The $1 million donations came gradually — and then all at once.
Meta. Amazon. OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Each of these Silicon Valley companies or their leaders promised to support President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inaugural committee with seven-figure checks over the past week, often accompanied by a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee.
The procession of tech leaders who traveled to hobnob with Mr. Trump face-to-face included Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, and Sergey Brin, a Google founder, who together dined with Mr. Trump on Thursday. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, shared a meal with Mr. Trump on Friday. And Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, planned to meet with Mr. Trump in the next few days.
This was the week when many tech companies and their top executives, as reluctant as they may have been, acknowledged the reality of getting business done in Mr. Trump’s Washington. With their donations, visits and comments, they joined a party that has already raged for a month, as a cohort of influential Silicon Valley billionaires, led by Elon Musk, began running parts of Mr. Trump’s transition after endorsing him in the campaign.
While businesses frequently try to get on an incoming president’s good side, the frenzy of tech activity stood out from other industries. Until President Obama’s administration, the tech industry had largely stayed aloof from politics. Some wrote just small checks for Mr. Trump’s first inauguration.
Now the bread-breaking with Mr. Trump has become highly public. Meta and Amazon, whose founders had previously been criticized by Mr. Trump, said they would donate $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural fund this week. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, the high-profile artificial intelligence start-up, said on Friday that a $1 million donation to Mr. Trump’s inaugural fund would come from him personally.
“President Trump will lead our country into the age of A.I., and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” Mr. Altman said in a statement.
Nonprofit contributions to inaugural committees, which host patriotic-themed events around Jan. 20, are low-stakes, timeworn ways for companies to seek favor under the guise of patriotism without being pegged as overly partisan actors.
Other tech leaders have also praised Mr. Trump. Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce and the owner of Time Magazine, posted on X on Thursday that it was “a time of great promise for our nation,” after Time awarded Mr. Trump its coveted “Person of the Year” designation.
“We look forward to working together to advance American success and prosperity for everyone,” Mr. Benioff wrote, alongside a picture of the Time cover of Mr. Trump.
The turnabout has been especially stark as some tech executives who made donation pledges or met with Mr. Trump this week had appeared to be avowed liberals. That included Mr. Benioff and Mr. Altman, who were among the most politically active Democratic tech donors during Mr. Trump’s first term. Mr. Brin publicly protested an immigration order from Mr. Trump in 2017.
In a statement, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said, “President Trump has built the broadest political movement in history fueled by working-class Americans who are being joined by leaders from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. He’s not even in the White House yet and President Trump is already uniting all Americans through success.”
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI, saying the start-up infringed on its copyright in training A.I. systems.)
The latest moves brought the tech industry’s backing of Mr. Trump to an even greater critical mass, as his early tech supporters spoke out about their giddiness for the incoming administration.
Marc Andreessen, an influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist who endorsed Mr. Trump during the campaign, said in a podcast interview this week that he had spent about half of his time since Election Day working on the presidential transition. He framed Mr. Trump’s win as a cultural moment for a “techno-optimist” ideology.
“It’s morning in America, so I’m very happy,” Mr. Andreessen said. “People are finally poking their heads out of the frozen tundra of the culture and realizing that it’s actually OK to build things, hire on merit, celebrate success, and fundamentally be proud of the country and be patriotic.”
Mr. Andreessen has joined tech executives such as Mark Pincus, who founded the gaming company Zynga, and David Marcus, a former Meta executive, at Mar-a-Lago to help staff the new administration and to work on reducing regulations in industries like A.I. and cryptocurrencies.
Peter Thiel, a tech investor who was involved in Mr. Trump’s 2016 transition but has been less involved this time, said in an interview that aired this week that his expectations were “properly intermediate” for Mr. Trump’s performance. Even so, Mr. Thiel said, it was an epochal moment.
The “ancien régime that is liberalism is really exhausted,” Mr. Thiel told Piers Morgan in the interview, in a reference to the political and social system in France before the French Revolution.
Exactly eight years ago, Mr. Thiel organized the parallel to the latest tech pilgrimages — a selective get-together at Trump Tower of tech titans and Mr. Trump. At the time, attendees expressed a similar optimism, which evaporated when Mr. Trump pushed policies on climate and immigration early in his term that repelled tech leaders.
Some signs of tension between Mr. Trump and the tech industry have already surfaced this time. Mr. Trump has named tech hawks to senior administration roles, as well as tech executives such as David Sacks, an investor and podcaster who has been appointed “czar” of crypto and A.I.
Part of Mr. Sacks’s job is to assemble a council to advise Mr. Trump, who has pronounced himself a crypto believer, on crypto and A.I. But Mr. Trump’s circle of advisers and his tech friends have disagreed over whether there should be two separate advisory bodies or just one, people involved in the conversations said.
Those in the cryptocurrency and A.I. fields have largely pushed for two different councils, one person said, adding that there had also been some dispute over who would choose those who serve on the councils. People who donated to support Mr. Trump are likely to gain preference in receiving positions on the councils, the people said.
Many cryptocurrency and A.I. executives have also visited Mar-a-Lago or talked with Mr. Trump or those close to him. Among them is Daniel Gross, an A.I. executive, who recently visited Mar-a-Lago, according to a social-media post from him.
Michael Saylor, the executive chairman of MicroStrategy, a publicly traded software firm that owns tens of billions of dollars of Bitcoin, said in an interview this week that he would be “happy to volunteer my services” to the crypto advisory council. And Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, spoke privately with Mr. Trump last month, two people with knowledge of the matter said. (Coinbase said in a statement that it planned to work with Republicans and Democrats.)
Brad Garlinghouse, the chief executive of the crypto company Ripple, said he also visited Mar-a-Lago recently to talk about crypto. Not to be outdone, Ripple plans to donate $5 million in XRP, its own digital currency, to Mr. Trump’s inaugural fund, he said.
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