A Wall Street Journal headline calls this “The Week CEOs Bent the Knee to Trump.”
Driving the news: Apple CEO Tim Cook dined at breezy Mar-a-Lago last night — a day after a pilgrimage to Trump’s table on Thursday by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Mark Zuckerberg flew in on Thanksgiving Eve. Jeff Bezos will sit down with Trump next week.
Meta! Amazon! OpenAI! Rat-tat, each donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. “President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement to Axios.
Trump basked in literal Wall Street applause as he rang the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange, beneath a giant Platon cover portrait of himself as “Person of the Year” in his beloved TIME magazine.
Why it matters: The bullish “Trump trade” shows markets, from stocks to crypto, believe he’ll be good for business. But after staying arms-length during the campaign, CEOs aren’t “leaving anything to chance,” as The Journal puts it.
Being there: “When Donald Trump arrived at the New York Stock Exchange this week for a postelection victory lap, dozens of influential executives lined up to catch a glimpse of the man who holds the future of their businesses in his hands,” The Journal reports.
“Gathered behind red velvet ropes were senior executives at Visa, Meta Platforms, Goldman Sachs, Charles Schwab and Citadel … Real-estate and aerospace magnate Robert Bigelow was spotted in the crowd, as was investor [and Trump stan] Bill Ackman.”
Between the lines: In tech, the “turnabout has been especially stark as some tech executives who made donation pledges or met with Mr. Trump this week had appeared to be avowed liberals,” the N.Y. Times’ Teddy Schleifer and David Yaffe-Bellany note.
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