Jeff Bezos Meets with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, has joined the ranks of billionaires meeting with Donald Trump at his Florida estate.
Footage shared on social media showed Bezos arriving at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday evening for a dinner with the president-elect.
The tech mogul has pledged $1 million (£780,000) to support Trump’s inauguration fund, joining other technology leaders in making contributions.
Bezos also maintains significant business ties with the U.S. government through his ventures, including Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud computing services, and Blue Origin, his space exploration company.
Tech Leaders Meet Trump as Big Business Aligns with Administration
A wave of tech industry leaders has recently traveled to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, and Apple CEO Tim Cook. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is also scheduled to meet with Trump on Thursday.
These meetings come amid Trump’s mixed approach to tech companies, alternating between criticism of alleged censorship and praise for their influence.
Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos, plans to stream Trump’s January 20 inauguration on its Prime Video platform, which CBS News reports will count as a $1 million in-kind donation to the inauguration fund. Bezos himself pledged $1 million in cash, as did Zuckerberg and Altman.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter), has funneled over $250 million into election efforts supporting Trump, according to public records. Musk also attended the Bezos-Trump dinner, later describing it as a “great conversation.” Trump has tapped Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to spearhead efforts to reduce government spending.
Musk’s SpaceX holds $3.8 billion in U.S. government contracts for the 2024 fiscal year, according to data from USASpending.gov. Similarly, Bezos’s companies maintain major government deals. Amazon Web Services secured a $10 billion contract with the National Security Agency in 2021, and Blue Origin won a $3.4 billion NASA contract in 2023 to develop a lunar lander.
Before the November election, The Washington Post, owned by Bezos, decided not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in decades. Bezos defended the move, stating that endorsements could create an appearance of bias and calling the decision “principled and right.”
Some tech leaders, including Musk and Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick—Trump’s pick for commerce secretary—have been part of Trump’s inner circle since before the election. Others, such as Zuckerberg, have had a more distant relationship. Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, previously suspended Trump’s accounts after the January 6 Capitol riot but reinstated them later.
Now, Zuckerberg appears to have shifted his approach, aligning more closely with Trump as big business increasingly cooperates with his administration.
