Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos are all heading to Trump’s inauguration

It shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point, however NBC News He is Preparing reports Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos will all attend President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

What do all these leaders in technology have in common? They have all publicly expressed varying degrees of support for the incoming Trump administration, and all three have donated money to his campaign or inauguration. It represents a major pivot from Trump’s first time in office when the tech industry kept its distance from him and eventually kicked him from its services entirely in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Zuckerberg in particular has gone from a very tense relationship with Trump, who threatened him with prison over his stance on moderate conservative content, but now feels better about him, as Zuckerberg promised. Relax content restrictions on meta platforms, ditched the company’s DEI programs, and appointed an outspoken Republican to lead its political arm. Bezos, as owner The Washington Postregularly received harsh criticism from Trump on his first tour and saw the possibility of raising the USPS prices charged to Amazon in retaliation for his newspaper coverage.

Meta and Amazon each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, and of course Elon Musk spent money aggressively campaigning for Trump’s re-election. He will help cut government spending through DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, and was looking to recruit more figures from technology to staff the initiative.

according to nbcThe three technology leaders will be seated “at the podium near Cabinet officials and elected leaders.”

Perhaps what’s most notable about Silicon Valley’s shift toward Trump is how public the whole thing has become. While in the past an investigative journalist might have needed to do some digging to discover pay-to-play schemes, none of the tech leaders here are hiding what they do. They are doing everything they can to get on Trump’s good side, prevent any attacks he might bring, and perhaps get preferential treatment for lucrative defense contracts. This is despite the fact that technology employees tend to do so Much more liberal than employers. But these leaders must realize that the positives of supporting Trump outweigh the negatives. Especially since the tech industry has seen mass layoffs in recent years, rank-and-file engineers don’t have the power they once did.