Big Tech’s Support of Trump Shows Who Has Leverage Now
Plus: What will drive price changes in 2025, a country where almost everyone buys EVs and how to invest in private credit.
Mark Zuckerberg recently traveled to Mar-a-Lago and donated $1 million to the inaugural fund.
Photograph: Bloomberg
Big Tech CEOs have taken out their checkbooks to support the upcoming presidential inauguration. Businessweek’s Max Chafkin writes today about why they’re suddenly helping someone who’s spent so much time insulting them. Plus: Get ready for more dynamic pricing; how one country made buying EVs more attractive; and private credit investing gets less exclusive. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.
Among the recurring tropes of the president-elect’s 2024 campaign was a threat to jail Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. Donald Trump’s rationale for retribution shifted: Sometimes he focused on the $400 million or so in donations Zuckerberg and his wife made to nonprofits that distributed grants to local election offices during the Covid-19 pandemic, which conservatives have long argued amounted to a contribution to Democrats. (Zuckerberg has denied this.) Sometimes Trump focused on the ways in which Facebook, one of Zuckerberg’s social networks, had been unfair to him. (Ditto.) Sometimes it was a combination of those two.