President Donald Trump said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos were his “bitter enemies” during his first term in office, but those relationships have since improved.
The president’s comment was made on Thursday afternoon and ran in The Spectator on Friday, in what was his first magazine interview since returning to office last month.
“I like them. I tell you what, I like these guys, but I have to,” Trump said of the tech moguls. “So when you ask about the difference — so the first time, these guys were bitter enemies. I never even understood it. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know Zuckerberg. I didn’t know Jeff, I didn’t. When you look at the inauguration, it was a ‘who’s-who’ of every single one of them. Every single guy was there.”
President Trump’s inauguration certainly was a “who’s-who” of tech world tycoons, with Bezos and Zuckerberg joining X owner Elon Musk, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple chief Tim Cook and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the event. Despite the public support, many Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., that day told TheWrap that, beyond Musk, they were skeptical of Big Tech’s sudden embrace of the president.
Zuckerberg, notably, kicked Trump off of Facebook and Instagram in early 2021, following the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot. At the time, Zuckerberg said “the risks” of keeping President Trump on the platforms were “simply too great.” Meta later reinstated Trump in 2023.
Now, Trump and the tech world seem to get along much better. The president told The Spectator that he just had dinner with Bezos on Wednesday — the same day Bezos announced The Washington Post, the paper he owns, would shift the focus of its opinion section to “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” That pivot led to an uproar from many WaPo staffers and mainstream reporters.
After hearing about the dinner, The Spectator asked Trump if he could trust tech kingpins like Bezos. “Who do I trust? I mean, who do you trust? Do you trust anybody? These are very smart guys,” Trump answered.
He continued, “And I always say to them, we have dinners together, usually started by them. I’m so busy with all of this. Between China, Russia, Ukraine, I’ve got more things happening. But I always love to just sort of look at them and say, ‘Hi, where do you come from?’ ‘I came from Hawaii to have dinner.’ That was good. I said, ‘Would you have been here if I lost,’ you know? ‘Would you have been here if I lost it?’ They never answer that question. Actually, they just sort of shy away from it.”
