Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg will attend Donald Trump’s inauguration next week, NBC News reported Tuesday, further highlighting the tech giants’ efforts to develop closer ties with the incoming president.
The network, citing an unnamed official involved in planning the January 20 ceremony, said the three men would be seated together on stage with prominent guests, including Trump Cabinet nominees.
Musk – CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and majority owner of X – has become one of Trump’s closest allies and his planned attendance at the ceremony is no surprise.
Musk shares Trump’s far-right politics and plowed millions of dollars into supporting his presidential campaign.
Trump has chosen Musk to co-lead an advisory commission aimed at reducing federal spending and bureaucracy, to be called the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE”, which will not be an official US agency.
Bezos and Zuckerberg have a less close relationship with Trump, but both have taken steps since the election to try to curry favor with the president-elect, including meeting with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Meta CEO Zuckerberg signaled a rightward political shift last week when he announced that Facebook and Instagram would eliminate fact-checking in the United States, ending what he described as censorship by governments and so-called legacy media.
The pivot to Trumpian talking points surprised some meta watchers, but was also in line with previous decisions by Zuckerberg aimed at maintaining his dominance on social media.
Over the summer, Trump threatened to jail Zuckerberg over Facebook’s decision to ban him from the platform in 2021.
Highlighting Zuckerberg’s continued move into politics, he will co-host a post-inauguration reception for Trump with several well-known Republican donors, according to an invitation obtained by the Puck news site on Tuesday.
Bezos’s relationship with Trump has also seen moments of significant friction.
The Amazon founder also owns The Washington Post, one of several newspapers against which Trump has railed over the years.
In a decision that shocked many in the American media, The Post declined to endorse a presidential candidate ahead of the November election.
According to a report in the newspaper, Bezos intervened to stop the board from publishing an editorial in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris.
The newspaper’s leadership denied that report.
Bezos’ aerospace company Blue Origin also competes for lucrative government contracts.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
