Trump says Big Tech CEOs like Tim Cook have been the ‘opposite of hostile’ ahead of his 2nd term: ‘My personality changed or something’

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Donald Trump addressed the scores of CEOs who have jockeyed to get private meetings.”Everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump told reporters.Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and other top execs have met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

President-elect Donald Trump said on Monday that major tech CEOs want to meet with him ahead of his second term, showcasing how an industry that once spurned him is now supportive.

“One of the big differences between the first term, in the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump told reporters during a news conference. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Big Tech executives like Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai have or are expected to visit Mar-a-Lago to meet with the president-elect. “I had dinner with, sort of, almost all of them, and the rest are coming,” Trump said on Monday.

“I don’t know, my personality changed or something,” the president-elect added.

The series of meetings follows an election season that saw some major names in Silicon Valley embrace Trump, including, most notably, Elon Musk.

Trump has reciprocated the love, naming Musk to co-lead the newly created “Department of Government Efficiency” and tapping former PayPal executive David Sacks as his crypto and AI czar.

Some in the tech community have also announced their intentions to make $1 million donations to Trump’s inaugural committee either by themselves or through their corporation.

Many in the business community, including tech, were skeptical of Trump’s first term.

Some, including Musk, broke with Trump over his decision to stick by his campaign promise to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord. Others, including CEOs from Intel, Merck, and Under Armour, resigned from White House advisory councils in the wake of Trump’s response to white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump, however, continued to court CEOs. In 2019, his White House launched a new business-focused council that included the likes of Cook, along with top leaders from IBM and Walmart.