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OOn Monday, three of the richest people on Earth crammed into an area smaller than a Mini Cooper.
“First Mate” Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook and Instagram chief Mark Zuckerberg — along with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, himself a billionaire but barely — sat down during Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, DC.
In a show of strength, they sat directly behind the Trump family.
Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg have a combined estimated net worth of $860 billion, but they’re far from best friends. Most of them have openly disagreed with each other on a business and personal level.
But authoritarian leaders tend to make strange bedfellows, and in recent months all three men have bent the knee to Trump.
Consider Musk and Bezos, who have been locked in a private space race for years. Their respective companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, have long been at loggerheads over federal space launch contracts.
The two men reportedly fell out in early 2004 when they met for dinner to discuss the space industry. “[I told him,] “Dude, we tried it and it was really stupid, so don’t do the stupid thing we did,” Musk later recalled. “I actually tried my best to offer good advice, which he largely ignored.”
In 2013, Blue Origin sued to block SpaceX from using one of NASA’s launch pads, which Musk described as a “bogus blocking tactic.”
The rivalry intensified in 2019 as both men continued to jab at each other in public statements and on social media. Bezos mocked Musk’s desire to colonize Mars, while Musk called Bezos a “copycat” over his plans for a network of low-Earth orbiting satellites (similar to Musk’s Starlink).
The two companies continued to battle in court, with Musk accusing Bezos of “taking himself a little too seriously” and criticizing Amazon. lord of the rings TV series for sexism against men.
Then there’s Musk’s long and strangely public spat with boss Metta Zuckerberg. After a faulty SpaceX rocket blew up one of Facebook’s satellites on the launch pad in 2016, Zuckerberg called Musk’s “vindictive” views on artificial intelligence “irresponsible.”
In 2018, Musk joined the #DeleteFacebook movement, shutting down his companies’ Facebook accounts, quipping, “What is Facebook?”
In 2023, things got weirder after Musk entered the social media market by buying Twitter and renaming it X. Harsh words over Facebook’s trustworthiness, and Instagram’s attempt to poach users from X, turned into a scheduled cage martial arts match between the two men. .
“Zack is a cuckoo,” tweeted Musk, offering to engage in a “literal dick-measuring contest.” Luckily for the world, that never happened, and neither did the cage match (which both men blamed on each other).
Still, business is business, and all three men now seem to have calculated that Trump’s scheming works to their advantage.
Bezos intervened The Washington Post (a newspaper he owns) to boost Kamala Harris’ planned campaign support, though he insisted it had nothing to do with Trump. He later donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and visited him at Mar-a-Lago.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg unveiled a series of Trump-friendly reforms at Meta, appointing a Trump ally to its board. After spending 2020 as a staunch progressive, he then took on Joe Rogan to praise the “masculine energy” at his company Meta (which is 63 percent female). Both Amazon and Meta have said they will be removed from diversity programs.
Of course, Musk’s evolution at MAGA is well known — his massive donations to the Trump campaign and his influence over the future White House. During the inauguration, he moved to stand next to the Trump family.
On Monday, Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk, along with Alphabet’s Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook, all attended an inauguration ceremony at a D.C. cathedral shortly before Trump was sworn in as president.
Cook, whom Trump once referred to as “Team Apple,” has until recently distanced himself somewhat. Cook, who is gay, personally donated money to Trump’s inauguration and has worked hard to improve his relationship with Trump, but his company has defended its diversity policies against conservative challenge. And yet, he made sure to be there on Monday.
These billionaire tech barons are united only by the vast scale of their business interests and their shared desire to pay tribute to a man described by 14 of his former officials as a power-hungry fascist.
I can’t help but wonder if their sitting together is a deliberate show by the ever-knowing and loyal Trump (or rather, one of his aides) — to show the world that these powerful men, in particular, are willing to share this common interest. Set aside your differences.
However, wouldn’t you like to be the federal agent assigned to eavesdrop on their conversations?
