This week, Meta announced that it had donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund. The fund is used to finance the festivities that accompany the president-elect’s inauguration day celebrations. It would seem to be yet another sign that the tech giant is doing its best to get on the good side of a man that once threatened to send its CEO to prison for the rest of his life.
Meta’s generous financial gift—which is pretty big as far as inaugural contributions go—follows on the heels of other conciliatory moves made by Zuck. In November, the tech mogul dined with the President-elect at Mar-a-Lago, after which Meta said its CEO was “grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming administration.” Prior to the election, Zuckerberg also spoke with Trump and complimented him, saying that he thought it was “badass” how he handled the assassination attempt against him. The Meta founder also presented Trump with a significantly cheaper gift in the form of his company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses.
It makes sense that Zuck is turning on the charm since Trump has repeatedly threatened to throw him in prison. Indeed, an ongoing theme with Trump has been that Zuckerberg somehow helped undermine his electoral chances during the 2020 presidential election. This year, Trump actually co-authored a coffee table book in which he alleged that Zuck and his wife, Priscilla Chan, had conspired against him. While the book is vague on the details of what this so-called conspiracy entailed, it is thought to be a reference to a series of large election infrastructure donations that Zuckerberg and Chan made to election offices in 2020. For whatever reason, Trump seems to presume that these donations undermined his electoral chances that year. The book states that, should the tech CEO ever “do anything illegal” again, he will “spend the rest of his life in prison.” Trump has also threatened Zuckerberg with prison and prosecution at other points, typically via posts on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Meta’s inauguration gift is yet another effort by the tech platform to stay in the good graces of the new president, which is not a particularly unique thing for a company to do when there’s a new administration.
Indeed, while the actual presidential inauguration—the part where the President is sworn in—is publicly funded, many of the celebrations after the initial ceremony, technically known as “inauguration events,” are fueled by private donations. Indeed, a broad variety of people and organizations can give to the president’s inaugural committee but, more often than not, the biggest donations come from corporations, lobbyists, and political action committees. These donations are broadly viewed as an attempt to curry favor with the incoming administration.
The rules of inaugural donations can be changed from presidency to presidency. For instance, in 2009, in a show of populist solidarity, Obama banned corporate contributions to his inaugural celebrations. However, he subsequently lifted that cap in 2012. A study showed that 40 percent of Obama’s 2013 inaugural funds came from special interest groups, with telecom AT&T being the single largest donor (it gave $4.1 million).
During his first rodeo, Trump’s 2016 inaugural committee raised a whopping $107 million, which was the biggest inaugural haul for a president in U.S. history. For comparison, Obama’s 2013 inauguration raised about $43 million, while his 2009 inauguration raised $55 million. In 2016, Trump’s only cap was on contributions from lobbyists. The companies that were the biggest spenders for Trump’s inauguration included military-industrial-complex notables Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as Wall Street mainstays Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. Other notable contributors included Dow Chemical, Pfizer, Microsoft, Google, and a number of private prison companies, like CoreCivic, Geo Group, and Union Supply Group. Again, the single biggest contributor was AT&T, with a donation of some $2 million.
Notably, Trump’s first inauguration was not without controversy. In 2022, the Trump Organization and Trump’s inauguration committee paid $750,000 to the District of Columbia to resolve allegations, lobbed by D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, that they had misused funds. Trump said at the time that the payment was not an admission of guilt or culpability.
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