Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of the Washington Post, has become the latest billionaire to meet Donald Trump at his Florida club.
A video that went viral on social media on Wednesday night showed him entering Mar-a-Lago on his way to dinner with the president-elect.
According to US media, Elon Musk has joined the pair. Mr. Musk later tweeted, “It was a great conversation.”
Mr. Bezos pledged $1 million (£780,000) to Trump’s inauguration fund, one of several donations made by tech executives.
Mr. Bezos has significant economic interests in the United States government through several of his firms, including Amazon’s cloud computing division and Blue Origin, his space exploration company.
Others who have recently visited Mar-a-Lago include Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Trump will also meet with Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, on Thursday.
The discussions come as Trump has simultaneously threatened and lauded digital giants, accusing some of censorship and promising to tighten regulations on certain of their business practices.
According to CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner, Amazon will stream Trump’s inauguration on its Prime Video service, resulting in another $1 million in-kind payment to his inaugural fund.
Mr. Zuckerberg of Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has pledged $1 million to the initiative, as has OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
According to public documents, Mr. Musk donated more than $250 million to support Trump’s presidential campaign.
Trump has appointed Mr. Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to lead an effort to reduce government expenditure. According to the federal database USASpending.gov, Mr. Musk’s SpaceX has $3.8 billion in US government contracts for the fiscal year 2024.
Mr Bezos also conducts considerable business with the government.
Amazon Web Services was awarded a 10-year, $10 billion deal with the National Security Agency in 2021. In 2023, NASA signed a $3.4 billion contract with Blue Origin to build a lunar lander for a planned expedition to the Moon.
The Washington Post stated just days before the November election that it will not endorse any candidates for the first time in decades.
Mr Bezos defended his decision by stating that endorsements generate the sense of partiality.
“Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one,” he wrote in the Post.
Mr Musk and other corporate titans, like Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, Trump’s candidate for commerce secretary, have been in Trump’s inner circle since before the election.
However, other IT leaders and billionaires have had a more distant relationship.
Trump was suspended from Facebook during the Capitol riot after losing the 2020 election, but he was eventually reinstated.
This time, Mr Zuckerberg appears to have altered course.
