Why business leaders are spending big

Major CEOs and their companies are pledging to donate millions of dollars to the president-elect Donald TrumpThe inaugural committee of the committee, as they try to put on his good side and make inroads before he takes office.

Some of the donations expected reported includes $1 million each from Jeff Bezos‘ AmazonOpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Facebook parent company Metaled by Mark Zuckerberg. Others include $2 million from Robinhood Markets and $1 million each from both Uber and its CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi.

Ford is it reported pairing his own $1 million donation with a fleet of vehicles.

Hedge fund manager Ken Griffin also said he plans to give $1 million to the inaugural tax-exempt committee, Bloomberg said. Other donations from financial leaders are referenced in the works.

Buoyed by a decisive election victory, Trump has promised to overhaul US economic policy in a way that could have outsized benefits for a few favored industries, such as fossil fuels.

At the same time, he telegraphed the value, both personal and political, he places on face-to-face meetings and public praise from the leaders of the world’s largest companies.

“EVERYONE WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump wrote in a post on Thursday Social truthself-managed social media app technology company.

Many of those CEOs have already made, or plan to make, trips to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, resort and de facto transition quarters as they seek to gain influence and access to the incoming administration.

To that end, Trump’s inaugural committee presents a “unique opportunity,” Brendan Glavin, director of research for the policy-making nonprofit OpenSecrets, said in an interview.

Inaugural committees, which are appointed by presidents-elect, plan and finance much of the pomp and circumstance that traditionally surrounds the transition of power from one administration to another.

While the money ultimately benefits a recent political candidate, it doesn’t carry the same connotation as a donation to, say, a super PAC, which can fund partisan political activity that risks stirring up controversy.

And unlike a direct contribution to a candidate’s campaign, there are no limits to how much an individual—or a corporation or a labor group—can give to an inaugural committee.

In addition, since Trump has already won the election, an inaugural contribution carries no risk for a high-profile executive to support a losing candidate.

“It’s really a great opportunity for them to curry favor with the incoming administration,” Glavin said.

While it’s nothing new for corporations and power brokers to pour big bucks into inaugural committees, experts told CNBC that the Trump factor is changing the calculus.

“It’s all ramped up now,” Glavin said. “None of these people, they don’t want to be Trump’s punching bag for four years.”

Trump’s inaugural committee and his transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump’s inaugural campaign in 2017 earned about 107 million dollars, by far the highest in US history. The previous record was set in 2009 during the first inauguration of Barack Obamathat the committee raised $53 million.

Trump’s second inauguration is on pace to break that record, with pledged contributions already surpassing a fundraising goal of $150 million, ABC News reported.

President Joe BidenThe inaugural committee, in comparison, has barely risen $62 million.

“One of the oldest adages in Washington is that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu, and the price of admission to have a seat at the table continues to rise,” said Michael Beckel, director of research Issue One, a political reform advocacy group.

The increased funding for Trump’s second inaugural committee is coming in part from tech giants, many of which largely shied away from supporting his first inauguration.

Besides GoDaddy.com founder Robert Parsons, who gave $1 million, few other leaders in Big Tech donated to Trump Committee 2017.

Once Trump openly met with some of them, including Zuckerberg and Bezoswho also owns the Washington Post, a frequent target of the president-elect’s ire.

Not so this time. As Trump promises to tear up a number of federal regulations, but also continues to accuse Big Tech of stifling competition, industry leaders could have more riding on their relationship with the White House than ever before.

“I’m really very optimistic,” Bezos said of a second Trump presidency in a Dec. 4 interview at the New York Times’ DealBook conference. “I’m very hopeful. He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view, if I can help do that, I’m going to help him. Because we have too much regulation in this country.”

The comments came in the wake of a scandal at the Washington Post in October, when the newspaper reported that Bezos decided not to publish the endorsement of the vice president by his editorial board Kamala Harris over Trump. Bezos in op-ed he defended the paper’s decision to no longer endorse presidential candidates, but the reversal spurred an exodus of subscribers and prompted numerous staffers to resign in protest.

Nowhere is Trump’s new friendship with the tech world more pronounced than in his blossoming relationship with Tesla and the SpaceX CEO. Elon Muskwho spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has appeared frequently at Trump’s side before and after his election victory, and has been involved in all aspects of Trump’s transition planning. He and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy were tapped to lead an advisory group tasked with cutting government costs.

This could put Altman of OpenAI, which is currently engaged in a suit for breach of contract carried by Musk, in an awkward position.

Along with his inaugural $1 million donation, Altman praised Trump earlier this month. “President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I look forward to supporting his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” he said.

Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for the progressive non-profit Public Citizen, told CNBC that these figures “very much fear that Donald Trump may take retribution against them.”

“So, they throw money” at his feet “to do the favor,” Holman said.

Four days after the presidential election, Trump announced the formation of the “Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc.”, a 501(c)(4) non-profit. It is co-chaired by real estate investor Steve Witkoff and former Republican Senator. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, who is also Trump’s pick to lead the Small Business Administration.

Reince Priebus, who was one of Trump’s White House chiefs of staff during his first term, said in a X post that he was tapped to serve as the committee’s financial chairman.

Priebus also shared a screenshot of an invitation that listed the names of other finance chairs. They include Miriam Adelson, the GOP megadonor who passed $100 million this year on a pro-Trump super PAC, and a billionaire Trump donor Diane Hendricks.

Inaugural committees are required to publicly disclose the names of donors who give $200 or more, but those documents are not due until 90 days after the inaugural ceremony.

If the committee has a surplus after all the festivities, figuring out how much is left can be a challenge.

Trump’s 2017 inauguration was a smaller affair than Obama’s in 2009, even though Trump raised more than twice as much money for his as Obama had. As a result, Trump’s committee was widely expected to have tens of millions of dollars left over after paying for balls and hotels.

But years after the fact, it was it is not clear what happened a lot of that money.

Federal documents show that about a quarter of all funds raised, $26 million, were paid to a newly created company which was run by an adviser to first lady Melania Trump.

“We look through the history of inauguration funding, and it clearly comes from very big donors, wealthy special interests and corporations, almost all of whom have pending business before the federal government,” said Holman, of Public Citizen.

He added: “This is a real cesspool of buying favors.”