- It's not new for rich people and big companies to donate to presidential inaugurations.
- Something about watching tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos do it seems different.
- That's at least in part because it's so public — the money is less important than the message.
First, Mark Zuckberg. Then, Jeff Bezos. Now, Sam Altman. They're all donating $1 million to Donald Trump's inauguration fund.
Expect more tech titans to follow. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was reportedly flying to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump this week. I wouldn't be shocked to see a $1 million pledge coming shortly after. (Google declined to comment about any of the above.)
You can see it playing out in real time. Zuckerberg's initial donation was news; each subsequent one just confirms it as the cost of doing business. At some point, the news will be when you hear that some tech giant is not forking over $1 million to help fund Trump's multi-day party next month.
Quick context: It is not unusual for big companies and very rich people to donate lots of money to presidential inaugurations, whether via cash, in-kind contributions, or both.
While US elections themselves have (some) rules about the amount of money people and companies can spend on candidates, there's no cap on what they can spend on inaugural committees. The only restrictions are that the money can't come from foreign nationals and that the donations eventually have to be disclosed.
Which is why we can see it's also not unheard of for Big Tech companies to make inaugural donations. Microsoft kicked in $500,000 for Trump's first inauguration in 2017; Google spent $285,000. Those two companies also contributed to Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration, along with Uber, which spent $1 million.
It's also worth noting that the sums we are talking about here don't even qualify as rounding errors for companies this size. Zuckerberg's Meta makes about $174 million in profit every day. Amazon does about $110 million. A million bucks just doesn't register. (The Amazon and Meta donations are coming directly from the companies, not their founders; Altman, who has a reported net worth of $1.1 billion, has said he is making his donation personally.)
So, what makes this round of donations newsworthy?
Yes, in some cases, Trump has tangled with the companies or the leaders in question — he famously threatened to jail Zuckerberg earlier this year for theoretical election interference, and he's long railed about Amazon founder Bezos, as well as the Bezos-owned Washington Post.
There's also the fact that while Trump and his allies continue to insist that they want to cut regulations, they also insist that they'll be cracking down on Big Tech. That context makes the donations seem even more transactional than other rich person/corporate donations.
But the main reason this is news is … because it's news. News that's out in public, that is.
In the past, these donations would eventually be disclosed in filings, but this time around, the contributors seem eager to let the world know they're doing it.
That's the telling part. The part that tells you that this time around, more tech leaders have decided that the best way to deal with Donald Trump is to say nice things about him in public, and to do nice things for him — in public. And then, they hope, they can get things from him privately.
That is, they are taking cues from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who navigated the first Trump presidency very effectively. As I've noted before: "Cook became an expert Trump manager during Trump 1.0 by letting the president do what he wanted in public, like take credit for things he didn't do, while prevailing on him privately to do things Cook wanted Trump to do — namely, exempting Apple products from tariffs." I'm assuming that will also include a $1 million donation from Apple that will get announced very shortly.