Big business will have the best seat in the house at President-elect Donald Trump’s coronation ceremony.
The world’s three richest men — Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg — will have prominent seats on the platform at Trump’s inauguration, according to an NBC News report. The platform typically seats former presidents and vice presidents as well as their families, along with members of Congress, governors and Supreme Court justices.
Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg collectively control three of the nation’s four largest social media platforms, one of its newspapers of record and the world’s largest web hosting provider. With a combined $862 billion in net worth, per Forbes estimates, they hold over 3% of the nation’s annual GDP.
The three men stand to benefit handsomely from a second Trump administration, which has promised lower corporate taxes and deregulation. Musk, a vocal backer of Trump’s campaign since July, chipped in more than $250 million to his 2024 bid and has been tapped to lead a government austerity initiative.
Bezos’ Amazon and Zuckerberg’s Meta both slashed DEI initiatives, a frequent target of right-wing fury, in the weeks since Trump’s victory and donated $1 million each to the inaugural fund.
The Meta CEO then went a step further, removing fact-checking and content moderation policies from his platform that the president-elect and his allies had previously criticized.
A report from the Bezos-owned Washington Post last year said Bezos’ companies had or would soon compete for more than $11 billion in federal contracts, while Musk’s SpaceX raked in nearly $20 billion in federal dollars, per USASpending.gov.
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