(San Francisco) Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, added to the increasingly close ties between the president-elect and the technology community.
“They will take pride of place at the ceremony, seated together on the dais with other distinguished guests, including members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet,” said the NBC article published Tuesday, based on a source involved in the organization of the event.
The three emblematic figures of the American technology industry have courted the president-elect in recent months, with varying degrees of fervor.
Elon Musk became a fixture during the Republican’s election campaign, to which he contributed significantly with massive financial donations and political rallies.
The boss of Tesla, CEO of SpaceX and owner of X has thus acquired strong political influence and obtained an extragovernmental mission of deregulation and reduction of public spending.
The richest man in the world had already started his shift to the right years ago.
The turnaround is more recent for Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. The Amazon founder and chairman fought the first Trump administration over large defense contracts awarded to Microsoft, its cloud computing rival.
PHOTO DAVID ZALUBOWSKI, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Mark Zuckerberg
This time, Jeff Bezos – who also has a space company, Blue Origin, lagging behind SpaceX – adopted a different posture.
He prevented the Washington Post, which he owns, from supporting Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. And Amazon paid $1 million for the president-elect’s inauguration ceremony in Washington on Monday.
PHOTO ISAIAH DOWNING, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Jeff Bezos
Meta gave the same amount.
If Donald Trump has not spared the three men and their companies in the past, Mark Zuckerberg seemed the lowest in his esteem.
This summer again, the former President of the United States threatened to jail the boss of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) if he won the November election, because of Facebook’s decision to ban him in early 2021 , after the assault on the capitol by his admirers.
But since his victory, Mark Zuckerberg has multiplied his advances: he has had dinner with him, appointed several of his allies to key positions, put an end to programs (anti-disinformation, prodiversity) highly criticized by conservatives and relaxed the rules of moderation content on Facebook and Instagram, following the example of Twitter, which became X under Musk.
