Amazon founder and Washington Post proprietor Jeff Bezos has turn out to be the most recent billionaire to fulfill Donald Trump at his Florida resort.
He was seen coming into Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday night time on his approach to dinner with the president-elect, in video posted on social media.
The enterprise magnate has pledged $1m (£780,000) to Trump’s inauguration fund, considered one of quite a lot of donations pledged by tech bosses.
Mr Bezos additionally has massive enterprise pursuits with the US authorities by a number of of his firms, together with Amazon’s cloud computing division and Blue Origin, his house exploration firm.
Others who’ve travelled to Mar-a-Lago lately embody Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew and Apple’s Tim Cook.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai can be scheduled to fulfill Trump on Thursday.
The conferences come as Trump has each threatened and praised tech firms, accusing a few of censorship and threatening to crack down on a few of their enterprise practices.
Amazon will stream Trump’s 20 January inauguration on its Prime Video service, which can rely as one other $1m donation in-kind to his inauguration fund, in accordance with CBS News, the BBC’s US information accomplice.
Mr Zuckerberg of Meta – the proprietor of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – has pledged $1m to the fund, as has OpenAI chief government Sam Altman.
The tech boss closest to Trump – Tesla, SpaceX and X proprietor Elon Musk – funnelled greater than $250m to election efforts backing Trump, in accordance with public data.
Musk was additionally current on the Bezos-Trump dinner, saying later it had been a “nice dialog”.
Trump has picked Mr Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to go an effort to slash authorities spending. In the 2024 price range yr, Mr Musk’s SpaceX has US authorities contracts value $3.8bn, in accordance with authorities database USASpending.gov.
Mr Bezos additionally has vital enterprise with the federal government.
Amazon Web Services was awarded a 10-year, $10bn contract with the National Security Agency in 2021. In 2023, Nasa introduced a $3.4bn contract with Blue Origin to construct a lunar lander for a deliberate mission to the moon.
Just days earlier than the November election, the Washington Post introduced that it could not be endorsing a candidate for the primary time in many years.
Mr Bezos defined the choice by saying endorsements create a notion of bias.
“Ending them is a principled resolution, and it is the proper one,” he wrote within the Post.
Mr Musk and different enterprise leaders reminiscent of monetary providers agency Cantor Fitzgerald’s CEO Howard Lutnick – Trump’s choose for commerce secretary – have been a part of Trump’s internal circle since earlier than the election.
But different tech leaders and billionaires have had a extra distant relationship.
Trump was suspended from Facebook after the Capitol riot following his loss within the 2020 election, and later reinstated.
This time round, Mr Zuckerberg seems to have modified tack.
