On the day of Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, a group of his top billionaire donors, including the casino magnate Miriam Adelson and the future Republican National Committee finance chair Todd Ricketts, hosted a small private party, away from the publicly advertised inaugural balls.
It was the sort of event that carried no interest at the time for the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He greeted Trump’s first presidency by publicly identifying his wife’s parents and his own ancestors with the immigrants targeted by Trump’s early executive orders. “These issues are personal for me,” Zuckerberg wrote in a public letter of concern a week after Trump took office.
But this month, as the same donors made plans for Trump’s second inauguration, Zuckerberg successfully maneuvered to become a co-host of their black-tie event, scheduled for tonight. The party quickly became one of the most sought-after gatherings of the weekend, overwhelming organizers with RSVPs from people who had not received invitations.
Even more striking: Zuckerberg sat in front of Trump’s incoming Cabinet in the Capitol Rotunda at his inauguration—at the personal invitation of Trump himself, according to two people briefed on the plans who, like some other sources interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to describe private conversations. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.)
Zuckerberg was not alone. Trump’s inauguration events featured a Silicon Valley smorgasbord, with leaders from Apple, Google, and TikTok in attendance, as well as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Several of the tech moguls also joined a small prayer service this morning at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Later, they blended in with the Trump clan directly behind the incoming president as he officially assumed power just after noon, like honorary family members.
The scene announced a remarkable new dynamic in Washington: Far more so than in his first term, the ultra-wealthy—and tech billionaires in particular—are embracing Trump. And the new president is happy to entertain their courtship, setting up the possibility that Trump’s second turn in the White House could be shaped by person-to-person transactions with business and tech executives—a new kind of American oligarchy.
Eight years ago, Trump landed in Washington in a fit of defiance, denouncing in his inaugural address “the American carnage” wrought by “a small group in our nation’s capital.” Four years later, he left as an outcast, judged responsible for the U.S. Capitol riot and a haphazard attempt to undo the constitutional order. He returns this week with a clean sweep of swing states and the national popular vote, the loyal support of Republicans in Congress, and the financial backing of corporate donors who are expected to help the inaugural committee raise twice what it did in 2017. Organizers of the Women’s March, which stomped on Trump’s 2017 inauguration by sending hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets, settled for a series of unremarkable Saturday gatherings. The Democratic opposition, which treated Trump’s first term as an existential threat, now lacks an evident strategy or leader.
Like nearly every entity that has tried and failed to bend Trump to its will—his party, his former rivals, his partners in Congress, and his former aides among them—the tech elites largely seem to have decided that they’re better off seeking Trump’s favor.
Just months ago, Trump released a coffee-table photo book that included a pointed rant about Zuckerberg’s $420 million donation in 2020 to fund local election offices during the coronavirus pandemic, an undertaking that Trump called “a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.” “We are watching him closely,” Trump wrote of Zuckerberg, “and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison.”
But since Trump’s victory, Zuckerberg has worked to get himself in the new president’s good graces. The Meta CEO traveled to Mar-a-Lago; added a Trump pal to his corporate board; extolled the importance of “masculine energy” on Joe Rogan’s podcast; abandoned the Meta fact-checking program, which MAGA world had viewed as biased; and personally worked with Trump to try to resolve a 2021 civil lawsuit over Facebook’s decision to ban him from the platform, a case that legal experts once considered frivolous.
Bezos, meanwhile, worried aloud in 2016 that Trump’s behavior “erodes our democracy around the edges” and spent his first term taking fire from the president for the aggressive reporting of The Washington Post, the newspaper that Bezos owns (and where, until recently, we both were reporters). Now Amazon, like Meta, has given $1 million to the 2025 inaugural committee, and the company recently announced it would release a documentary about, and produced by, the first lady, Melania Trump. Even Musk, who spent more than $250 million last year to elect Trump and now is one of his top advisers, called for the aging Trump to “sail into the sunset” as recently as 2022.
“In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump marveled at a mid-December news conference. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”
The sheer quantity of money flowing to, and surrounding, Trump has increased. In his first term, he assembled the wealthiest Cabinet in history; this time, his would-be Cabinet includes more than a dozen billionaires. Sixteen of his appointees come not just from the top one percent, but from the top one-ten-thousandth percent, according to the Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization. Democrats, too, have long kept their wealthiest donors close, inviting them in on policy discussions and providing special access, but never before have the nation’s wealthiest played such a central role in the formation of a new administration.
As recently as last week, before the inauguration proceedings were moved indoors because of cold weather, a donor adviser got a last-minute offer of $500,000 for four tickets, according to the person who fielded the call and had to gently decline the request. Trump’s 2017 committee raised $107 million, more than twice the 2013 record set by Barack Obama, and spent $104 million. So far this year, the 2025 inaugural committee is expected to raise at least $225 million and spend less than $75 million on the inaugural festivities, according to a person familiar with the plans. At least some of the unspent tens of millions could go to Trump’s presidential library, several people involved with fundraising told us.
