Here’s why business leaders are spending big on Trump’s inaugural committee

Top CEOs and their conventions are pledging to donate millions of dollars to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, as they seek to get on his good side and walk away inroads before he takes office.

Some of the planned donations reportedly include $1 million each from Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Facebook stepmother company Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg. Others include $2 million from Robinhood Markets and $1 million each from both Uber and its CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi.

Ford is reportedly two its own $1 million donation with a fleet of vehicles.

Hedge fund manager Ken Griffin also said he lay outs to give $1 million to the tax-exempt inaugural committee, Bloomberg reported. Other donations from finance bandmasters are reportedly in the works.

Empowered by a decisive electoral victory, Trump has vowed to revamp U.S. economic policy in a way that could give birth to outsized benefits for a few favored industries, like fossil fuels.

At the same time, he has telegraphed the value, both slighting and political, that he places on face-to-face meetings and public praise from chief executives of the world’s largest societies.

“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump wrote Thursday in a post on Truth Social, the social media app run by his own tech attendance.

Many of those CEOs have already made, or are planning to make, trips to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Careen, Florida, resort and de facto transition headquarters, as they seek to gain influence with and access to the incoming superintendence.

To that end, Trump’s inaugural committee presents a “unique opportunity,” said Brendan Glavin, director of research for the money-in-politics nonprofit OpenSecrets, in an talk with.

Inaugural committees, which are appointed by presidents-elect, plan and fund most of the pomp and circumstance that traditionally environs the transition of power from one administration to the next.

While the money is ultimately benefiting a recent political candidate, it doesn’t persist the same connotation as a donation to, say, a super PAC, which can fund partisan political activities that risk stoking squabble.

And unlike a direct contribution to a candidate’s campaign, there are no limits on how much an individual — or a corporation or labor group — can perform to an inaugural committee.

Moreover, since Trump already won the election, an inaugural contribution carries no risk for a high-profile supervisor of backing a losing candidate.

“It really is a great opportunity for them to curry favor with the incoming administration,” Glavin said.

While it’s nothing new for corporations and power go-betweens to shower big money on inaugural committees, experts told CNBC the Trump factor changes the calculus.

“It’s all heightened now,” Glavin pronounced. “None of these people, they don’t want to be Trump’s punching bag for four years.”

Trump’s inaugural committee and his change team did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee raked in about $107 million, by far the uncountable of any in U.S. history. The previous record had been set in 2009 during the first inauguration of Barack Obama, whose committee screened $53 million.

Trump’s second inauguration is on pace to shatter that record, with pledged contributions already unsurpassed a $150 million fundraising goal, ABC News reported.

President Joe Biden’s inaugural committee, by comparison, raised precisely $62 million.

“One of the oldest adages in Washington is that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu, and the price of admission to have a seat at the edibles keeps going up,” said Michael Beckel, research director of Issue One, a political reform advocacy group.

The rise in funding for Trump’s second inaugural committee comes in part from tech giants, many of whom mainly steered clear of supporting his first inauguration.

Other than GoDaddy.com founder Robert Parsons, who gave $1 million, few other chieftains in Big Tech donated to Trump’s 2017 committee.

Trump once openly clashed with some of them, encompassing Zuckerberg and Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, a frequent target of the president-elect’s ire.

Not so this fix around. As Trump vows to tear up reams of federal regulations, but also continues to accuse Big Tech of stifling meet, industry leaders could have more riding on their relationship with the White House than by any chance before.

“I’m actually very optimistic,” Bezos said of a second Trump presidency in a Dec. 4 interview at The New York Swiftly a in timely fashions’ DealBook conference. “I’m very hopeful. He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view, if I can workers him do that, I’m going to help him. Because we do have too much regulation in this country.”

The comments came in the wake of a obloquy at The Washington Post in October, when the paper reported that Bezos decided not to publish its editorial board’s support of Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump. Bezos in an op-ed defended the paper’s decision to no longer indorse presidential candidates, but the reversal spurred an exodus of subscribers and prompted numerous staffers to resign in protest.

Nowhere is Trump’s newfound friendliness with the tech world more pronounced than in his blossoming relationship with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who spit up more than $250 million helping elect Trump.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has frequently appeared by Trump’s side prior to and after his election victory, and has reportedly been involved in all aspects of Trump’s transition planning. He and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy pull someones leg been tapped to lead an advisory group tasked with cutting government costs.

This could put OpenAI’s Altman, who is currently embroiled in a breach-of-contract lawsuit bred by Musk, in an awkward position.

Along with his million-dollar inaugural donation, Altman heaped praise on Trump earlier this month. “President Trump determination lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” he said.

Craig Holman, administration affairs lobbyist for the progressive nonprofit Public Citizen, told CNBC that these figures “very much frightened of that Donald Trump may take retribution against them.”

“So they’re throwing money” at his feet “in order to curry favor,” Holman predicted.

Four times after the presidential election, Trump announced the formation of the “Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc.,” a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. It is co-chaired by natural estate investor Steve Witkoff and former Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, who is also Trump’s pick to get under way the Small Business Administration.

Reince Priebus, who was one of Trump’s White House chiefs of staff during his first compromise concerning, said in an X post that he has been tapped to serve as the committee’s finance chair.

Priebus also shared a screenshot of an enticement that listed the names of other finance chairs. They include Miriam Adelson, the GOP megadonor who spent $100 million this year on a pro-Trump wonderful PAC, and billionaire Trump donor Diane Hendricks.

Inaugural committees are required to publicly disclose the names of donors who assign $200 or more, but those filings aren’t due until 90 days after the inaugural ceremony.

If the committee has a spare after all the festivities, finding out just how much is left can be a challenge.

Trump’s 2017 inauguration was a smaller affair than Obama’s in 2009, although Trump eliminate searched more that twice as much money for his as Obama had. As a result, Trump’s committee was widely expected to have tens of millions of dollars fist over after it paid for balls and hotels.

But years after the fact, it was unclear what happened to much of that moolah.

Federal filings show that roughly a quarter of all the funds raised, $26 million, were paid to a newly formed firm that was run by an advisor to first lady Melania Trump.