One thing that really stood out during President Donald Trump’s inauguration? All the billionaires. A cadre of them, including three of the world’s richest men: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
They all attended the event, and all of them seemed to be jockeying for his attention. This prompted prominent Democratic New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to lay down some harsh words for the current crop of billionaires trying to curry the president’s favor.
Ocasio-Cortez appeared on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart podcast recently, and she didn’t hold back. She pointed at that these were people who were “scared before” about being associated with Trump but now they’re in a “kiss-ass race” to devote themselves to him. “I think what’s really important for people to understand, now and every day of this administration, is that you’re being ripped off,” she said.
AOC went on to tell Stewart that Trump was “so much more dangerous” now than he was four years ago because he is “much more normalized.” Before, she explained, people were more cautious and guarded about supporting Trump. When Trump would do something out of the ordinary, people would respond appropriately. That’s not how it is this time around. Musk, for one, doesn’t seem to care about respecting social norms at all.
No one gives a flying hoot, she argued, about what Trump stands for. These billionaires only care about kissing Trump’s butt so they can get something out of him, or at the very least, not incur his wrath. Trump is “the quintessential New York con-man,” she said. This sentiment was also echoed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who said the big three billionaires saw increases of wealth in the neighborhood of $233 billion since Trump was elected in November. “No wonder they were sitting right behind Donald Trump at his inauguration,” he said in a video posted to X.
Just how have these billionaires shown “fealty” to their new lord, as Ocasio-Cortez puts it? Bezos reportedly killed an endorsement of Trump’s Democratic opponent Kamala Harris at The Washington Post. Zuckerberg did away with Meta’s fact-checking program, something that Trump was openly hostile toward. Musk gave the Trump campaign a quarter of a billion dollars. It doesn’t stop there. Both Amazon and Meta, along with the government itself, have quickly been getting rid of corporate diversity and D.E.I. hiring practices. The Trump administration seems to be turning into a “For the billionaires” government, instead of a “for the people” one.
Ocasio-Cortez is one of Trump’s leading critics, and has been for a long time. She posted a series of Instagram videos before Trump’s inauguration, saying the country was on the “eve of an authoritarian administration” and that his administration looks like “21st-Century fascism.”
She was also very clear as to why she didn’t attend the inauguration: “I don’t celebrate rapists,” she said. Other billionaires in attendance at Trump’s inauguration included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. Stewart quipped that instead of Democratic or Republican governors who would normally attend an inauguration, there were “the six guys who control maybe 20 percent of the world’s wealth and 100 percent of your nudes.”
Published: Jan 25, 2025 07:03 am