By Kathryn Watson, Libby Cathey
/ CBS News
Tech CEOs donate to Trump’s inaugural fund
Washington — Tech leaders and companies are shelling out big bucks to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, as they prepare for the next four years of a Trump White House.
Amazon, run by billionaire Jeff Bezos, intends to donate $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund and will stream the ceremony on Prime, amounting to another $1 million in-kind donation, according to a source familiar with the donations. The Wall Street Journal first reported Amazon’s plans.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, also plans to send $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman plans to make a $1 million personal donation to Trump’s inaugural fund, according to an OpenAI spokesperson. Fox News Digital first reported Altman’s intended donation.
“President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” Altman said in a statement.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and CEO of X, Tesla and SpaceX, has become a regular presence by Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago, and spent $277 million to help get Trump elected.
CBS News has also reached out to Reddit, as well as major corporations who have donated to inaugural funds in the past, including Walmart, Home Depot and Target, for information about their plans.
According to a source at Google, the company donated $285,000 to Biden’s inaugural fund four years ago. Google has not announced plans, so far, to donate to Trump’s. The Information, a tech news site, and The Wall Street Journal reported that Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, had plans to meet with Trump.
Tech company CEOs have been going to see Trump at Mar-a-Lago after years of watching his tone and stance change, or at least soften, after in-person meetings.
Trump told CNBC in a Thursday interview that Bezos would visit him “next week.” Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which declined to endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential election, breaking with the paper’s past precedent. “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote at the time.
Trump’s relationship with social media and tech companies has, in the past, been tenuous if not downright hostile.
During Trump’s first term in the White House, he frequently blasted Bezos and Amazon, accusing the company of “doing great damage” to retailers and hurting “towns, cities and states throughout the U.S.” He’s insisted that Amazon should pay more for U.S. Postal Service deliveries.
But Trump has dialed back his public hostility toward the company, and Bezos — who previously said Trump’s treatment of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and refusal to accept the election results in 2020 “erodes our democracy around the edges” — has softened, too.
Speaking at a New York Times DealBook Summit recently, Bezos said he’s “very optimistic” about a second Trump term.
“What I’ve seen so far is he is calmer than he was the first time and more settled,” Bezos said. “You’ve probably grown in the last eight years. He has, too.”
Both X (which was called Twitter at the time) and Facebook prohibited Trump from posting to their platforms after hundreds of Trump supporters assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump did little to try to stop them. Musk reinstated Trump’s X account in November 2022 after taking over the company, although Trump has largely posted to his own social media platform, Truth Social. Facebook and Instagram restored Trump’s accounts in early 2023.
Tech CEOs weren’t so eager to donate to Trump’s first inaugural committee after his 2016 victory.
For Trump’s 2017 inauguration, which raised an eye-popping $107 million, his biggest donors were largely affiliated with sports teams, casinos, venture capital firms and banks. His most generous donor, at $5 million, was the late Las Vegas Sands founder Sheldon Adelson, who died in 2021. But, other than GoDaddy.com founder Bob Parsons, the leaders of big-name tech companies weren’t giving $1 million to Trump the first time around.
Trump’s inaugural committee, officially known as the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc., is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) entity that’s responsible for planning inaugural events, and can accept limitless donations. Trump allies former Sen. Kelly Loeffler and investor Steve Witkoff are the committee’s co-chairs. When he announced his inaugural committee and co-chairs, Trump said the committee will “honor” the “magnificent victory” he and his team had to kick off his administration.
Inaugural committees add the pomp and circumstance to an inauguration, but not at taxpayers’ expense. They also offer a way for donors to curry favor with an incoming administration. Donors who give $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee can expect not only tickets but face-time with the incoming president and vice president, as well as Cabinet officials.
A president-elect’s inaugural committee is different from the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, established by Congress, which is underwritten by taxpayers. The congressional committee, composed of members of both parties, plans and carries out the swearing-in ceremony, as well as an inaugural luncheon for the president and vice president at the Capitol.
The presidential committee is responsible for all events other than those taking place at the Capitol.
Only about $3.7 million was appropriated for the committee for the 2025 inauguration, according to the Congressional Research Service, but taxpayers will be spending more than that. The conservative National Taxpayers Union Foundation estimated that the 2021 inauguration, not counting the security lockdown following the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, cost at least $73 million.
Libby Cathey contributed to this report.
Kathryn Watson is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital, based in Washington, D.C.
