In display of fealty, tech industry curries favor with Trump

The $1 million donations came gradually — and then all at once.

Meta. Amazon. OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Each of these Silicon Valley companies or their leaders promised to support President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural committee with seven-figure checks over the past week, often accompanied by a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee.

The procession of tech leaders who traveled to hobnob with Trump face to face included Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, and Sergey Brin, a Google founder, who together dined with Trump on Thursday. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, shared a meal with Trump on Friday. And Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, planned to meet with Trump in the next few days.

While businesses frequently try to get on an incoming president’s good side, the frenzy of tech activity stood out from that of other industries. Until former President Barack Obama’s administration, the tech industry had largely stayed aloof from politics. Some wrote just small checks for Trump’s first inauguration.

Now the bread-breaking with Trump has become highly public. Meta and Amazon, whose founders had previously been criticized by Trump, said they would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund this week. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the high-profile artificial intelligence startup, said Friday that a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund would come from him personally.

“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.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI, saying the startup infringed on its copyright in training AI systems.)

Nonprofit contributions to inaugural committees, which host patriotic-themed events around Jan. 20, are low-stakes, timeworn ways for companies to seek favor under the guise of patriotism without being pegged as overly partisan actors.

Other tech leaders have also praised Trump. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and owner of Time magazine, posted on X on Thursday that it was “a time of great promise for our nation,” after Time awarded Trump its coveted “Person of the Year” designation.

“We look forward to working together to advance American success and prosperity for everyone,” Benioff wrote, alongside a picture of the Time cover of Trump.

The turnabout has been especially stark as some tech executives who made donation pledges or met with Trump this week had appeared to be avowed liberals. That included Benioff and Altman, who were among the most politically active Democratic tech donors during Trump’s first term. Brin publicly protested an immigration order from Trump in 2017.

Marc Andreessen, an influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist who endorsed Trump during the campaign, said in a podcast interview this week that he had spent about half of his time since Election Day working on the presidential transition. He framed Trump’s win as a cultural moment for a “techno-optimist” ideology.

“It’s morning in America, so I’m very happy,” Andreessen said. “People are finally poking their heads out of the frozen tundra of the culture and realizing that it’s actually OK to build things, hire on merit, celebrate success, and fundamentally be proud of the country and be patriotic.”

Andreessen has joined tech executives such as Mark Pincus, who founded gaming company Zynga, and David Marcus, a former Meta executive, at Mar-a-Lago to help staff the new administration and to work on reducing regulations in industries including AI and cryptocurrencies.

Peter Thiel, a tech investor who was involved in Trump’s 2016 transition but has been less involved this time, said in an interview that aired this week that his expectations were “properly intermediate” for Trump’s performance. Even so, Thiel said, it was an epochal moment.

The “ancien régime that is liberalism is really exhausted,” Thiel told Piers Morgan in the interview, in a reference to the political and social system in France before the French Revolution.

Eight years ago, Thiel organized the parallel to the latest tech pilgrimages — a selective get-together at Trump Tower of tech titans and Trump. At the time, attendees expressed a similar optimism, which evaporated when Trump pushed policies on climate and immigration early in his term that repelled tech leaders.

Some signs of tension between Trump and the tech industry have already surfaced this time. Trump has named tech hawks to senior administration roles, as well as tech executives such as David Sacks, an investor and podcaster who has been appointed “czar” of crypto and AI.

Part of Sacks’ job is to assemble a council to advise Trump, who has pronounced himself a crypto believer, on crypto and AI. But Trump’s circle of advisers and his tech friends have disagreed over whether there should be two separate advisory bodies or just one, people involved in the conversations said.

Those in the cryptocurrency and AI fields have largely pushed for two different councils, one person said, adding that there had also been some dispute over who would choose those who serve on the councils. People who donated to support Trump are likely to gain preference in receiving positions on the councils, the people said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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