Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg will attend President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, according to an official involved with the planning of the event.
They will have a prominent spot at the ceremony, seated together on the platform with other notable guests including Trump’s Cabinet nominees and elected officials.
The three tech titans have all made attempts to earn favor with Trump in the past year, led by Musk donating more than a quarter-billion dollars in campaign funds to help elect Trump. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX — and the co-lead of a new Trump administration advisory body called DOGE — Musk has frequently been at Trump’s side since endorsing him for president in July.
Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, this month reshuffled his lobbying staff and his content moderation policies to align with the incoming Republican administration. Meta also gave $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund.
Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the company’s executive chair, decided last fall that The Washington Post, which he owns, would not endorse in the presidential race, overruling opinion staff who wanted to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. Amazon also contributed $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
The three men are among the wealthiest people in the world with fortunes based on the tech boom of the past two decades. Musk ranks No. 1, Bezos No. 2 and Zuckerberg No. 3, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
NBC News has reached out to representatives of Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg about their attendance. A representative at Meta declined to comment. The others did not immediately return requests for comment.
All three men have supported Democrats and Republicans over the years, according to federal records.
Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos are frequent rivals in the tech industry, dueling for influence on subjects such as artificial intelligence, space exploration and media.
Bezos is trying to compete with Musk’s dominance in rocket launches with his space company Blue Origin, though on Monday Blue Origin called off its inaugural launch attempt.
Zuckerberg and Musk are longtime rivals in AI research and are each pouring billions of dollars into new AI models. In 2022, Musk also started competing with Zuckerberg on social media when he bought X, which was then Twitter.
Bezos and Zuckerberg compete through the dueling advertising and shopping businesses of Amazon and Meta.
