Amazon is reportedly planning to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund as founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos follows in the footsteps of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who directed his company to make the same contribution earlier this week.
Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon, listens during a meeting of technology executives and ... [+]
The Wall Street Journal and CNN cited unnamed sources in reporting plans for the donation, which comes as Trump, who has been critical of major tech companies and long feuded with Bezos, prepares to retake the White House next month.
Amazon also gave $58,000 in cash and in-kind donations to Trump's inauguration in 2017, according to The Wall Street Journal, but Facebook, which changed its name to Meta in 2020, did not donate to President Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration or Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
Bezos is set to have dinner with Trump next week at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
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Bezos and Trump have long had a contentious relationship. Trump has repeatedly criticized The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, and complained about its coverage of his first term. Amazon Web Services complained that Trump intervened to block a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Department of Defense, and Trump has said the Post should be registered as a lobbyist working on behalf of Amazon. Trump has accused Amazon of not paying taxes and putting small retailers out of business, and suggested Amazon should be paying the government-owned U.S. Postal Service more than it does for deliveries. Since Trump started inching closer to the White House, however, Bezos has seemingly moved to mend fences. He posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, for the first time in almost a year after an assassination attempt on Trump in July, writing Trump "showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire tonight. So thankful for his safety and so sad for the victims and their families." He reportedly stepped in to block The Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, breaking decades of tradition, and congratulated Trump on "an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory” after the election.
It’s not uncommon for corporations to make up a large share of donations to presidential inaugural celebrations, with few exceptions, like in 2009, when then-President-elect Barack Obama refused to accept any corporate donations and when Biden didn’t accept tech donations for 2021.
Bezos is the second-richest person in the world, behind only Elon Musk, with an estimated net worth of $242.5 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has an estimated $217.9 billion, putting him fourth on the world's billionaires list. Trump is also a billionaire thanks to his stakes in Truth Social's parent company, the Trump Media and Technology Group, his real estate investments and other assets, and is worth an estimated $6.2 billion as of Thursday.