A parade of tech billionaires and key members of his orbit joined President-elect Donald Trump as he kicked off his pre-inauguration celebrations with a church service Monday morning.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Apple boss Tim Cook and Google boss Sundar Pichai were seen taking their prime seats at St John’s Church.
Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, FIFA president Gianni Infantino and former British prime minister Boris Johnson have also been spotted at the church.
Many of those executives were among Trump’s first critics in the business world during his first term, speaking out on issues such as climate change and immigration.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chou, as his company grapples with the fallout from the US ban, is expected to attend the inauguration, as well as OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi.
Then, of course, there’s SpaceX and Tesla boss Elon Musk, who spent nearly $300 million helping the presidential campaign and has been firmly on his side ever since.
It is a striking spectacle. The last public event in Washington that brought so many tech bosses together in the same room was a 2020 congressional hearing focused on their companies.
Today, most companies still have serious backlogs before the US government, including antitrust lawsuits, investigations, regulatory battles and tariffs.
Last week, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bennett, both Democrats, shared a letter to the CEOs, accusing them of trying to “coddle the new Trump administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation and buy favor.”
“It’s funny they never sent me this for a Democrat contribution,” Altman responded on social media.
How durable the tech bromance will prove to be and how far Trump will push on many of these issues remain open questions.
But the president, who first left office as something of a pariah in the business world, seems to be relishing his new position.
As he wrote on social media last month: “Everyone wants to be my friend!!!”
Trump’s new friendship with tech executives has not gone down well with everyone in his circle.
Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon on Sunday called Musk a “genuinely evil guy,” claiming he would be “kicked out of here by Inauguration Day.”
“I look at this and I think most people in our movement look at this as President Trump broke the oligarchs, he broke them and they surrendered,” Bannon told ABC News.