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On January 20 the three richest people on Earth will all squeeze into an area together smaller than a Mini Cooper.
That is according to NBC News, which reported on Tuesday that “first buddy” Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Facebook and Instagram boss Mark Zuckerberg will be seated together on the platform at Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington D.C.
These three men, who enjoy a combined estimated net worth of $860 billion, are far from best friends. Often they’ve openly feuded, on both 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.
Take Musk and Bezos, who have spent years locked in a private space race against each other. Their respective companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, have long tussled over federal space launch contracts.
The two men reportedly clashed as early as 2004, when they met over dinner to discuss the space industry. “[I told him,] ‘dude, we tried that and that turned out to be really dumb, so don’t do the dumb thing we did’,” Musk later recalled. “I actually did my best to give good advice, which he largely ignored.”
In 2013 Blue Origin sued to prevent SpaceX from using one of NASA’s launchpads, which Musk described as a “phony blocking tactic”.
The rivalry heated up further in 2019, as both men continued to needle 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 orbit satellites (similar to Musk’s Starlink).
The two companies continued to battle in court, while Musk accused Bezos of “taking himself a bit too seriously” and criticized Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV series for being sexist against men.
Then there’s Musk’s long and bizarre public quarrel with Meta boss Zuckerberg. After a faulty SpaceX rocket blew up one of Facebook’s satellites on the launchpad in 2016, Zuckerberg called Musk’s “naysaying” views on AI “irresponsible”.
In 2018, Musk joined the #DeleteFacebook trend and closed his companies’ Facebook accounts, quipping: “What’s Facebook?”
Things got weirder in 2023, after Musk got into 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, escalated into a planned mixed martial arts cage match between the two men.
“Zuck is a cuck,” tweeted Musk, offering to engage in a “literal dick-measuring contest”. Thankfully for the world, this never happened, and neither did the cage match (for which both man blamed each other).
Yet business is business, and all three men now seem to have calculated that schmoozing Trump benefits theirs.
Bezos intervened with the Washington Post (the newspaper he owns) to spike a planned election endorsement of Kamala Harris, though he insisted this had nothing to do with Trump. He later donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and visited him at Mar-a-Lago.
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has unveiled a raft of Trump-friendly reforms at his company Meta and appointed a Trump ally to his board. Having spent 2020 selling himself as a heartfelt progressive, he then went on Joe Rogan to decry Meta’s “masculine energy” at his company (which is 63 percent women). Both Amazon and Meta have also said they will axe diversity programs.
Musk’s MAGA transformation, of course, is well known — as are his massive financial donations to Trump’s campaign and his influence over the coming White House.
One tech baron not mentioned in NBC’s report was Apple CEO Tim Cook, whom Trump once called “Tim Apple”. While Cook, who is gay, has personally donated to Trump’s inauguration and devoted great effort to improving his relationship with Trump, his company has defended its diversity policies against a conservative challenge.
So when Trump is sworn in next week,these tech barons will sit united in little but the sprawling scale of their business interests and their shared willingness to pay obeisance to a man described by 14 of his own former officials as a power-hungry fascist.
I can’t help wondering if seating them together is a deliberate piece of theater by the always loyalty-conscious Trump (or rather, one of his aides) — to show off to the world that these three powerful men are willing to put aside their differences for this shared interest.
Still, wouldn’t you love to be the federal agent assigned to eavesdrop on their conversation?
