Amazon plans to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural fund as founder Jeff Bezos and other tech leaders strengthen ties with the incoming administration.
of wall street journal report Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos is scheduled to visit Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, a private club in Palm Beach, Florida, next week, and preparations are underway to make a donation, according to people familiar with the matter. It is said that there is. Bezos and the company made the donation decision and informed Trump's team earlier this week. According to a person close to Bezos, “Mr. Bezos is making donations through Amazon.''
In addition to the cash donation, Amazon plans to stream the inauguration through its Prime Video business and will make a separate in-kind donation worth $1 million, another person said. This is a significant increase from the roughly $58,000 in cash and in-kind donations Amazon donated to President Trump's inauguration in 2017, when other technology companies made larger donations.
Tech companies have been the target of fierce criticism from Mr. Trump and his allies, and other technology company leaders are rushing to smooth relations with him. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta also donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund.
Bezos and Trump have had a long-standing feud, one of the reasons being Bezos' stock ownership. washington post. President Trump accused the Post of being a “lobbyist” for Amazon and was dissatisfied with its coverage of the presidential inauguration. When Amazon Web Services lost a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Department of Defense, the company blamed it on undue pressure and attacks from President Trump to damage Bezos and keep the contract away from AWS. insisted. The Pentagon denied such influence at the time.
But Bezos has recently taken a more conciliatory attitude toward Trump. He congratulated Trump on his “extraordinary political comeback,” noting that he seems “calder” and “more confident” this time around, and expressed optimism about a second term. In October, Bezos washington post He also decided not to support Trump's opponent, Kamala Harris, sparking outrage on the left.
For Amazon, the stakes are high when it comes to the federal government. In addition to Bezos' space company Blue Origin competing for government contracts, Amazon was also sued by the FTC last year in an antitrust case. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, whose SpaceX company competes with Blue Origin, has become a close ally of Trump and donated more than $200 million to his re-election campaign.
Other technology industry leaders are also trying to repair their relationships with Trump. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, whose company has been the top target of allegations of anti-conservative bias and is facing an antitrust lawsuit, continued this week at Mar-a-Lago. I met with President Trump.
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News, covering free speech and online censorship issues.
