On the day of Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, a group of his top billionaire donors, including the casino magnate Miriam Adelson and the future Republican National Committee finance chair Todd Ricketts, hosted a small private party, away from the publicly advertised inaugural balls.

It was the sort of event that carried no interest at the time for the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He greeted Trump’s first presidency by publicly identifying his wife’s parents and his own ancestors with the immigrants targeted by Trump’s early executive orders. “These issues are personal for me,” Zuckerberg wrote in a public letter of concern a week after Trump took office.

But this month, as the same donors made plans for Trump’s second inauguration, Zuckerberg successfully maneuvered to become a co-host of their black-tie event, scheduled for tonight. The party quickly became one of the most sought-after gatherings of the weekend, overwhelming organizers with RSVPs from people who had not received invitations.

Even more striking: Zuckerberg sat in front of Trump’s incoming Cabinet in the Capitol Rotunda at his inauguration—at the personal invitation of Trump himself, according to two people briefed on the plans who, like some other sources interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to describe private conversations. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.)

[Charlie Warzel: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this]

Zuckerberg was not alone. Trump’s inauguration events featured a Silicon Valley smorgasbord, with leaders from Apple, Google, and TikTok in attendance, as well as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Several of the tech moguls also joined a small prayer service this morning at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Later, they blended in with the Trump clan directly behind the incoming president as he officially assumed power just after noon, like honorary family members.

The scene announced a remarkable new dynamic in Washington: Far more so than in his first term, the ultra-wealthy—and tech billionaires in particular—are embracing Trump. And the new president is happy to entertain their courtship, setting up the possibility that Trump’s second turn in the White House could be shaped by person-to-person transactions with business and tech executives—a new kind of American oligarchy.

Eight years ago, Trump landed in Washington in a fit of defiance, denouncing in his inaugural address “the American carnage” wrought by “a small group in our nation’s capital.” Four years later, he left as an outcast, judged responsible for the U.S. Capitol riot and a haphazard attempt to undo the constitutional order. He returns this week with a clean sweep of swing states and the national popular vote, the loyal support of Republicans in Congress, and the financial backing of corporate donors who are expected to help the inaugural committee raise twice what it did in 2017. Organizers of the Women’s March, which stomped on Trump’s 2017 inauguration by sending hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets, settled for a series of unremarkable Saturday gatherings. The Democratic opposition, which treated Trump’s first term as an existential threat, now lacks an evident strategy or leader.

Like nearly every entity that has tried and failed to bend Trump to its will—his party, his former rivals, his partners in Congress, and his former aides among them—the tech elites largely seem to have decided that they’re better off seeking Trump’s favor.

[Read: ‘If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump’]   

Just months ago, Trump released a coffee-table photo book that included a pointed rant about Zuckerberg’s $420 million donation in 2020 to fund local election offices during the coronavirus pandemic, an undertaking that Trump called “a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.” “We are watching him closely,” Trump wrote of Zuckerberg, “and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison.”

But since Trump’s victory, Zuckerberg has worked to get himself in the new president’s good graces. The Meta CEO traveled to Mar-a-Lago; added a Trump pal to his corporate board; extolled the importance of “masculine energy” on Joe Rogan’s podcast; abandoned the Meta fact-checking program, which MAGA world had viewed as biased; and personally worked with Trump to try to resolve a 2021 civil lawsuit over Facebook’s decision to ban him from the platform, a case that legal experts once considered frivolous.

Bezos, meanwhile, worried aloud in 2016 that Trump’s behavior “erodes our democracy around the edges” and spent his first term taking fire from the president for the aggressive reporting of The Washington Post, the newspaper that Bezos owns (and where, until recently, we both were reporters). Now Amazon, like Meta, has given $1 million to the 2025 inaugural committee, and the company recently announced it would release a documentary about, and produced by, the first lady, Melania Trump. Even Musk, who spent more than $250 million last year to elect Trump and now is one of his top advisers, called for the aging Trump to “sail into the sunset” as recently as 2022.

