Among all the images of people cozying up to President Donald Trump at today’s inauguration, one in particular will be worth remembering over the next four years. During the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, you could see some of the most powerful men on the planet positioned immediately behind members of the Trump family on the dais. There’s Tiffany, there’s Eric, there’s Ivanka and Don, Jr., and then, smiling and clapping right alongside the family, the tech titans: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook. In visual proximity, they’re as close to honorary Trumps as anyone could be.

The power that each of these men represents may be rivaled by only the presidency itself. Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta; Bezos founded Amazon and Blue Origin and owns The Washington Post; Pichai runs Google; Musk heads Tesla and SpaceX and owns X; Cook is Apple’s CEO. TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, was also in attendance in a back row, and OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, was reportedly seated in the overflow crowd in Emancipation Hall. These business leaders directly control the tools that billions of people around the world use to communicate, to receive information, to be entertained, to navigate and understand the world. Even an incomplete list of products overseen by these people is striking: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Gmail, Google Search, Google Docs, Android, iPhones, iPads, Macs, iMessage, Starlink, ChatGPT, TikTok—the world’s foremost technology platforms, in line behind Donald Trump.

It’s not unusual for business leaders to rub shoulders with presidents and other elected officials. But this was something else: Inauguration seats closest to an incoming president tend to be reserved for a president’s family and figures in politics, and the tech executives on Trump’s dais have been hard at work ingratiating themselves into his universe. In the lead-up to today’s events, they have demonstrated a remarkable spinelessness. Most attempted to curry the incoming president’s favor by giving million-dollar donations to his inaugural fund—in effect, kissing the ring. They gave relatively little, if at all, to Joe Biden’s fund; some run companies that had previously declared they would reassess their political donations following the January 6 insurrection—a stance that clearly did not stick. The events of that day have been memory holed. Now Zuckerberg and Musk have reoriented their products in direct service of the MAGA movement, disposing of content-moderation policies and proclaiming a supposed commitment to free speech that serves the loudest and most odious users. TikTok exalted Trump yesterday when it brought its service back online following a brief shutdown: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” the app wrote in a pop-up sent to users. Fewer than five years ago, Trump had issued an executive order that would have effectively banned the app, calling it a threat to national security.

Regardless of past policies and stated principles, it seems that, as always, business is business. Each tech leader on Trump’s dais has a clear financial interest in courting the president. Meta, Google, and Apple all face antitrust suits; TikTok could still be shut down in the United States; and OpenAI, like other generative-AI firms, is doing whatever it can to avoid growth-limiting regulation. Musk’s companies have been under numerous recent investigations or reviews by federal regulators. Plus, he will need the support of the government to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” as Trump put it in his speech today.

The tech industry has officially placed itself in the palm of Trump’s hand. What will happen the next time the FBI wants to get into a Facebook account or an encrypted iPhone—when the definition of a political threat has changed based on the president’s whims? What will happen if Google Search delivers search results that are at odds with Trump’s agenda?

What cannot be forgotten is that these men—who for years have behaved as if they answer to no one—appear to stand for little more than the accrual of wealth and power, regardless of what it means for the people who use their products. Today, they bent the knee.

During the early days of COVID, I found myself living in Los Angeles, the city I grew up in, back in the San Fernando Valley, the flat sprawl of suburban conformity I’d run away from at 18. The Valley had always felt oppressively normal to me; it made me, as a weirdo, self-conscious. And now I was there again, this time missing the serendipitous weirdness of a New York City subway car, in which I could be subsumed. Trying to relax, I would drive around just to drive around, the palm trees and sun exactly where they always were, the strip malls endless. But one morning, I turned the radio dial, and on came the lizardy voice of David Lynch. And he was doing the weather report.

Lynch, the bizarro-baroque filmmaker who died this week, at 78, will be remembered for being a cinematic giant, for Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive as well as the warped TV soap opera Twin Peaks and its avant-garde sequel, Twin Peaks: The Return. But what I want to recall is a much smaller gift he bestowed on me and other Angelenos when he started airing weather reports every day on the local public-radio station KCRW in May 2020, just as life under the coronavirus was becoming a long-term slog.

