In one of his final official acts as the nation’s chief executive, President Biden earlier this month awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to billionaire George Soros — a well-known funder of progressive and Democratic causes whose money has, among other things, helped elect local district attorneys around the US.
Bestowing the nation’s highest civilian honor on the megadonor wasn’t exactly a surprising move coming from Biden. After all, many of Soros’ fellow billionaires — including Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs and ex-Google chairman Eric Schmidt — had helped fund Biden’s aborted re-election campaign. Major companies, too, have likewise dipped into their coffers at times to support the 46th president, such as back in 2021 when corporations like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Pfizer, Bank of America, AT&T, and Comcast put up $1 million each for Biden’s inauguration.
Fast forward four years later, with President-elect Trump preparing for his inauguration on Monday, and that same kind of political philanthropy from Big Tech CEOs to Trump is suddenly being decried as some kind of threat to the republic.
While giving his farewell address from the Oval Office in recent days, for example, Biden saw nothing ironic in warning of an “oligarchy taking shape in America” and of the “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.” Likewise, Democratic US Senators sent a letter with a barely veiled insinuation of corruption to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in response to his donation of $1 million to Trump’s inauguration — the same kind of donation, remember, that Biden got for his inauguration from both wealthy donors and corporations.
Altman tweeted out the letter he received from Senators Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bennet, which not only demanded that he explain himself and his donation, but added: “We are concerned that your company and other Big Tech donors are using your massive contributions to the inaugural fund to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation, and buy favor.”
Noted Altman in his tweet: “Funny, they never sent me one of these for contributing to democrats…”
For what it’s worth, Altman isn’t some sort of longtime Republican donor. “I am voting against Trump because I believe the principles he stands for represent an unacceptable threat to America,” Altman tweeted back in 2016. “I think he’s absuvie, erratic, and prone to fits or rage. I think he is unfit to be President and would be a threat to national security.” Furthermore, ChatGPT — the high-profile chatbot launched by Altman’s company, OpenAI — has been accused in the past of having a baked-in political bias that leans left (per The Washington Post).
Perhaps Altman changed his mind about the incoming president. I don’t know if that’s the case, but what I do know is that he also did the same thing that Democrat-leaning donors do all the time with no problem, and no one in the press or in Congress questioning whether they’re trying to curry favor or are potentially corrupt for doing so. Sens. Warren and Bennet, meanwhile, sent the same letter to Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos (incorrectly identified in their letter as Amazon’s CEO), Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshai.
This scrutiny over political donations, obviously, raises important questions about fairness and consistency in holding powerful figures accountable. But if contributions from billionaires are to be viewed skeptically, that standard should obviously apply universally, regardless of the political party involved. Instead, these selective critiques risk deepening public cynicism about the integrity of institutions and leaders. Because, let’s be real: If the other side had won in November, no one would be batting an eye at donations like these from CEOs or companies.
I can certainly understand why people might be wondering what changed this time around, why the reaction from the business community to Trump’s return is so different from what it was in 2016. Zuckerberg, for example, has gone through quite a dramatic MAGAmorposis. Likewise, Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service has acquired a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, which it plans to release in the second half of this year. You would have never seen something like that in 2016, nor a statement about it like this one from the company: “We are excited to share this truly unique story with our millions of customers around the world,” an Amazon spokesperson said about the film, which counts Mrs. Trump as an executive producer.
Maybe, though, instead of questioning the reality of political donations from only one side of the idealogical spectrum or why CEOs are doing what they do, perhaps there’s a more substantive discussion to be had about why a recent poll found that most Americans can’t point to one success of the Biden administration — and will, instead, remember him for doing “nothing.”
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