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As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House in January, corporations and their executives are vying to get on his good side, with some companies donating seven-figure sums to his inauguration.
Silicon Valley giants like Meta, Amazon, Uber and OpenAI have contributed at least $1 million each to Trump's inaugural fund. As The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing donors and people familiar with the matter, companies that previously condemned the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and vowed to reconsider support for politicians who rejected the 2020 election results — like Ford, Goldman Sachs and AT&T — have similarly made large contributions to Trump's 2025 inauguration. (A Mother Jones report last year found several corporations, including AT&T, gave money to at least one election-denying lawmaker during the 2022 election cycle after promising to pause contributions to such officials. Neither NBC News nor MSNBC has independently verified the Journal and Mother Jones reports.)
“People just really want to move forward and move on. The election results were very clear,” a representative at one of the companies mentioned in the Journal report told the outlet. The Journal did not specify which company employs the representative.
The donations to Trump's inauguration have come at such furious pace that his inaugural committee is on track to raise more than $150 million, ABC News reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. That amount would dwarf the $62 million President Joe Biden's inaugural fund raised in 2021 and surpass the $107 million in contributions to Trump's inaugural committee in 2017.
Donations to inaugural committees are not restricted by federal law. With Trump expected to make drastic changes to federal policies that oversee a host of industries, several corporate executives — including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Apple's Tim Cook — have already paid a visit to Mar-a-Lago for some face time with the president-elect. They also likely see these corporate contributions as a chance to generate even more goodwill with the incoming president, whose approach to politics has been more nakedly transactional than most.