Big Tech CEOs send well wishes to Trump

Tech company CEOs who largely sat on the sidelines for the presidential election sent their congratulations Wednesday to President-elect Donald Trump, ignoring Trump’s history of threats against some of them and joining their peer Elon Musk in welcoming Trump back to power. 

A series of tech titans weighed in on social media with warm wishes for Trump including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Amazon Executive Chair Jeff Bezos and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. 

“Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory,” Zuckerberg wrote on his app Threads. “We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.” 

Trump publicly threatened Zuckerberg with “life in prison” in a book published two months ago — one of many battles between Trump and the tech industry that the CEOs appeared to be putting aside at least temporarily in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory. 

“We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote in his book, regarding Zuckerberg.

The demonstrations of support signaled a tidal shift in the politics of Silicon Valley, as Trump supporters are ascendant in the tech industry and as executives who at points resisted Trump now face little choice but to work with him — or even seek Trump’s favor in regulatory matters — for the next four years.

Musk was early in his support of Trump compared with other tech executives, helping to propel the candidate to victory with a super PAC that spent more than $152 million in the past few months, according to a Federal Election Commission filing. 

Trump’s win came about with the help of Musk and his wealthy tech friends including investors Peter Thiel and David Sacks. They boosted Trump with financial contributions, fundraising help and public endorsements on subjects such as the economy and deregulation. 

Few other major tech executives publicly endorsed in the presidential race, though some of them made vague comments praising one or the other candidate. Zuckerberg in July said that Trump was “badass” for how he reacted to being shot at by a would-be assassin that month in Butler, Pennsylvania, while Bezos was criticized for The Washington Post's decision against an endorsement. The paper denied that Bezos was involved in that decision.

Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder and major Democratic donor, posted on X that he hoped the most dire of predictions about Trump — such as punishing political opponents — wouldn’t come true. He said he’d focus on investing for the immediate future. 

“How do we increase prosperity and give fair access to as many people as we can?” he asked. “My focus will be addressing these challenges by building the next generation of companies that will help our society.” 

Trump’s relationship with the tech industry could affect Americans in countless ways, from economic factors such as imported goods to less tangible outcomes such as the privacy of company-held personal data. 

Tech companies saw at least one immediate benefit from Trump’s win: jumps in almost all their share prices Wednesday, with Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft shares all rising Wednesday afternoon. (Meta was an outlier, with shares down less than 1%.) 

Shares in Tesla, where Musk is CEO, were up more than 14.8% in afternoon trading, versus a rise in 2.4% for the S&P 500 index. 

And boosted by Trump’s alliance with cryptocurrency investors, bitcoin jumped to a new high and shares in Coinbase were up more than 30%. 

Trump has a complicated history with many tech CEOs. Even Musk has publicly feuded with Trump in the past, saying in 2022 that Trump should “sail into the sunset” — a comment that, at the time, prompted Trump to denounce Musk’s “many subsidized projects” such as “rocketships to nowhere.”

Bezos and Trump have a long-running feud that has involved Amazon’s bid on a $10 billion Pentagon contract, Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post and Amazon’s decision not to do business with the far-right social media app Parler in 2021. 

Some Trump supporters reacted to Bezos’ post Wednesday with vows to continue the grudge. 

“Amazon kicked Parler off the internet. We won’t ever forget, Jeff,” wrote Mike Davis, head of The Article III Project, a pro-Trump advocacy group, on X.

Another Trump ally, activist Ivan Raiklin, responded to Cook with a specific demand: “Step one, Share publicly all treason communications of everyone on the Deep State Target List and dole it out by County/State for prosecution starting today!” 

The post-election dynamic is reminiscent of a famous gathering of tech titans at Trump Tower in December 2016, a month after Trump’s first upset win in a presidential race, when some of the same executives braced themselves for unpredictable policy shifts. 

Trump has outlined several broad themes that could affect the business of tech, including wider leeway for the cryptocurrency industry and skepticism of the Justice Department’s antitrust case seeking a possible breakup of Google. 

In their social media posts, several tech CEOs used the word “decisive” to describe Trump’s victory and they employed popular buzzwords like “innovation” in an apparent attempt to identify common ground. Most of their posts were on X — owned by Musk — and Musk personally responded to some of their posts with emojis or expressions of appreciation, such as “Cool.”