating them two years later in January 2023.

Furthermore, a federal judge in November ruled that an anti-trust lawsuit filed by the FTC in 2020, accusing Meta of holding an illegal monopoly over social media, can proceed to trial, presumably to be heard during Trump's term.

Bezos follows Zuck's lead

The latest Trump “flatterfest” is being further joined by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who is now scheduled to have dinner with Trump sometime next week at Mar-a-Lago, the President’s camp confirmed to Reuters on Thursday morning.

Not to be outdone, hours later, the Wall Street Journal on Thursday evening, reported that Amazon.com was also donating $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund in an effort to shore up ties with the incoming administration.

According to some people familiar with the matter, Bezos and Amazon had decided on the million-dollar contribution earlier this week, with the Trump team privy to the decision soon after, the WSJ reported.

Taking it one step further, Amazon has agreed to live stream the inauguration for Prime Video business members, a move said to be valued at $1 million, to be categorized as a “separate, in-kind donation” the insiders told the Journal.

Bezos, also known to have had a contemptuous relationship with Trump in the past years, stepped down from his role as CEO and president of Amazon in 2021 during Biden’s reign and is currently the executive chair of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Additionally, Bezos is the founder of the aerospace manufacturing company Blue Origin and the owner of The Washington Post, a 'liberal-leaning' newspaper that Trump has previously denounced as a "scam" due to its coverage of him during his presidency.

Allegedly as payback for the Post's "repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks," Trump during his first term bypassed Amazon's cloud services in favor of awarding Microsoft a $10 billion contract with the US Department of Defense. The so-called diss prompted Amazon to sue the DoD. In the end, neither tech giant got the contract, as the DoD eventually decided to parse out the services to multiple smaller vendors.

Even so, post-election, Bezos began his own about-face, actually wishing Trump “all success in leading and uniting the America we all love” and just last week stated he was “very optimistic” about Trump’s upcoming four-year term. “What I’ve seen so far is that he is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled,” Bezos said.

Like Zuckerberg, Bezos had refused to let the Post endorse one candidate over the other in the presidential race, a move which raised hackles among the newspaper's employees, leading to a slew of resignations and canceled subscriptions in the hundreds of thousands.

It's all about deregulation

The steps towards mending relations with Trump happen to come on the same day Forbes released its annual "The World's Real-Time Billionaires" list revealing SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk at the top with a net worth of $400 billion.

Following Musk in second place is Bezos with a net worth of $243.7 billion, while Zuckerberg's net worth of $212.1 billion put him fourth on the Forbes list.

With Thursday's donation pledges, it seems that Zuckerberg and Bezos have taken note of Musk's Trump-friendly strategy and want to get in on the action.

Musk, no stranger to putting his money where his mouth is, not only stumped for Trump on the campaign trail (and social media) but spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to help the former president win the election, and the payoff has been worth it for the world's richest billionaire.

Barely a week after the election, Trump lavishly rewarded Musk with an appointment to head up a newly created federal commission – the US Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE – a carte blanche directive to rein in government waste and loosen regulation.

Investors in Tesla, SpaceX, and Musk’s brain chip start-up Neuralink – along with other big tech supporters – have been banking on Musk’s symbiotic relationship with the President-elect to change the atmosphere in Washington towards tech regulation, including for AI development, something Musk has riled against in the past.

Furthermore, Musk is the largest shareholder in Tesla, owning about 13% of the EV automaker's shares. Those shares hit a record high of $424.9 on Wednesday, extending a rally that, not so coincidentally, kicked off following the November 5th election, Reuters reported.

To note, Musk’s net worth received a further boost this year from a nearly 71% surge in Tesla shares, as well as a soaring stock valuation of SpaceX due to a massive influx of investor capital from purchased shares worth about $1.25 billion, the outlet said.

Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference in October, Musk declared the biggest obstacle facing tech companies today is overregulation. "It takes longer to get a permit to than to actually send a rocket," Musk said, referring to it as a "slow strangulation."

“Unless we do something to scale back overregulation, if we don’t push back on that, it will eventually become illegal to do almost any large project,” he said.

It's no secret that Bezos' Blue Origin, a rival rocket maker to Musk's SpaceX, regularly competes for government contracts, while Amazon is currently facing a major anti-trust lawsuit brought by US consumer watchdog agency the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2023.

Randomly, another member of the big tech wolfpack, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, was reportedly meeting up with Trump at Mar-a-Lago also on Thursday, according to the Journal. Google, which Trump has labeled this year as "a crooked, election interference machine" on his Truth Social platform, happens to also be facing two anti-trust lawsuits filed by the FTC, one of which may require a break-up of the tech giant.

In an obvious attempt to read the room, last month tech bigwigs Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy organized a group call with Trump by phone, reportedly with Musk listening in.