The richest men in Silicon Valley spent the months after Election Day groveling before Donald Trump — and Trump laughed about it behind their backs with Elon Musk. According to a forthcoming book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the same executives who control how millions of Americans communicate debased themselves for access, and the president treated their desperation as a parlor trick.
If these billionaires will kiss the ring this shamelessly to protect their empires, Americans who depend on their platforms for speech and commerce should understand exactly where they rank. The answer is nowhere.
The book, "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," out June 23, details what Wired describes as Trump showing Musk the texts he received from fellow tech executives. "Think of where these guys were in 2016," Trump told Musk. "They hated me. They were doing everything they could to knock me down. And look at them now." Musk's reported reply: "First-class groveling." Trump later told associates the executives were "kissing my ass."
The specifics are revealing. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg texted Trump a photo of a letter written by one of his children, who wrote they "looked forward to the golden age of America" — echoing a Trump campaign slogan. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sent Trump a selfie with his then-fiancée Lauren Sánchez. When Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago around Thanksgiving 2024, Trump played the national anthem as recorded by a choir of January 6 defendants, according to TNW's account of the book.
Gizmodo framed the episode as evidence of Silicon Valley's sycophancy while noting Musk is hardly independent himself — the man literally jumped on stage at a Trump rally. TNW reported the detail Gizmodo buried: Bezos used his Mar-a-Lago dinner to lobby Trump directly, criticizing his own newspaper — "The people there are terrible. They don't listen" — and urging Trump to spread federal space contracts beyond Musk's SpaceX, calling reliance on a single contractor a national security risk. That pitch would have benefited Bezos's own rocket company, Blue Origin. Trump said he would consider it. He never did, and instead expanded SpaceX's operations.
So Bezos didn't just grovel — he lobbied. And he lost. The White House has not confirmed the book's claims, saying only that Trump wants to work with "every American business… to cement America's innovative dominance."
The same men who spent years building censorship apparatuses and curating what Americans can say online sat in the front row at Trump's inauguration. They serve power, whichever way the wind blows. The question isn't whether they'll grovel again — it's what they'll do to the rest of us the next time they need permission to operate.
