By Kaitlan Collins, Ramishah Maruf and Clare Duffy, CNN
Jeff Bezos. Photo: AFP / Getty Images
Amazon is planning to donate US$1 million (NZ$1.7m) to President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is expected to visit with Trump in person in the coming days, as he and other tech founders seek closer relationships with the incoming president.
Amazon will donate US$1 million in cash to the inauguration and it will make a US$1 million in-kind donation by streaming the event on Amazon Video, the company confirmed to CNN Thursday evening local time.
Bezos and Trump spoke over the summer after the first assassination attempt. Bezos publicly praised Trump at the time.
"Our former President showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire tonight," Bezos wrote on X at the time.
Trump has been warming up to tech giants. He has flaunted his private conversations with them in interviews and appearances and now heaps praise on companies he once blamed in part for his 2020 electoral defeat.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the planned donation.
Bezos joins other tech leaders in looking to foster a closer relationship with the president-elect.
Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: AFP
Meta confirmed this week that it also donated US$1 million to the inaugural fund, two weeks after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with Trump privately at Mar-a-Lago.
It's a major shift from the company's previous approach to Trump nearly four years ago, when it banned him from its platforms after the 6 January 2021 insurrection.
Trump had also previously criticized Bezos over his ownership of The Washington Post and the newspaper's coverage of him.
Trump tweeted in 2015, "If @amazon ever had to pay fair taxes, its stock would crash and it would crumble like a paper bag. The @washingtonpost scam is saving it!"
More recently, the Post was thrown into turmoil in late October after Bezos withheld the newspaper's endorsement in the 2024 presidential race.
"Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election," Bezos wrote in an op-ed. "No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, 'I'm going with Newspaper A's endorsement.' None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it's the right one."
The decision had deep ramifications for the newspaper. Members of the Post's editorial board resigned over the decision not to issue its endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, and thousands of readers cancelled their subscriptions to the newspaper. Staffers also publicly expressed their dissent.
Trump had also met with executives from Blue Origin, a Bezos-founded spacefaring company. In his op-ed, Bezos denied allegations he withheld the endorsement to curry favour with Trump, saying he had no advance knowledge of the meeting.
Trump has also repeatedly squabbled with Zuckerberg over the years. The president-elect appeared to threaten the Meta chief in a book published this year.
"We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison - as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election," he wrote.
- CNN