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The days of tech CEOs tussling with Donald Trump are fading. After distancing themselves from Trump during his first administration—and publicly rebuking him after the events of January 6, 2021—many Silicon Valley leaders are now taking a softer approach. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have each pledged, through their companies or their personal coffers, individual $1 million donations to Trump’s inauguration fund. The Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who protested Trump’s immigration policies in 2017, apparently dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, this month; Bezos, along with the the heads of TikTok and Netflix, are reportedly on the schedule there this week too. As Trump put it in a press conference today: “In the first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Friendship may not be exactly what these tech CEOs are after. Self-preservation seems to be playing a role—these companies don’t want to lose out on government contracts or face retribution from a man known for threatening to punish his critics. For years, Trump was no friend to tech, and vice versa: During his first term, he used Twitter to lob insults at Amazon and its then-CEO Bezos. And as recently as this past summer, Trump was hurling unfounded accusations at Zuckerberg. Ambition is likely part of the calculus too; CEOs hope that Trump will go easier on the industry than the Biden administration did, including on crypto and AI. Now, as Trump prepares to take office a second time, tech executives seem eager to please the president-elect—and to start a new chapter in their relationship that elides the past.

Throughout Trump’s 2024 campaign, tech executives were privately speaking with Trump about their interests and policy preferences; after the election, the public congratulations quickly rolled in. Business leaders attempting to get on good terms with an incoming administration is not unheard of. But the machinations here are happening out in the open. As my colleague Ali Breland wrote last week, “Until recently, elites and politicians who worked together feared the scandal of the sausage-making process being revealed, and the public backlash that could come with it.” Now, with Elon Musk setting a new standard for blatantly self-serving political participation—including attempts to influence the outcome of an election—his peers are operating more brazenly than they once did. Beyond the tech CEOs who are donating to and hobnobbing with Trump, several prominent venture capitalists who stumped for Trump are now advocating for their fellow tech leaders to be nominated for roles in the Trump administration. The venture capitalist David Sacks, an outspoken Trump supporter, has been named the “A.I. and Crypto Czar” for the incoming administration. And of course, the vice-president-elect was once a venture capitalist too.

Donating to any president-elect’s inauguration fund is a standard way for corporations to signal goodwill. Some tech companies, including Google and Amazon, quietly gave relatively small amounts to Trump’s first inauguration fund, according to data published by OpenSecrets. Firms such as Google and Microsoft donated to President Joe Biden’s inauguration fund. And a  seven-figure tech donation is not unprecedented—Microsoft gave more than $2 million to President Barack Obama for his 2013 inauguration. The flow of such large sums from multiple executives this year, Margaret O’Mara, a historian of Silicon Valley, told me in an email, is “both a reflection of the growth of inaugural spending generally” and “the surging profits and net worth of tech’s biggest names.” And the meetings with and warm statements from tech leaders who are donating this money signals a new chapter of cooperation between Big Tech and Trump.

The tech industry has always relied, to an extent, on the federal government, but its political allegiances have shifted. A free-market libertarian strain has long run through the region and industry, though in the 2010s, the industry cozied up to the Obama administration, a relationship that benefited both sides. During the first Trump term, the government-tech relationship became uneasy: Social platforms attempted damage control after blowback from employees and users who blamed them for Trump’s ascent to office (remember Zuckerberg’s national listening tour in 2017?). As Trump enters his second term having received close to half of the country’s vote, support for him may not risk that same level of public outrage: In many circles, the Trump taboo is over. As O’Mara put it, the social consequences of supporting Trump are lesser, and the business risks of crossing him are higher.

When Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago on the evening before Thanksgiving, he and other guests reportedly stood with hands over hearts while listening to a recording of the national anthem sung by people accused of January 6–related crimes. Whether Zuckerberg knew who the singers were is unclear. But the scene was uncanny given that January 6, when it happened, was a bright-red line for the tech industry. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch banned or suspended Trump, and companies such as Amazon paused donations to election deniers. Now, with the arrival of Trump 2.0, that red line has been erased entirely.

Related:

• Even the Koch brothers weren’t this brazen.
• What’s with all the Trumpy VCs?

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Maybe Democrats didn’t do so badly after all.
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• The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research, Helen Lewis argues.

Today’s News

1. At least two people were killed and several others were injured by a shooter at Abundant Life Christian School, in Madison, Wisconsin. The suspect, who was found dead, was a student at the school, according to the Madison police chief.
2. Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet. She wrote that Trudeau told her on Friday that he wanted to move her to another role in the cabinet, and that she disagreed with him on the best path forward in the face of Trump’s threat to implement new tariffs.
3. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence; the country will face snap elections next year to form a new coalition government.

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: These books and movies will entertain even the most fleeting of attention spans, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

What If You Just Skipped the Holidays?

By Faith Hill

For years, ahead of family holiday gatherings, Alicia Dudley would wake up anxious. Since she’d gotten married, her relatives and her husband’s had wanted them at multiple different celebrations for each occasion. Bundling up her small child and toting him about was a pain. Dudley, a creative director in Virginia, couldn’t believe that on her rare, precious days off, she was doing what she always did: running around.

Eventually, she made a simple but major decision—she quit the holidays.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Has your cat closed its rings today?
• Oliver Sacks’s lifelong search for recognition
• Conor Friedersdorf: How to move on from the worst of identity politics
• The health-care system isn’t hopeless.
• How Democrats lost their way on immigration

Culture Break

Have a laugh. This week’s Saturday Night Live highlighted Chris Rock’s talent for trolling, Shirley Li writes.

Watch. Spend some time with six binge-worthy movie series recommended by The Atlantic’s writers and editors.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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