Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, recently became the latest billionaire to meet with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort. On Wednesday evening, Bezos was seen arriving at the resort for a dinner with the president-elect, as captured in a video shared on social media.
According to US media reports, Elon Musk also joined the meeting. Musk later tweeted that it was “a great conversation.”
Bezos had previously pledged $1 million (£780,000) to support Trump’s inauguration fund, one of several contributions from tech leaders.
Bezos has significant business ties with the US government through companies like Amazon’s cloud computing division and Blue Origin, his space exploration venture.
Recently, several prominent tech leaders have visited Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, and Apple’s Tim Cook.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is also scheduled to meet Trump on Thursday.
These meetings come amid a backdrop of Trump both criticizing and praising tech companies, accusing some of censorship and threatening to take action against certain business practices.
Amazon will stream Trump’s inauguration on January 20th through its Prime Video service, contributing another $1 million in-kind donation to his inauguration fund.
Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has pledged $1 million to the fund, as has OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Elon Musk, who has contributed over $250 million to election efforts supporting Trump, continues to be a significant financial backer.
Trump has appointed Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to lead an initiative aimed at reducing government spending. Musk’s SpaceX, for its part, has U.S. government contracts worth $3.8 billion for the 2024 fiscal year, according to the U.S. government database USASpending.gov.
Jeff Bezos also has significant business dealings with the government. In 2021, Amazon Web Services secured a 10-year, $10 billion contract with the National Security Agency. Additionally, in 2023, NASA awarded a $3.4 billion contract to Blue Origin, Bezos’s space exploration company, to develop a lunar lander for a planned mission to the moon.
Just days before the November election, The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, announced it would not endorse any candidate for the first time in decades. Bezos explained that such endorsements could be seen as biased, calling the decision to stop them a “principled” one.
Elon Musk and other business leaders, including Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and Trump’s pick for commerce secretary, have been part of Trump’s inner circle since before the election. However, some other tech leaders and billionaires have maintained a more distant relationship with the former president.
Trump was suspended from Facebook following the January 6th Capitol riot after losing the 2020 election but was later reinstated. This time, Mark Zuckerberg seems to have taken a different approach.