United States: Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk will be at Donald Trump’s inauguration

Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, increasingly close ties between the president-elect and the technology community.

“They will take pride of place at the ceremony, seated together on the dais with other distinguished guests, including members of Donald Trump’s cabinet,” said the NBC article published Tuesday, based on a source involved in the organization of the event.

The three emblematic personalities of American tech have courted the president-elect in recent months, with varying degrees of fervor. Elon Musk became essential during the Republican’s electoral campaign, to which he contributed significantly with massive financial donations and political meetings.

Millions paid for the ceremony

The boss of Tesla, CEO of SpaceX and owner of X has thus acquired strong political influence and obtained an extra-governmental mission of deregulation and reduction of public spending. The richest man in the world had already started his shift to the right years ago.

The turnaround is more recent for Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. The Amazon founder and chairman fought the first Trump administration over big defense contracts awarded to Microsoft, its cloud rival.

This time, Jeff Bezos – who also has a space company, Blue Origin, lagging behind SpaceX – adopted a different posture. He prevented the Washington Post, which he owns, from supporting Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. And Amazon paid $1 million for the president-elect’s inauguration ceremony in Washington on Monday. Meta gave the same amount.

Changes to Meta

If Donald Trump has not spared the three men and their companies in the past, Mark Zuckerberg seemed the lowest in his esteem. This summer again, the former President of the United States threatened to jail the boss of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) if he won the November election, because of Facebook’s decision to ban him in early 2021 , after the storming of the capitol by his fans.

But since his victory, Mark Zuckerberg has multiplied his advances: he has had dinner with him, appointed several of his allies to key positions, put an end to programs (anti-disinformation, pro-diversity) highly criticized by conservatives and relaxed the rules content moderation on Facebook and Instagram, following the example of Twitter, which became X under Elon Musk.

“Inequality”

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – in that order – are also the three richest men in the world, according to Bloomberg and Forbes lists. These “three people today have more wealth than the poorest half of American society,” Bernie Sanders, a figure of the left in the United States, protested on Tuesday on X.

The senator published an excerpt from an interview he gave to a New York radio station, SiriusXM, to explain that “capitalism is broken.” He drew a parallel between these three men whose combined fortunes are worth “almost a trillion dollars”, while “60% of Americans have no savings at all” and “800,000 people live on the streets” .

“Income and wealth inequality have never been greater in American history,” he said. “This is not the world or the economy we want.”

He also castigated the power of three American investment companies, BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, which are “the main shareholders of 95% of S&P companies”, the stock market index based on 500 large groups listed on American stock exchanges. . “In sector after sector, a handful of very, very large companies control what is produced and the kind of prices we pay,” he insisted.

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