Tech CEOs Race To Florida Swamp To Kiss Trump's Ring

The new government demands a personal touch, and Pichai, Bezos, and Zuck are trying to oblige.

Don't you even know dignity when you see it?

Currying favor with the government used to take teams of lobbyists. But the government to come demands a personal touch. Specifically, CEOs with Ted Cruz levels of dignity, who are willing to fly to Mar-a-Lago and abase themselves in the hope that the Dictator on Day One won’t use every lever of power available to him to try and gut their companies like luau pigs.

There’s Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, who reportedly flew himself down to the motel on Thursday, presumably to beg Big Daddy to keep the DOJ from giving Google the old Ma Bell treatment. Back in August, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google was a monopoly, the Standard Oil of search. Which it surely is: Its engine accounts for about 90 percent of all searches in the world, netting $175 billion in search advertising revenue in 2023 alone. When’s the last time you asked Jeeves or Bing a gotdamn thing?

A forced breakup could cost Google bajillions, and kneecap its DeepMind project in the AI race. And the old man has been Big-Mac-biting mad at the company, raging that Google “rigged” search results to suppress positive coverage about him. But after Pichai reportedly called him on the phone a few times, Ginger Donya outwardly began to waffle a bit, musing in October, “If you do that, are you going to destroy the company? What you can do without breaking it up is make sure it's more fair? They do treat me very badly.” So there’s maybe a chance?

Big Daddy’s already stuffed his junk drawer of administration picks with people who agree that Google has been terribly unfair to him and done censorship to conservatives, including new head of the FTC Andrew Ferguson, who got the position after his own Mar-a-Lago pilgrimage.

The DOJ’s proposed that Google be forced to divest Chrome and its Android operating system, and prevented from entering into monogamous polycules with the likes of Apple and Samsung. Swift kicks in the dicks to Google, Meta, and/or Amazon would also help best buddy Elon Musk, as it happens, who’s been working on a “non-woke” AI to compete with Apple Intelligence, Microsoft’s ChatGPT, Meta Platforms, Amazon Web Services, and the like.

Speaking of Meta, here comes the Zuck! Dictator Day One threatened him with life in prison after he and wife Priscilla Chan committed the terrible crime of donating $350 million to a nonprofit that helped underfunded jurisdictions pay for election administration. Trump fumed in one of his coffee-table photo books that the boar-hunting billionaire

would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes [ballot drop boxes, presumably] in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT. He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me. We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison—as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.

The Zuckerbot has never donated to any specific political campaigns, actually, but that was then! More recently he’s slobbered that Big Daddy was “badass” for fist-pumping after getting “shot in the face” (he was not shot in the face) and praised him on Facebook after he won. Then Zuck zipped down to Florida with a gift pair of Meta Ray-Bans to partake in that school-lunch-looking Thanksgiving meal, where he was apparently seated in the pantry as rival Musk beamed at Poppy’s right hand.

Still, the boy Small Wonder has donated a million Meta bucks to the big inaugural coming-out ball, which will probably just be Trump sitting at the head of the table like an Italian bride, with a big satin borsa for everybody to stuff their envelopes in, while the soundtrack to Cats plays in the background.

And let’s not forget the Beez! He’s reportedly got plans to fly down next week, and has also ponied up a million bucks to help make Poppy feel like the prettiest princess on his special day. And he will stream the inauguration for whoever is dumb enough to still subscribe to Amazon Prime Video. (Bezos also tried to donate to Biden’s inauguration in 2020, but Biden turned him down.) Bezos even preemptively tanked all trust in his own newspaper by yoinking that endorsement of Kamala Harris at the last minute, and that’s gotta count for something, right? Amazon is also the subject of an antitrust suit, as it happens, and Bezos and Elon also have companies competing for government contracts for their respective space-dick companies. It’s so fun to have boys fighting over you!

The old man has long bitched about the Washington Post’s treatment of him, and mused about raising parcel rates just to fuck over the Beez: “If @amazon ever had to pay fair taxes, its stock would crash and it would crumble like a paper bag. The @washingtonpost scam is saving it!” In 2019 Amazon Web Services lost a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Department of Defense, which Bezos complained was personal. Under Biden, the deal was split between Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is now also donating a million bucks to the inaugural fund. Better get in there soon, Apple, Oracle, and Microsoft! Can’t you hear the spare-change cash can a-shaking?

These guys are businessmen. That means if they gotta soft-shoe to “Memories” in the West Vanilla Ice ballroom, that is what they gotta do. Shareholders would expect no less. Fealty, it’s the stablecoin of the realm!

[US et al v. Google/ NPR/ The Verge/ Zuck Wall Street Journal gift link/ Bezos Wall Street Journal gift link/ Amazon Wall Street Journal gift link/ AP]

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