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US President-elect Donald Trump smiles at the crowd during the 146th General Conference and Exposition of the National Guard Association of the United States at the Huntington Place Convention Center on August 26, 2024 in Detroit, Michigan.
Emily Elconin | Getty Images News | fake images
Goal CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos has a particularly rocky past with President-elect Donald Trump. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in a heated legal battle with Elon Musk, who has become one of Trump’s biggest supporters and is poised to play a huge role in his second administration.
All of that helps explain this week’s announcements about donations to Trump’s inauguration fund.
“President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I look forward to supporting his efforts to ensure America remains ahead of the curve,” Altman said in a statement Friday. Altman said he plans to make a personal donation of $1 million to the fund, the company confirmed.
Goal donated $1 million to the inauguration, the company confirmed to CNBC, weeks after Zuckerberg dined privately with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Amazon also plans to donate $1 million, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Trump has been an outspoken critic of technology companies and earlier this month signaled that he will not shy away from antitrust enforcement. The incoming president nominated Gail Slater, who advised Trump on technology policy during his first term, to head the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
“Big Tech has run amok for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to stifle the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of small tech!” Trump wrote in a December 4 post about Social Truth announcing Slater’s nomination. “I was proud to fight these abuses during my first term, and our Department of Justice’s antitrust team will continue that work under Gail’s leadership.”
Some of Trump’s most hostile words in the past have been directed at Amazon and Meta.
In his first term, Trump repeatedly attacked Bezos and his companies, Amazon and The Washington Post, accusing them of evading taxes or publishing “fake news,” among other things. Trump also repeatedly accused Amazon of its use of the U.S. Postal Service to deliver packages to customers, alleging the company contributed to the post office’s budget problems.
The animosity went both ways. In 2019, Amazon blamed Trump’s “behind-the-scenes attacks” on the company for the loss of a multimillion-dollar contract with the Department of Defense, then called JEDI. And before the 2016 election, Bezos criticized Trump’s behavior, saying it “erodes our democracy.” After the then-Republican candidate accused Bezos of using the Post as a “tax shelter,” Bezos, who also owns the space company Blue Origin, offered in a tweet to send Trump to space on one of his rockets.
Blue Origin competes for government contracts with Musk’s SpaceX.
At the New York Times DealBook Summit on December 4, Bezos said he hopes for a friendlier regulatory environment in the next administration.
“I’m actually very optimistic this time,” Bezos said on stage. “You seem to have a lot of energy to reduce regulation. If I can help do that, I’ll help you.”
Trump has called Bezos “Jeff Bozo.” His preferred nickname for the CEO of Meta is “Zuckerschmuck.”
Following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, he sued Facebook, Twitter, and Google, as well as their respective CEOs in class-action lawsuits. All three companies removed Trump’s accounts from the platforms after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Trump has long accused Facebook of silencing conservative voices. In March, he called the platform “the enemy of the people along with many media outlets,” in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Now that Trump returns to the White House and has been warming up to Musk, the rest of the tech sector seems interested in currying favor. Apple CEO Tim Cook microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and others publicly congratulated Trump after his victory in November.
Microsoft declined to comment on whether it will contribute to the inauguration. Representatives for Apple and Google did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
For OpenAI and Altman, the concerns are a little different. Altman and Musk were co-founders of OpenAI, which was initially a nonprofit organization. The two have since publicly parted ways, with Altman remaining CEO of OpenAI and Musk starting a rival artificial intelligence company called xAI.
In March, Musk sued OpenAI (and co-founders Altman and Greg Brockman) alleging breach of contract and fiduciary duty. He claimed that the project had been transformed into a for-profit entity largely controlled by major shareholder Microsoft, and he is suing to thwart the structure change.
OpenAI responded on Friday, stating in a blog post titled “Elon Musk wanted a for-profit OpenAI,” which in 2017 Musk “not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit” to serve as the company’s proposed new structure.
Altman’s next concern is that Musk spent more than $250 million to help boost Trump’s campaign and is now set to help run the “Department of Government Efficiency.” In that role, Musk could influence how AI is regulated in ways that benefit his businesses.
On December 5, Trump announced that venture capitalist and podcaster David Sacks, a friend of Musk, will join the Trump administration as the “White House AI and cryptocurrency czar.”
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