President-elect Donald Trump had dinner Wednesday with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and the two were joined by billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump transition team spokesperson confirmed.
The meeting marks the latest trek by tech executives to Trump’s home in South Florida to appeal to the incoming administration, including Silicon Valley titans who spurned Trump in his last term. Musk has been a frequent presence at Trump’s side, advising the president-elect on federal spending and tech policies.
After feuds during Trump’s first term, Trump and Bezos have both noted their recent evolving relationship. Trump told reporters Monday that he has noticed that tech executives are friendlier to him.
“One of the big differences between the first term – in the first term everybody was fighting me,” Trump said. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai also recently visited Trump’s West Palm Beach home.
A representative for Bezos didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post about the Trump meeting.
Musk wrote on X Wednesday night that “it was a great conversation” with Trump and Bezos, who also owns Blue Origin, a rival rocket company to Musk’s SpaceX. The two billionaires have clashed over business. Last month, Musk accused Bezos of telling people that Trump would lose and to sell stocks of Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX. Bezos denied the allegations.
During his first term as president, Trump complained bitterly about Bezos to his advisers and sought to punish Bezos’s companies out of anger about Post journalism, The Post has reported. Trump accused Amazon of swindling the U.S. Postal Service, tried to get the government to cancel subscriptions to The Post and accused Amazon of not paying enough taxes.
Now, as Trump is preparing to return to the White House, Bezos has offered him more public support. He posted a congratulatory message about Trump’s electoral win, writing that it was “an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.” And he offered a thankful post after Trump survived an assassination attempt. Bezos also committed to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund through Amazon.
The Post’s owner faced a political controversy when he decided to end The Post’s practice of endorsing a candidate for president, spiking The Post editorial board’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Bezos later wrote that he made the decision to improve readers’ trust in the newspaper and “that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here.”
Bezos, who had previous disagreements with Trump, told the New York Times DealBook conference earlier this month that he thinks the president-elect is “calmer” and has “grown in the past eight years.”
“He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him,” Bezos said. “We do have too much regulation in this country.”
A video circulating on social media from Trump’s Palm Beach resort club showed Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, walking with Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez.
(c) 2024, The Washington Post · Marianne LeVine, Meryl Kornfield
This is terrible. Totally unethical. A conflict of interest. Trump should resign immediately!