CEOs from some of the biggest tech companies in the US have publicly shown their support for incoming President Donald Trump, which has included large donations for his inaugural ceremony by Jeff Bezos-owned Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms.

The Washington Post reported Meta Platforms CEO Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee ahead of his swearing in ceremony on 20 January while Bezos chipped in another $1 million through Amazon.

Amazon will also contribute a $1 million in-kind donation by streaming the inauguration on Amazon Video, according to CNN.

Bloomberg reported OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is planning to give $1 million of his own money to the inaugural fund after previously making contributions to President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.

Bezos is scheduled to meet with Trump this week following a similar meeting by Zuckerberg at the President Elect’s estate in Florida. Google CEO Sundar Pichai also reportedly met with Trump in Florida last week (12 December), according to Axios.

Following the presidential election in November, Bezos, Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella were among the tech CEOs that took to X to congratulate Trump on his win.

Will Oremus, technology news analysis writer for The Washington Post, told CNN in an interview Friday (13 December) that Big Tech executives did not offer similar accolades for President Biden when he won in 2020.

Trump’s relationship with many of those same executives was acrimonious during his first term and in the run-up to the election, but they now are willing to bend the knee to get into his good books.

In 2019, Amazon put the loss of a $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract squarely on the shoulders of then President Trump, who was reportedly at odds with Bezos over The Washington Post’s coverage of his administration.

Trump filed lawsuits against Google and Meta in 2021 that accused them of censorship, according to the newspaper.

Oremus stated Trump routinely threatened social media companies during his first term.

“Whether he will go after that again depends in part on whether he sees social media companies as being on his side or as being beholden to liberal interests who want to take down conspiracy theories, extremism, hate speech, et cetera.”

Oremus noted Meta Platforms stands to benefit if Trump sticks with a proposed ban of TikTok by the Biden Administration while Amazon Web Services still has large government cloud contracts in place with the federal government.

“You saw Mark Zuckerberg after the assassination attempt describe Trump as ‘badass,’” he said. “I think they understand that for Trump, a lot of politics is personal.”

The Washington Post reporter stated he has said for years that tech titans are not liberal or conservative.

“They’re capitalists,” he explained. “They didn’t get to be some of the richest people in the history of the world by being ideologues. When there’s money on the table, they know where their bread and butter is.

“I think they see how things are lined up in the Trump administration, that if they’re not on his good side they’re going to suffer.”

Of course, one CEO and company that doesn’t have to butter up Trump is Elon Musk’s X. Billionaire entrepreneur Musk, the world’s richest man, has been tapped to lead what Trump has termed a Department of Government Efficiency, alongside one-time presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.

The department – whose acronym Doge is a nod to a cryptocurrency promoted by Musk – will serve in an advisory capacity to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies”, Trump said.