An upcoming book reveals that two of the wealthiest men in the world, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, literally groveled to President Donald Trump after he returned to power — and the Republican openly mocked them once their heads were turned.
Chronicled in their book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported that Zuckerberg and Bezos flattered Trump incessantly after he won the 2024 election, according to a Thursday story in WIRED. On one occasion, Zuckerberg sent Trump a photograph of a letter written by one of his children — the oldest of whom would have been either eight-years-old or nine-years-old at the time — in which the youth said they “looked forward to the golden age of America” that the president would supposedly usher in.
Trump later showed this off to a number of guests and visitors, along with laughing at other ingratiating texts sent to him by Zuckerberg. He was similarly determined to humiliate Bezos, who he lumped in with Zuckerberg as “tech guys” who opposed him during the 2016 election but were now “kissing my a--.”
Speaking to the world’s single richest man, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Trump bragged that Zuckerberg and Bezos had “hated me. They were doing everything they could to knock me down. And look at them now.”
Musk delightedly replied, “First-class groveling.”
Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s obsequiousness has had real-world policy consequences. Zuckerberg, who was previously on such sour terms with Musk that the two discussed fighting in a cage match, offered to help Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency as it gutted or closed down government agencies like USAID, the Department of Education, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services. Similarly, Bezos reportedly agreed with Trump when he described The Washington Post (which Bezos owns) as “really unfair,” adding that the billionaire had “got to take better care” of the newspaper’s oft-critical coverage of him. Bezos allegedly responded that “the people there are terrible” and “don’t listen” to him.
While the revelation of their sycophancy to Trump may embarrass Zuckerberg, Bezos, their business associates and their supporters, that may prove to be the least of their problems. In an April article for Foreign Affairs, Christopher Hartwell and Tricia D. Olsen pointed out that Trump is modeling his relationship with American billionaires off of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s relationship with his own country’s oligarchs. Despite their hope that cozying up to a right-wing authoritarian would help their businesses, Hartwell and Olsen explained that it has often had the opposite effect on their overall fortunes.
The problem, they explained, is that authoritarians eventually need to demonstrate their dominance by humbling the super-rich with whom they formed alliances.
“By stripping the post-Soviet oligarchs of their assets, Putin could refill state coffers and distribute the extra spoils among his own new ruling elite, thereby creating a new oligarchy that was wholly dependent on his whims and desires,” Hartwell and Olsen wrote. “After the 2012 presidential election, which was marred by widespread allegations of fraud and mass protests against the regime, this system became hypercentralized and even more dependent on Putin. Fealty to Putin, rather than managerial expertise, became and remains the key criterion for success. The consequences of failing to adhere to this compact can be deadly. There seems to be nothing as dangerous to a high-profile Russian business executive as an open window.”
Despite the possibility for betrayal, America’s billionaires continue ingratiating themselves with Trump — and, in the case of Musk, doing more than that. In addition to donating at least $288 billion to Trump and other Republican candidates during the 2024 elections, Trump enigmatically insinuated that Musk’s knowledge of computers helped him win Pennsylvania.
Musk “journeyed to Pennsylvania where he spent like a month and a half campaigning for me in Pennsylvania, and he's a popular guy, and he was very effective,” Trump said shortly before his second inauguration (where Musk would later deliver a Nazi salute). “And he knows those computers better than anybody, all those computers, those vote counting computers.”
He then added, “And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like, in a landslide, so it was pretty good, it was pretty good. So, thank you to Elon.”
When AlterNet contacted Trump’s White House after inside Democratic Party sources speculated Musk may have rigged the 2024 election, they did not directly reply to the specific questions.
“AlterNet does nothing more than pump out glorified press releases for the Democrats that are chock full of left-wing conspiracy theories,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told AlterNet. “For the three people reading this, here’s the truth: President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections. The President has urged Congress to pass the SAVE America Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting.”
