Trump Mocked Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos by Showing Off Fawning Texts
Key takeaways
- These episodes are detailed in the book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, a copy of which WIRED obtained ahead of its release on June 23.
- Weeks after they met with Trump, he was still regaling associates with stories of how Zuckerberg and Bezos were “kissing my ass,” according to the book. “You would not believe the texts I got from these tech guys.
- The episodes also show how Trump reveled in the genuflections of the titans of Big Tech—Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook also met with the incoming president—before relentlessly deriding their efforts.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
PHOTOGRAPH: Pool/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sought to ingratiate themselves with President Donald Trump after he won the 2024 election, and in return he mocked their efforts behind their backs, according to a new book by The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
Zuckerberg once texted Trump a photo of a letter written by one of his grade-school-age children, who wrote that they “looked forward to the golden age of America,” a slogan Trump had repeated at rallies during the presidential campaign.
And over dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, Bezos denigrated The Washington Post to Trump and essentially described the newspaper as one of his worst financial investments, months before he unsuccessfully sought a business favor from the president.