Google is the most recent California-based tech big to make a significant donation to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, which can happen on Jan. 20, or Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
On Thursday, CNBC, which cited a press release from a Google spokesperson, mentioned that Google donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund earlier this week.
“Google is pleased to support the 2025 inauguration, with a livestream on YouTube and a direct link on our homepage,” mentioned Karan Bhatia, Google’s world head of presidency affairs and public coverage. “We’re also donating to the inaugural committee.”
Bhatia added that Google has donated to earlier president’s inaugurations and in addition offered livestreams the day of.
With its $1 million donation, Google joins different tech titans in cozying as much as Trump. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon; Meta, the mum or dad firm of Fb, Instagram, and Threads; Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI; and Uber have already made related donations. Along with its $1 million money to Trump’s inaugural fund, Amazon can even make a $1 million in-kind donation by streaming the occasion on Amazon Video.
Though it’s not extraordinary for main companies to donate to inaugural committees, Trump has already set a document in donations. President Joe Biden’s 2020 inaugural committee raised practically $62 million, in contrast with the $107 million Trump’s committee raised in 2016. Already, the Trump-Vance inaugural committee has raised an eye-popping $170 million.
It’s not clear that any of those tech giants shall be rewarded for his or her efforts, although. In accordance with The New York Instances, a number of the greatest seven-figure donors gained’t even obtain perks akin to VIP tickets due to their excessive demand. This appears to counsel that the businesses merely see donations as a solution to suck as much as the president-elect, particularly since lots of them—particularly Bezos and Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta—had a stormy skilled relationship with Trump throughout his first 4 years within the White Home and Trump is reportedly maintaining tabs on who cuts checks for him.
Another Silicon Valley giants which have donated, together with Perplexity AI, a man-made intelligence firm, have taken discover of this obvious pattern.
“Unlike other tech companies who have recently donated to President Trump’s inaugural fund, Perplexity didn’t exist during his previous term, so this is an opportunity for us to collaborate on shared goals rather than mending a frayed relationship,” Perplexity Chief Enterprise Officer Dmitry Shevelenko mentioned in a assertion in December.
Notably, this isn’t the one approach billionaire CEOs are kowtowing to Trump. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg introduced plans to disband its fact-checking workforce—a transfer extensively interpreted as a solution to curry favor with the previous and incoming president. Prior to now, Trump has accused social media corporations, together with Fb, of censorship and of having a bias in opposition to conservatives.
In contrast to a number of the others donating to Trump, although, Google and the president-elect seem to have a reasonably respectable relationship—at the least for the second. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was additionally among the many billionaires who congratulated Trump on his win in November.
Nonetheless, that doesn’t imply Google and different tech giants are free from Trump’s ire as soon as he’s again within the White Home. Giant tech corporations have confronted heightened scrutiny from each side of the political aisle. In spite of everything, throughout his first time period, the Trump administration sued Google over allegations that it violated antitrust legislation. He’s since signaled, nevertheless, that he won’t break up the corporate throughout his second time period.
Realizing Trump, although, it’s fully doable he’ll change his stance. In a Dec. 4 publish to his social media web site, Fact Social, Trump accused “Big Tech” of operating amok.
He wrote: “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!”
