At this point, there has been plenty of public evidence of just how cozy Silicon Valley executives have gotten with the Trump administration. But it turns out they might be just as big sycophantic brown-nosers behind the scenes. According to a report from Wired, citing excerpts from an upcoming book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump appears to happily shared the suck-up texts that billionaires like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have sent to him.
The accounts of Trump showing how the most powerful men in the world were groveling in his inbox will appear in the book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” set to release on June 23. In it, Trump is quoted as telling White House guests, “You would not believe the texts I got from these tech guys. I’ve got to show you.”
He purportedly then proceeded to show them, because how can you tease that and not give folks a peek? Per the story recounted by Wired, Trump apparently shared a text that Zuckerberg sent him that included a photo of a letter written by one of his children in which the little one wrote that they “looked forward to the golden age of America.” Using your child as a prop is bad enough, but telling them to spew propaganda in the process is some truly shameless behavior.
Of course, it looks like Meta’s CEO wasn’t alone in thinking a personal touch would really move Trump, rather than just give him even more material to mock him. Bezos purportedly at one point sent Trump a selfie of him and his then-fiancée and now wife, Lauren Sánchez—which, you really gotta wonder what the thought process there was. Trump should not exactly strike anyone as the kind of guy who is gonna tap the heart emoji on your pictures when you send them or respond with a selfie of him and Melania. Just how many of these messages from tech execs, if Wired’s reporting is correct, got left on read only for them to come back with even more brown-nosing attempts would be fascinating to know.
Notably, one of the people he reportedly showed the messages to was Elon Musk, who isn’t exactly a man known for being fiercely independent of Trump—the man literally jumped for Trump while on stage at a rally during the 2024 campaign, really literalizing the whole “You say ‘Jump’ and I say ‘how high?’” trope. But since Musk was in the room while the other execs weren’t, he apparently got to be part of the mockers rather than the mockees—though who knows who Trump has shared some of Musk’s more pathetic texts with.
“Think of where these guys were in 2016,” Trump reportedly told Musk during a meeting. “They hated me. They were doing everything they could to knock me down. And look at them now.” Musk apparently reveled in the fact that his fellow billionaires were getting dragged, and called their texts “First-class groveling.”
You know, the kind of response only an independent thinker who definitely isn’t also just sucking up could give.
Read the full article here
