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Days after Donald Trump last took office in 2017, Google co-founder Sergey Brin joined a protest against the new administration’s immigration policies, warning they threatened the US’s “fundamental values”.
On Monday, he joined more than a dozen billionaires in the prime seats at Trump’s second inauguration, applauding a man who has pledged to deport millions of migrants, to use the levers of American justice to pursue political opponents and to launch sweeping tariffs.
Trump’s inauguration ceremony in the US Capitol underscored the president’s deepening ties to titans of industry and the shifting stances of business leaders who previously scorned him. Four of the world’s five richest men were placed more prominently than members of his own cabinet, with some of their spouses occupying seats at the expense of governors and members of congress.
Elon Musk, a former Joe Biden supporter who spent a quarter-of-a-billion dollars getting Trump elected, was joined on the crowded dais by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who this month abolished fact-checking on his social media platforms in a peace offering to Trump, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who stopped his newspaper’s editorial board endorsing Kamala Harris.
Metres away were Europe’s wealthiest man Bernard Arnault, head of the LVMH luxury goods empire, India’s Mukesh Ambani, and Apple chief executive Tim Cook, who like other tech chief executives, had donated $1mn to Trump in the lead-up to the proceedings. They joined cabinet nominees who are billionaires in their own right, including commerce secretary pick Howard Lutnick and Treasury nominee Scott Bessent.
“The man is power,” said Lutnick of Trump in a speech on Monday at the Capital One arena, where the president’s supporters gathered to watch him being sworn in. “He is power.”
Lutnick was followed by Musk, who received thunderous applause when he promised to help Trump usher in a “golden age”. The billionaire also made two straight-armed gestures to the crowd that were likened by many observers to a fascist salute.
In a sign of Musk’s growing power and influence, the crowd also cheered his reference to Trump’s pledge to send astronauts to Mars — a move that would benefit Musk’s SpaceX, and one that has been deemed wasteful and unnecessary by scientists within the US government.
Such displays of corporate power have been lambasted by some members of Trump’s core ‘Maga’ support base. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, hit out at Musk and the tech moguls in the president’s orbit this week, echoing Biden in calling them “oligarchs” and claiming they were “created by the Democratic Party and the lords of easy money”.
Democrats were also quick to use the spectacle at the inauguration to undermine Trump’s populist credentials, with the Democratic National Committee claiming that by “leaving his own supporters literally out in the cold while billionaires worth over $1tn got a front-row seat” the president was showing he would always “put himself and his ultra-wealthy backers ahead of the American people”.
Inside the Capitol One Arena on Monday, where Trump supporters had gathered to watch the inauguration after it was moved indoors, the presence of the billionaires — seen by many of the Maga faithful as supplicants, rather than puppet masters — was largely welcomed.
Minnesota farmer Cherry Fiedler said she hoped the tech billionaires’ prominence meant “all the censorship will be gone”, and predicted diversity, equity and inclusion policies would also be axed at the world’s biggest companies in the wake of Trump’s win.
“So many of those business leaders used to be . . . against Trump,” Paul Kirby, an accountant from Missouri who had travelled to Washington for the ceremony, added. “All those leaders are basically bending the knee . . . [Trump is] in control, he’s got the power back.”
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