“In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump marveled at a mid-December news conference. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

The sheer quantity of money flowing to, and surrounding, Trump has increased. In his first term, he assembled the wealthiest Cabinet in history; this time, his would-be Cabinet includes more than a dozen billionaires. Sixteen of his appointees come not just from the top one percent, but from the top one-ten-thousandth percent, according to the Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization. Democrats, too, have long kept their wealthiest donors close, inviting them in on policy discussions and providing special access, but never before have the nation’s wealthiest played such a central role in the formation of a new administration.

As recently as last week, before the inauguration proceedings were moved indoors because of cold weather, a donor adviser got a last-minute offer of $500,000 for four tickets, according to the person who fielded the call and had to gently decline the request. Trump’s 2017 committee raised $107 million, more than twice the 2013 record set by Barack Obama, and spent $104 million. So far this year, the 2025 inaugural committee is expected to raise at least $225 million and spend less than $75 million on the inaugural festivities, according to a person familiar with the plans. At least some of the unspent tens of millions could go to Trump’s presidential library, several people involved with fundraising told us.  

Trump’s first inauguration had all the markings of a hastily arranged bachelor party put on someone else’s credit card. Trump’s company and the 2017 inaugural committee ultimately paid $750,000 to the District of Columbia to settle claims of illegal payments, including allegations of inflated charges to a Washington hotel then owned by Trump. (Neither entity admitted wrongdoing.) This time, the inauguration organizers have been more disciplined, and donors have been eager to reward Trump’s victory.  

“People were prepared, so when he did win, Trump was looking for checks,” a person involved in all of the Trump campaigns and both inaugural events told us. “Once Elon got in there, that was kind of the holy water that allowed all the other tech guys to follow. They all followed each other like cattle.”

What wealthy donors could get in return for their support of Trump remains an open question. Zuckerberg’s, Bezos’s, and Musk’s federal business interests include rocket-ship and cloud-computing contracts, a federal investigation of Tesla’s auto-driving technology, a pending Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Meta, and a separate antitrust case against Amazon. Just last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for allegedly failing to disclose his early stake in Twitter, the social-media giant he later took over and renamed X. (A lawyer for Musk has said he did “nothing wrong.”) When Trump promised in his inaugural address to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” the cameras panned to Musk, whose SpaceX is racing Bezos’s Blue Origin; Musk raised both thumbs and mouthed “Yeah!” as he broke into an ebullient grin.

[Read: He’s no Elon Musk]

Existing federal ethics rules were not designed to address the possibility of the world’s wealthiest people padding the pockets of the first family through television rights or legal settlements. The Trump family’s recently announced cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, creates yet another way for the wealthy to invest directly in an asset to benefit the commander in chief. “There is no enforcement mechanism against the president under these laws,” Trevor Potter, a former general counsel for the late Arizona Senator John McCain’s campaign, told us.

Even as Silicon Valley elites try to ingratiate themselves with the incoming president, some of Trump’s populist supporters are murmuring that the emerging tech oligarchy is diluting the purity of the MAGA base. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump who has clashed in recent weeks with Musk over immigration policy, has fashioned himself as the field general for a fight against the tech bros and their outsize influence on a president eager to cut deals.

“He’s got them on display as ‘I kicked their ass.’ I’m stunned that these nerds don’t get anything to be up there,” Bannon told us last week, referring to the tech leaders appearing in prime camera position at Trump’s inauguration. “It’s like walking into Teddy Roosevelt’s lodge and seeing the mounted heads of all the big game he shot.”

For now, the ragtag populist figures like Bannon who defined Trump’s early years in politics are still celebrating. Roger Stone, the convicted and subsequently pardoned Trump kibitzer, attended inauguration events in his anachronistic morning suit—with plans for evening white tie. The British MP Nigel Farage hosted a party Friday at the Hay-Adams hotel, while former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson managed to get a ticket for the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

On Thursday, Bannon threw his own party, titled “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” or “A New Order of the Ages,” at Butterworth’s club on Capitol Hill. Drinks included, perhaps predictably, the Covfefe Martini (vodka, Fernet, espresso) and the Im-Peach This (gin, peach, Cocci Americano). Bannon arrived fashionably late and was followed from the moment he ducked through the door by a mob of iPhone documenters, and even a man with a flashbulb. He received an impromptu line of frenzied well-wishers that one British journalist quipped was “as if for the Queen.”

