Google is the newest California-based tech large to make a serious 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 an announcement 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 international 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 supplied 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 guardian 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 may also make a $1 million in-kind donation by streaming the occasion on Amazon Video.
Though it’s not unparalleled for main companies to donate to inaugural committees, Trump has already set a file 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 might be rewarded for his or her efforts, although. In keeping with The New York Occasions, a few of the largest seven-figure donors received’t even obtain perks similar to VIP tickets due to their excessive demand. This appears to recommend that the businesses merely see donations as a solution to suck as much as the president-elect, particularly since a lot 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 protecting tabs on who cuts checks for him.
Another Silicon Valley giants which have donated, together with Perplexity AI, a synthetic 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 an announcement in December.
Notably, this isn’t the one means billionaire CEOs are kowtowing to Trump. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg introduced plans to disband its fact-checking workforce—a transfer broadly interpreted as a solution to curry favor with the previous and incoming president. Previously, Trump has accused social media firms, together with Fb, of censorship and of getting a bias in opposition to conservatives.
Not like a few of the others donating to Trump, although, Google and the president-elect seem to have a reasonably first rate 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. Massive tech firms have confronted heightened scrutiny from either 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, nonetheless, that he won’t break up the corporate throughout his second time period.
Realizing Trump, although, it’s solely potential he’ll change his stance. In a Dec. 4 submit to his social media web site, Reality 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!”
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