A handful of major tech executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook, were “courting” Donald Trump before he won his second election earlier this week, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
Zuckerberg called Trump after the first assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, while Google chief Sundar Pichai — as Trump noted on his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast — called the president-elect recently to tell him his stint as a McDonald’s worker was driving huge search results.
On top of that, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, made an intro call to Trump, The Times reported, and Jeff Bezos also called after the July assassination attempt.
The behind-the-scenes approach stands in contrast to X and Tesla boss Elon Musk, who was Trump’s most vocal supporter during the 2024 election cycle. It’s also a change from the hands-off approach most tech executives took with Trump following his win in 2016.
But that’s changing, The Times reported, after executives saw how Cook’s occasional reach-outs to Trump helped Apple avoid tariffs during his first term (Cook, The Times reported, started reaching out to Trump again in the months leading up to his victory on Tuesday).
Now, the other tech executives are following Cook’s playbook, because they believe Trump’s “political positions are fluid and his actions are often transactional,” The Times reported. The execs hope a more direct relationship with Trump, the outlet added, will benefit their businesses.
“They flattered him. They shared their troubles. They criticized his opposition. They emphasized common enemies,” The Times reported.
Trump and Zuckerberg, notably, have had an interesting and fairly contentious relationship in the past. Facebook restricted the reach of a New York Post report on Hunter Biden in the weeks before the 2020 election, and the platform banned Trump in early 2021, following the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot. He was reinstated in 2023.
Their relationship is “much better now,” though, Trump said last month.
“I actually believe he’s staying out of the election, which is nice,” he said on the “Bussin’ With the Boys” podcast.
And now that the election is over, Trump has been receiving congratulations from many of the execs publicly. Bezos congratulated Trump on his “extraordinary political comeback” on X and Cook wished him good luck in his own X post. Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, likewise, shared X posts congratulating Trump on beating Kamala Harris.