These dispatches were quick flashes of absurdity, many of them lasting just a bit more than a minute. The Lynchean joke of it all was, of course, that in La-La Land, the weather is pretty much always the same.

He would start off with the date and day of the week and read off the weather (in Fahrenheit and Celsius), almost invariably saying that it was “sunny” and “very still right now.” And then he would ponder for a moment: “Today, I was thinking about …” What followed was a nugget from the man’s mind, almost always the title of a song, actually something you could imagine him thinking about as he brewed a pot of black coffee that morning—Mazzy Starr’s “Fade Into You,” or “Moon River,” or the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” Sometimes he would just narrate his plans for the day, but in surreal splendor: “Day two of weekend projects, and the fun work train is rolling. I’m going to get to the dining car and get a hot coffee, maybe a cookie, maybe some popcorn. Today I’m going to be working with oil paint, tempera paint, mold-making rubber, resin, and … varnish.”

But the pièce de résistance was the last 10 seconds of each broadcast, when Lynch described what the sky would look like that afternoon: “We might have some clouds visiting until lunchtime. After that should be pure blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way,” or “It looks like these clouds will evaporate by mid-morning, and after that we’re going to be having those beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way.”

“All along the way” became a kind of catchphrase. It always made me think of The Wizard of Oz, which was a Lynch touchstone—both the glossy campiness of Glinda and the sickly green skin of the Wicked Witch. And that was it: “Everyone, have a great day!”

(His other catchphrase was “If yoouu can believe it, it’s a Friday once again!” Especially during the early pandemic, this felt like a lifeline to normal times, with a strong undernote of irony.)

[Read: David Lynch was America’s cinematic poet]

I heard these dispatches on the radio every morning on my aimless drives, but I later learned that Lynch posted videos of the reports, and in these he appears in a black shirt buttoned to the top, his shock of white hair standing straight up, and—always, always—big dark sunglasses. Mel Brooks, who gave Lynch his first major-studio directorial gig (The Elephant Man, which Brooks produced), famously once called him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” It also seems true to say that if Mars had a weatherman, this is exactly what he would look and sound like. (Perhaps: “A blazing red sun outside, folks, but we’ll be down to –153 tonight.”)

David Lynch’s final weather report.

These daily moments of zen opened something up in me, and made the Valley seem a little less ordinary. After all, Lynch was manifesting in these reports the duality that was a hallmark of his aesthetic, a kind of excessive, pathological normalcy. It’s in his reference to many 1950s songs, his clothing and hair, the very idea of a jolly weatherman providing a tether to sunny, physical reality. And yet, the creepy, creaky edge, the excitement with which he pronounced “very still” every single day, pointed to something dreamier and much darker. It made me attuned to the freeway underpasses, brightly lit and menacing, to the sadness of the blinking neon signs on liquor stores, to the Valley’s surrounding hills, which grow shadowy and hulking at night. Listening to Lynch on the radio suddenly made me feel like I was inhabiting a noir of some sort, as if Raymond Chandler were narrating the events of my very boring and predictable COVID day of bleaching vegetables and washing masks.

There was a charm to Lynch’s weather reports. He genuinely seemed to enjoy embodying this role for a few minutes a day. And it came through. My editor told me that his then-7-year-old son thought of Lynch as his “favorite weatherman,” and it’s funny to think of a new generation encountering the director as a grandfatherly figure wishing them a good day as they opened up their laptops for remote school. Wait until they see Dennis Hopper sucking on gas in Blue Velvet.

The weather reports stopped in late 2022, just as the world attempted to return to its own version of normal—and around the time I moved back to New York. But I like to think of Lynch having grabbed that brief period to fulfill his own fantasy of messing with us all a little bit, and also providing something that he wasn’t always known for but should be: a kind of innocent joy. I know that I’m wishing him blue skies all along the way.