Tech oligarchs pay fealty to Trump: Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg (Jan. 16, 2025)

Nearly every facet of our lives is conducted online these days. We order food through delivery apps, buy luxury items on e-commerce sites, listen to podcasts during commutes, check our work email every hour, and fall asleep to mindless video content on autoplay. This relentless integration of technology in modern society gives its purveyors immense power—and we should all be paying attention to where their political allegiances lie.

Jeff Bezos, the second-richest person in the world with a net worth of $233 billion, is the founder and executive chairman of the $2.3 trillion company Amazon. He also owns the Washington Post, the third-largest U.S. newspaper by both print and digital subscriber count, which he bought in 2013 for $250 million. You may remember that Bezos forbade the Washington Post’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for president last year, breaking decades of tradition to ostensibly end “a perception of bias.” Yet, Bezos has made his preferences clear via the most powerful force in politics today: money.

• The wealth we’re talking about in this post is literally unimaginable. In 2023, Bezos made $191,780,822 million a day. That’s $7,990,868 per hour. In just under 13 minutes, he raked in what an average U.S. worker makes in their entire lifetime. Check out this visualization of Bezos’ wealth (created in 2020, when he was the richest man on earth) to better understand the magnitude of these numbers.

During the 2024 election cycle, Bezos-controlled PACs dedicated two-thirds of their political spending to Republican candidates and PACs that support Republican causes. Once Trump won the election, however, Bezos went all in, giving Trump’s inaugural committee the maximum $1 million donation—more than three times as much as his company contributed to Biden’s inauguration. He then flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump and Elon Musk, right after telling the media that he believes the president-elect has “grown in the past eight years” and expressing hope that Trump will “reduce regulation.”

“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of Trump at the DealBook conference. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. If I can help him do that, I’m gonna help him.”

Of course, the regulations Bezos refers to are all common sense limits on corporate power, like those imposed by OSHA to ensure a safe workplace, EPA rules to protect the environment, and NLRB shields for the right to unionize. Removing these regulations would greatly benefit Bezos’ companies, boosting his and his shareholders’ profits.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, the third-richest person in the world with a net worth of $212 billion, has also made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring of the president-elect. Shortly after the election, Zuckerberg flew on his private jet to dine with Trump, where the two reportedly discussed the administration’s economic plans. He returned a second time just last week after committing to give $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. In contrast, Meta did not donate to Biden’s inauguration.

Leaders of other big tech companies to give the maximum $1 million contribution to Trump’s coronation include Apple CEO Tim Cook (who did not give to Biden’s), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who did not give to Biden’s), Google (which gave $337,000 to Biden’s), and Microsoft (which gave $500,000 to Biden’s). Their donations, in addition to millions given by corporations like Toyota and Lockheed Martin, have made Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee the most successful in history with more than $170 million raised so far. In fact, the committee is so flush with cash that it is limiting VIP access to those who donated $1 million and directing anyone who wishes to give less than $500,000 to instead donate to Trump-allied PACs.

These large donations are essentially bribes. Business leaders, correctly judging Trump to be easily manipulated by flattery and appeals to his ego, have launched an all-out charm offensive. Bezos’ trips to Mar-a-Lago and unprecedented financial support are an attempt to buy advantageous policy decisions in the future—like the potential abandonment of an FTC antitrust lawsuit against Amazon—and avoid Trump’s vengeance for past perceived harms—like the lawsuit Bezos filed over a $10 billion Department of Defense cloud computing contract that Trump awarded to Microsoft, not Amazon. He also likely fears that Elon Musk’s apparent closeness with Trump will result in preferential treatment of SpaceX, a competitor of Bezos’ aerospace company Blue Origin.

Mark Zuckerberg is likewise bending the knee to ingratiate himself with Trump, hoping the incoming administration won’t harm his profits. During a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, Zuckerberg provided a laundry list of issues that Trump could help with, including keeping domestic artificial intelligence regulation from slowing his company’s attempt to catch up with OpenAI (whose CEO, Sam Altman, also donated to Trump’s inauguration) and dissuading other countries from policing his platforms.

Zuckerberg complained that the EU had forced U.S. tech companies operating in Europe to pay "more than $30 billion" in penalties for legal violations over the past two decades. Last November, the tech chief's Meta conglomerate, which operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other social media and communications platforms, was fined €797 million for breaching EU antitrust rules by imposing unfair trading conditions on ads service providers.

Zuckerberg argued that the European Commission's application of competition rules is "almost like a tariff" on American tech companies and said that U.S. President Joe Biden's outgoing administration had failed to deal with the situation…

"And it's one of the things that I'm optimistic about with President Trump," he added. The U.S. president-elect appeared on the same program on the eve of November's American presidential election and cited Rogan's endorsement as a factor in his support among voters. "I think he just wants America to win," Zuckerberg said about Trump.

One of the EU’s laws that Zuckerberg is likely to run afoul of is the Digital Services Act, which aims to curb misformation. Last week, Zuckerberg announced that he is ending fact-checking on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, calling the practice a “slippery slope” that became “too politically biased.” This, too, is another move to obey in advance. Trump has long threatened to use the power of the government to “destroy” social media companies that he believes “censor” conservative viewpoints, even signing an executive order during his final year in office that would have weakened protections for platforms and websites. Whether to avoid a messy legal fight with Trump, or because he truly believed in the rightwing culture war messaging all along, Zuckerberg’s Meta will now allow users to use hate speech based on racial, ethnic, and gender identities:

Examples of newly permissible speech on Facebook and Instagram highlighted in the training materials include:

“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

“Gays are freaks.”

“Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”

Meta’s changes will ultimately turn the discourse on Facebook and Instagram into near-clones of Twitter/X, owned by Trump’s un-elected co-president Elon Musk. The danger of unrestricted misinformation spreading within a rightwing mediasphere should be fresh in our minds:

• Last fall, FEMA workers were threatened by individuals who believed false rumors that the Biden administration diverted Hurricane Helene disaster money to immigrants. Elon Musk tweeted that “FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.”
• Haitian immigrants in Ohio were targeted by a racist misinformation campaign claiming that they kill and eat local pets, inspiring a wave of bomb threats that closed schools and government buildings. Elon Musk even reposted a video implying that Haitian immigrants are cannibals.
• Just last week, far-right agitators seized on the wildfires in California to push conspiracy theories that Democratic leaders and/or “globalists” intentionally disabled firefighting efforts for their own benefit. Others blamed “DEI hire[s],” a common racist and misogynist dogwhistle, for incompetent leadership, with Elon Musk tweeting, “DEI means people DIE.”

Far from what these rightwing agitators would have us believe, immigration and diversity are not a threat. The threat we should all care about will be seated together on the dais at Trump’s inauguration on Monday. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the three wealthiest people in the world, collectively worth nearly $900 billion: the new American oligarchy.

Additional reading:

• Meta and Amazon scale back diversity initiatives, BBC News
• Zuckerberg says most companies need more ‘masculine energy’, Fortune
• Meta to fire thousands of staff as Zuckerberg warns of ‘intense year’, The Guardian
• Mark Zuckerberg will cohost reception with Republican billionaires for Trump inauguration, AP News
• ‘Deeply alarmed’: Washington Post staff request meeting with Jeff Bezos, The Guardian
• A Pulitzer winner quits 'Washington Post' after a cartoon on Bezos is killed, NPR