President Donald Trump privately laughed at two top tech billionaires behind their backs as they sought to curry favor with him following the 2024 race.
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According to “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” — a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, obtained ahead of its June 23 release by Wired — Trump spent weeks regaling associates with stories of how Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos were “kissing my a—.”
“You would not believe the texts I got from these tech guys. I’ve got to show you,” Trump told guests, according to the book.
Among the texts Trump showed off: a photo of a letter written by one of Zuckerberg’s grade-school-age children, who wrote that they “looked forward to the golden age of America.” When Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago the night before Thanksgiving 2024, Trump welcomed him by playing the national anthem — performed by the J6 Prison Choir, a group of detained January 6 rioters.
Trump also recounted the dynamic to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. “Think of where these guys were in 2016,” Trump told Musk, per the book. “They hated me. They were doing everything they could to knock me down. And look at them now.”
“First-class groveling,” Musk replied.
Bezos fared no better. Over dinner at Mar-a-Lago in December 2024, Bezos trashed his own newspaper to Trump, calling Washington Post staffers “terrible.” “They don’t listen,” Bezos said, per the book. “My other companies, they listen.”
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Months later, in July 2025, Bezos traveled to the Oval Office to pitch Trump on steering Pentagon space contracts toward his Blue Origin company — an effort to compete with Musk’s SpaceX. Trump said he would consider it but never did, instead expanding access for SpaceX.
Neither man had always been so accommodating. Zuckerberg banned Trump from Facebook and Instagram after January 6, 2021, calling the risks of keeping him on the platform “simply too great.” He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, once wrote that they were “deeply shaken and disgusted” by Trump’s rhetoric.
Bezos, meanwhile, called Trump’s behavior “eroding our democracy” in 2016 and offered to send him to space on one of his rockets.
After Trump won in 2024, Meta and Amazon each donated $1 million to his inaugural committee, and both men attended his inauguration. Zuckerberg axed Meta’s fact-checking program, ended its diversity initiatives, and hired Trump loyalists to top company posts.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not directly address the book’s reporting. “President Trump is committed to working with every American business and business leader to cement America’s innovative dominance, re-shore critical manufacturing, and accelerate economic growth,” Desai said.
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