The CEOs who gave Donald Trump cash and gold trinkets (and sought to influence his White House) are about to be gifted subpoenas.
Somewhere in Washington this morning, the head of government affairs for one of America’s biggest companies is re-reading this Washington Post article and feeling anxious. He’s deciding whether to send it to his billionaire boss. That’s because Democrats are drawing up a wave of investigations into the corporations that spent the last two years courting Donald Trump. And the executives who oversaw those influence campaigns are, in the Post’s words, bracing for an onslaught.
I know many of the people who’ve got twisting stomachs this morning. I used to work with them. After I left government, I spent a period of time advising some of the top emerging technology, AI, defense, space, and biotech companies in the country on how to deal with Washington, D.C. (and often why to stay away from it). Far too many of them were eager to become “MAGA” once Trump was re-elected, despite warnings about how quickly power changes hands in Washington.
CEOs couldn’t resist the idea of currying favor with Trump directly. He is, after all, so obviously susceptible to being bought off, whether it’s through flattery or funding. I saw it myself inside his first administration. Hell, everyone saw it. The man is a malfeasance magnet. And the tech titans and billionaires were all too willing to influence a man who was ready to be influenced.
Those CEOs have no idea what’s about to hit them.
Before I get to that, I want to take a moment to remind you how they handled the return of America’s most obviously corrupt president. They didn’t just try to make peace with him. A lot of those wannabe oligarchs showered the president with literal gifts. They wrote checks to his inaugural fund, underwrote the monument he is building to himself on the White House lawn, aired documentaries about his wife (and paid her for the privilege), settled lawsuits they should’ve won, and showed up in the Oval Office bearing tributes made of actual gold.
All the while, those same companies were asking the federal government for billions of dollars in contracts, tariff exemptions, or regulatory sign-off on blockbuster mergers.
There’s a name for this: corruption. And as the investigations roll forward, I believe you’ll see evidence of a more damning word: bribery.
The conventional wisdom is that corporate America showed a lack of courage. In my view, that’s far too kind. What I expect you’ll learn over the next two years is that some of these executives (not all, but some) engaged in something closer to criminal capitulation.
The cowardice part is easy to document, because it happened on camera:
In January 2021, Mark Zuckerberg threw Trump off Facebook because, he said, the risk of keeping him on the platform was “simply too great.” Three and a half years later he was calling Trump’s fist pump “badass,” wiring a million dollars to the inaugural fund, and sitting beside the president at a White House dinner, assuring him of the “huge investments” everyone at the table was making.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that the January 6 insurrection was “the antithesis of democracy.” By 2025, he was at dinner with the man who fomented it, praising him.
Jeff Bezos once offered to strap Trump to a Blue Origin rocket and send him to space, ostensibly to save America from the failed businessman. This spring, he went on CNBC and described the president as a “more mature, more disciplined” version of himself. (That very same month, Trump’s account posted or reposted 861 times on Truth Social, amplifying posts calling Barack Obama a “traitor” and demanding the arrest of his rivals, branding a New York Times reporter a “lowlife,” and sharing AI images of himself escorting a handcuffed alien, kissing a statue of Jesus, carved into Mount Rushmore, looming over Greenland, and wading shirtless through the Reflecting Pool beside a woman in a bikini.)
Elon Musk said in 2022 that it was time for Trump to “hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.” He then spent roughly $290 million putting him back in office and told a rally that thanks to Trump, “the future of civilization” was assured.
Tim Cook called the January 6 attack to prevent the peaceful transfer of power a “sad and shameful chapter” in our history. Last August, he walked into the Oval Office, opened a white Apple box, and presented Trump with a glass plaque on a 24-karat gold base. He left with an assurance that Apple would be spared a 100 percent tariff on imported chips.
Watching grown men who run trillion-dollar companies grovel like this gave me second-hand embarrassment. We’ve never seen such a spectacle of corporate fawning over a president. But embarrassment isn’t a crime. It’s what came afterwards that might be.
One line of inquiry for Democrats will be the Trump ballroom. The Post obtained the secret donor list for the $330 million Trump raised to bulldoze the East Wing of the White House and build himself a gilded party hall. Apple and Nvidia each put in $25 million, and Nvidia asked that its gift be kept anonymous. In fact, at least $77 million came from donors who insisted their names be kept hidden. I wonder why.
I can tell you what congressional investigators will be focusing on. A watchdog group found that within six months of the demolition, more than half of the known corporate donors had been awarded new or expanded federal contracts worth over $50 billion. Meanwhile, a slew of them received favorable treatment from the Trump administration on policy issues they cared about. And some watched as antitrust, labor, or securities cases against them were eased or dropped by the government altogether.
I’ve helped run corporate giving initiatives at major companies before. I’ve steered money to wounded veterans and anti-poverty work. This was not that. Not a single soul at Nvidia believed the Donald J. Trump Ballroom was the most pressing social need in America. For many of these executives, I suspect the payments were made to curry favor with the one man who controlled their contracts and their regulators. Otherwise, why did they want the donations kept secret? To be humble about their generosity? Or, perhaps, to avoid questions about their motives?
The ballroom was only the most visible tribute. Disney paid Trump $15 million to settle a defamation suit most media lawyers thought it would win… Paramount paid $16 million over a routine 60 Minutes edit and had its $8 billion merger approved by the FCC weeks later… Meta paid $25 million and X paid $10 million to settle suits over suspending Trump’s accounts after an attempted coup… Google paid $24.5 million, with nearly all of it earmarked for the ballroom… and Amazon paid $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary, more than it has ever spent on a documentary, with most of the money flowing to the First Lady herself.
You’re starting to see why the billionaires are panicking. For every one of these acts, there’s a paper trail somewhere. Each major company has a D.C. office, and each of those offices spent late 2024 and all of 2025 trading emails, texts, and Slack messages about how to position their company with the incoming president. There are messages on their servers from Trump’s team. Outgoing messages about ways they’re willing to work with the president. Phone call logs from aides. Calendar holds for private dinner meetings near the White House. Discrete inquiries about how to get on the list for Oval Office events and presidential trips. Instructions on which checks to write, and when.
Bookmark this prediction. Some of those messages will show company officials advising, in writing, that the way to protect a contract or clear a merger was to spend money on Trump, his vanity projects, or his political priorities. They may not all have been that stupid, but somewhere someone slipped up. For years, I watched smart people in those jobs walk a tightrope between their morals and their money. During this administration, a lot of them slipped on the wire, and I suspect at least a few were sloppy enough to leave evidence of their ethical fall.
In fact, before Democrats take power, they should be sending document preservation requests to every single one of these companies.
Whether any of this is charged as a crime will depend on exactly how it was carried out, what was said, and by whom. Lawyers will quibble over that in the years to come. But by then it might not matter. For better or worse in the age of the digital mob, the court of public opinion moves much faster than the court of law. When the congressional hearings into the pro-Trump billionaires begin and the documents come out, I expect you’ll see CEOs dethroned by their own boards (and boards dethroned by their shareholders) long before any jury is seated.
So here’s my message to the oligarchs scheduling phone calls with major law firms for advice this weekending (including, I suspect, some of the same law firms that cut capitulation deals with Trump). You could’ve simply run your companies. Instead, in fits of greed and fear, you sought ways to pay off a president who was abusing his power and torching the U.S. Constitution.
You will be rewarded for your work. Just not in the way you hoped.
Your friend, in defiance,
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