[Read: The MAGA honeymoon is over]

As seared foie gras and freshly shucked oysters moved through the room, Bannon urged his supporters to “set new lows tonight,” reminding them that once Trump took the oath of office on Monday, “then the real fun happens.”

“You have two to three days to get sober,” he exhorted. “Go for it!”

The tech barons also fanned out through the city in celebration. The next night, across town, Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, dined at Georgetown’s new hot spot, Osteria Mozza, sitting at a window table with leaders of the Post. On Saturday, Palantir and the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel hosted a party at his Woodley Park mansion; a bow-tied and mop-topped Zuckerberg arrived before the sun had fully set. And yesterday, Trump called Musk up onstage during his pre-inauguration rally inside the Capital One Arena—“C’mere, Elon!” he growled—briefly ceding the spotlight to the Tesla executive and his young son X.

During the 2024 election, many liberals and some conservatives feared that Trump’s second term would usher in a new kind of American autocracy, à la Hungary. But on its first day, at least, Trump’s new administration seems, more than anything else, oligarchal—albeit one where the transactions mainly flow one way, at least so far.

“They’re lining up to obey in advance. because they think they’re buying themselves peace of mind,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism who has been critical of Trump, told us. But, added Ben-Ghiat, who noted the overlap between autocracy and oligarchy: “They can give that million and everything can be fine—but the minute they displease Trump, he could come after them.”

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.

Twenty years ago, my day job was researching internet censorship, and my side hustle was advising activist organizations on internet security. I tried to help journalists in China access the unfiltered internet, and helped demonstrators in the Middle East avoid having their online content taken down.

Back then, unfiltered internet meant “the internet as accessed from the United States,” and most censorship-circumvention strategies focused on giving someone in a censored country access to a U.S. internet connection. The easiest way to keep sensitive content online—footage of a protest, for instance—was to upload it to a U.S.-based service such as YouTube. In early 2008, I gave a lecture for digital activists called “The Cute Cat Theory.” The theory was that U.S. platforms used for hosting pictures and videos of cat memes were the best tools for activists because if censorious governments blocked activist content, they would alienate their citizens by banning lots of innocuous content as well.

That was a simpler time. Elon Musk was a mere millionaire, only a few years removed from reportedly overstaying his U.S. student visa (he has denied working here illegally). Mark Zuckerberg was being mocked for wearing anonymous sweatshirts, not a $900,000 wristwatch. And the U.S. was seen as the home of the free, uncensored internet.

That era is now over. When Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20, videos of his oath of office will flood YouTube and Instagram. But those clips likely won’t circulate on TikTok, at least not any clips posted by U.S. users. In April 2024, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill, the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, designed to force TikTok to sell the Chinese-owned app to a U.S. company or shut down operations in the U.S. by January 19, 2025. Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law. News outlets have reported that Trump is considering issuing an executive order to delay the ban, leading to speculation that Chinese officials might sell the platform to “first buddy” Musk. (Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, has dismissed such speculation.)

[Read: ‘I won’t touch Instagram’]

Whether or not that happens, this is a depressing moment for anyone who cherishes American protections for speech and access to information. In 1965, while the Cold War shaped the U.S. national-security environment, the Supreme Court, in Lamont v. Postmaster General, determined that the post office had to send people publications that the government claimed were “communist political propaganda,” rather than force recipients to first declare in writing that they wanted to receive this mail. The decision was unanimous, and established the idea that Americans had the right to discover whatever they wanted within “a marketplace of ideas.” As lawyers at the Knight First Amendment Center argued in an amicus brief supporting TikTok, the level of speech suppression that the U.S. government is demanding now is far more serious, because it would prevent American citizens from accessing information entirely, not just require them to get permission to access that information.

According to the Biden administration and its bipartisan supporters, TikTok is simply too dangerous for impressionable Americans to access. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar’s national-security argument in defense of the ban was that “ByteDance’s ownership and control of TikTok pose an unacceptable threat to national security because that relationship could permit a foreign adversary government to collect intelligence on and manipulate the content received by TikTok’s American users,” though she admitted that “those harms had not yet materialized.” The Supreme Court’s decision explicitly affirms these fears: “Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”

We don’t yet know how TikTok users in the United States will respond to the ban of a platform used by 170 million Americans, but what happened in India might provide some insights.