Trump’s first inauguration had all the markings of a hastily arranged bachelor party put on someone else’s credit card. Trump’s company and the 2017 inaugural committee ultimately paid $750,000 to the District of Columbia to settle claims of illegal payments, including allegations of inflated charges to a Washington hotel then owned by Trump. (Neither entity admitted wrongdoing.) This time, the inauguration organizers have been more disciplined, and donors have been eager to reward Trump’s victory.
“People were prepared, so when he did win, Trump was looking for checks,” a person involved in all of the Trump campaigns and both inaugural events told us. “Once Elon got in there, that was kind of the holy water that allowed all the other tech guys to follow. They all followed each other like cattle.”
What wealthy donors could get in return for their support of Trump remains an open question. Zuckerberg’s, Bezos’s, and Musk’s federal business interests include rocketship and cloud-computing contracts, a federal investigation of Tesla’s auto-driving technology, a pending Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Meta, and a separate antitrust case against Amazon. Just last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for allegedly failing to disclose his early stake in Twitter, the social-media giant he later took over and renamed X. (A lawyer for Musk has said he did “nothing wrong.”) When Trump promised in his inaugural address to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” the cameras panned to Musk, whose SpaceX is racing Bezos’s Blue Origin; Musk raised both thumbs and mouthed, “Yeah!” as he broke into an ebullient grin.
Existing federal ethics rules were not designed to address the possibility of the world’s wealthiest people padding the pockets of the first family through television rights or legal settlements. The Trump family’s recently announced cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, creates yet another way for the wealthy to invest directly in an asset to benefit the commander in chief. “There is no enforcement mechanism against the president under these laws,” Trevor Potter, a former general counsel for the late Arizona Senator John McCain’s campaign, told us.
Even as Silicon Valley elites try to ingratiate themselves with the incoming president, some of Trump’s populist supporters are murmuring that the emerging tech oligarchy is diluting the purity of the MAGA base. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump who has clashed in recent weeks with Musk over immigration policy, has fashioned himself as the field general for a fight against the tech bros and their outsize influence on a president eager to cut deals.
“He’s got them on display as, ‘I kicked their ass.’ I’m stunned that these nerds don’t get anything to be up there,” Bannon told us last week, referring to the tech leaders appearing in prime camera position at Trump’s inauguration. “It’s like walking into Teddy Roosevelt’s lodge and seeing the mounted heads of all the big game he shot.”
For now, the ragtag populist figures like Bannon who defined Trump’s early years in politics are still celebrating. Roger Stone, the convicted and subsequently pardoned Trump kibitzer, attended inauguration events in his anachronistic morning suit—with plans for evening white tie. The British MP Nigel Farage hosted a party Friday at the Hay-Adams hotel, while former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson managed to get a ticket for the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
On Thursday, Bannon threw his own party, titled “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” or “A New Order of the Ages,” at Butterworth’s club on Capitol Hill. Drinks included, perhaps predictably, the Covfefe Martini (vodka, Fernet, espresso) and the Im-Peach This (gin, peach, Cocci Americano). Bannon arrived fashionably late, and was followed from the moment he ducked through the door by a mob of iPhone documenters, and even a man with a flashbulb. He received an impromptu line of frenzied well-wishers that one British journalist quipped was “as if for the Queen.”
As seared foie gras and freshly shucked oysters moved through the room, Bannon urged his supporters to “set new lows tonight,” reminding them that once Trump took the oath of office on Monday, “then the real fun happens.”
“You have two to three days to get sober,” he exhorted. “Go for it!”
The tech barons also fanned out through the city in celebration. The next night, across town, Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, dined at Georgetown’s new hot spot, Osteria Mozza, sitting at a window table with leaders of the Post. On Saturday, Palantir and the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel hosted a party at his Woodley Park mansion; a bow-tied and mop-topped Zuckerberg arrived before the sun had fully set. And yesterday, Trump called Musk up onstage during his pre-inauguration rally inside the Capital One Arena—“C’mere, Elon!” he growled—briefly ceding the spotlight to the Tesla executive and his young son X.
During the 2024 election, many liberals and some conservatives feared that Trump’s second term would usher in a new kind of American autocracy, à la Hungary. But on its first day, at least, Trump’s new administration seems, more than anything else, oligarchal—albeit one where the transactions mainly flow one way, at least so far.
“They’re lining up to obey in advance. because they think they’re buying themselves peace of mind,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism who has been critical of Trump, told us. But, added Ben-Ghiat, who noted the overlap between autocracy and oligarchy: “They can give that million and everything can be fine—but the minute they displease Trump, he could come after them.”
