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Dec 20, 2024 11:54 AM EST
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos joined the President-elect for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, a major step in a turbulent relationship between Trump and the Amazon founder.
By Evan Williams
Palm Beach, Florida - Elon Musk joined Jeff Bezos and President-elect Donald Trump for dinner at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday night.
Jeff Bezos (far right), Elon Musk (second to left), and President-elect Donald Trump (far left) dined together at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday. © Collage: AFP/Kena Betancur & AFP/Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Both Musk and Bezos contributed large sums to President-elect Trump's re-election campaign, with Musk being expected to hold the position of "efficiency tsar" in his second administration.
Bezos, who contributed $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund, has a number of business interests that receive US government money.
His Amazon Prime Video service is set to stream Trump's inauguration on January 20.
In response to a post on X which suggested that Bezos wants to "mend fences with Trump," Musk responded that the dinner "was a great conversation."
Musk and Bezos are not the only tech leaders to have dined with Trump at his Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Apple's Tim Cook are just three who have shared a dinner with Trump in recent weeks, with Google's CEO set to meet with Trump on Thursday.
Several tech CEOs have pledged large amounts of money to Trump's inauguration, including Mark Zuckerberg, who also donated $1 million.
Bezos, who has significant financial dealings with the US government in his space company Blue Origin, as well as Amazon's cloud network, has not always had a cozy relationship with Trump.
In 2017, then-President Trump criticized Amazon for damaging retail outlets and said the online platform should be paying more for its use of the US Postal Service.
Trump also criticized Bezos' takeover of the Washington Post and even dished out insults.
"So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post," Trump wrote on X in 2019.
In recent months, Bezos has expressed support for Trump. Sitting down with the New York Times earlier in December, he said that he's "actually very optimistic" about a second Trump term.
"He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation," Bezos said. "And my point of view is, if I can help him do that, I'm going to help him, because we do have too much regulation in this country."
Cover photo: Collage: AFP/Kena Betancur & AFP/Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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