A who’s-who of tech bigwigs are headed to Washington, D.C., with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos set to join X and Tesla boss Elon Musk at Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, according to media reports.
Zuckerberg and Bezos’ attendance should not come as a total surprise, considering both of their companies donated $1 million to the president-elect’s inauguration fund. Musk, meanwhile, spent at least $140 million to help Trump win the 2024 election, and has since been named the co-head of Trump’s upcoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
NBC was the first outlet to report the news. The tech execs will have a “prominent spot” at the ceremony, NBC reported, according to an official involved in planning the event.
A few other major execs have also contributed to Trump’s inauguration fund in recent weeks; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman personally donated $1 million, as did Apple CEO Tim Cook. (Altman is expected to attend Monday’s ceremony, Bloomberg reported on Jan.10.) And last week, Google pitched in its own $1 million to fund the inauguration.
Zuckerberg’s attendance comes after Meta ended its third-party fact checking operation last week. The 40-year-old said the move was about “restoring free expression” on Facebook and Instagram, where he said the fact checkers had made “too many mistakes” in recent years. Meta will be rolling out a new feature similar to X’s Community Notes, Zuckerberg said.
On Friday, Zuckerberg compared the fact checking operation to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984,” while appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast. He added the Biden Administration “basically pushed” the company to censor certain topics, including what the government felt was COVID-19 misinformation.
And in other Meta news, the company announced it was ending its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs on Friday.
The Zuckerberg-Trump relationship appears to be on better ground heading into Trump’s second term.
Notably, Facebook slapped warning labels on several posts made by Trump during his first term, and in January 2021, Trump was “indefinitely” banned from Facebook and Instagram. At the time, Zuckerberg said “the risks” of keeping Trump on those platforms were “simply too great.” Trump has since been reinstated by Meta.
Many of Zuckerberg’s critics have said the recent changes have been made to suck up to president-elect Trump. Meta is facing an antitrust lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission over its 2012 purchase of Instagram and its 2014 purchase of WhatsApp; the trial is set for April 14. Getting on Trump’s good side, Zuckerberg’s critics have said, would not hurt Meta heading into April.
