Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos head to Trump’s inauguration

It shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point, but NBC News is reporting that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos will attend President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

What do all these tech leaders have in common? All have gone public with varying degrees of support for the incoming Trump administration, and all three have donated money to his campaign or inauguration. It represents a major turning point since Trump first came into office, when the tech industry kept its distance from him and eventually kicked him out of its services altogether after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

Zuckerberg, in particular, has moved away from a rather acrimonious relationship with Trump, who threatened to jail him for his stance on moderating conservative content, but now feels better about him as Zuckerberg has promised to loosening content restrictions on Meta’s platforms, got rid of the company’s DEI programs and appointed an outspoken Republican to head its political arm. Bezos, as the owner of The Washington Postregularly drew criticism from Trump on his first visit and saw the possibility that USPS prices charged to Amazon could be raised in retaliation for his paper’s coverage.

Both Meta and Amazon each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, and Elon Musk, of course, is spending aggressively on Trump’s re-election campaign. He will help reduce government spending through the DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, and is looking to hire more tech figures to staff the initiative.

According to NBCthe three tech leaders will be seated “on the platform near cabinet officials and elected leaders.”

What is perhaps most remarkable about Silicon Valley’s turn to Trump is how open it all is. While in the past an investigative journalist might have had to do some digging to uncover pay-to-play schemes, none of the tech leaders here are hiding what they’re up to. They are doing everything they can to get on Trump’s good side, prevent any attacks he might cause, and perhaps get preferential treatment for lucrative defense contracts. This despite the fact that technical staff tend to be much more liberal than their employers. But these leaders must consider that the pros of supporting Trump outweigh the cons. Especially now that the tech industry has gone through massive layoffs in recent years, rank-and-file engineers don’t have the power they once had.