My lab at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst studies content on TikTok and YouTube, and a few months ago, we stumbled on some interesting data. In 2016, videos in Hindi represented less than 1 percent of all videos uploaded that year to YouTube. By 2022, more than 10 percent of new YouTube videos were in Hindi. We believe that this huge increase was due not just to broadband improvement and mobile-phone adoption in India, but to the Indian government’s ban of TikTok in June 2020. As we examined Hindi videos uploaded in 2020, we saw clear evidence of an influx of TikTok refugees onto YouTube. Many of the newly posted videos were exactly 15 seconds long, the limit that TikTok put on video recordings until 2017. Others featured TikTok branding at the beginning or end of the video.

Like the U.S., India had cited national-security reasons for the ban, and it had a more defensible justification: India and China were then clashing militarily along their shared border. But TikTok was much more important to India than it is to the United States. We estimate that, when India banned TikTok in mid-2020, more than 5 billion videos had been uploaded to the service by Indian users. (Examining some of these videos, we see evidence that TikTok in South Asia might be used more as a videochat service to stay in touch with family and friends than as a platform for wannabe influencers.) Even now, more than four years after the ban, the only countries with more videos uploaded to TikTok than India are Pakistan, Indonesia, and the United States; we estimate that more than a quarter of TikTok-video uploads are from South Asia, while just over 7 percent are from the United States.

When those Indian TikTok creators were forced off the platform, new Indian short-video apps such as Moj and Chingari hoped to capture the wave of users. They were largely unsuccessful—none of these small start-ups has achieved visibility in India to compete with YouTube and Instagram, both well-financed, U.S.-based businesses. In effect, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s TikTok ban was a subsidy to the U.S. companies Google and Meta. It was also correctly seen as evidence of the Modi government’s retreat from global democratic values and toward a less open society.

Until recently, I’d expected the TikTok ban to have the same result in the U.S.: effectively creating a nationalist subsidy protecting domestic tech providers (who, oddly enough, have been lining up to donate to inaugural parties for the incoming administration). But American TikTok users are a creative bunch, and in the past week, enough of them have migrated to the Chinese social network Xiaohongshu—often translated as “Red Book” or “Red Note” in English—that the app now tops social-media-download charts on Android and iPhone operating systems. Xiaohongshu, initially created as a video travel guide to Hong Kong for mainland-Chinese tourists, has an interface that’s familiar to TikTok users, and Chinese users are welcoming American newcomers with a charming stream of invitations to teach conversational Mandarin or Chinese cooking, and tips on how to avoid censorship on the network.

[Hana Kiros: The internet is TikTok now]

Chinese and American users aren’t likely to share space on Xiaohongshu for long. The Chinese government has generally required service providers whose tools become popular outside China to bifurcate their product offerings for Chinese and other users. Weixin, the popular messaging and microblogging app in China, is a separate platform—WeChat—in the rest of the world. TikTok itself branched off from the domestic-Chinese network Douyin. And even if Beijing, sensing a great PR opportunity, allows TikTok refugees to remain on Xiaohongshu, the same logic that allowed Congress to ban TikTok would presumably apply to any other Chinese-owned company with potential to “collect intelligence on and manipulate” American users’ content.

Although I don’t think this specific rebellion can last, I’m encouraged that American TikTok users realize that banning the popular platform directly contradicts America’s values. If only America’s leaders were so wise.

When I advised internet activists on how to avoid censorship in 2008, I included a section in my presentation called “The China Corollary.” Although most nations could not easily censor social-media platforms without antagonizing their citizens, China was big enough to create its own parallel social-media system that met the needs of most users for entertainment while blocking activists. What I could not have anticipated was that Americans would find themselves fleeing their own censorious government for a Chinese video platform with tight content controls.

Trump might decide to get around the TikTok ban with an executive order stating that the platform is no longer a national-security threat. Or the Trump administration could elect not to enforce the law. Musk, Zuckerberg, or another Trump friend might purchase the platform. But for millions of Americans, the damage is done: The idea of America as a champion of free speech is forever shattered by this shameful ban.