Amazon To Donate $1 Million to Trump’s Inauguration and Stream the Event on Prime Video
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Amazon will donate $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, which the company will also reportedly stream on Prime Video.
Amazon confirmed the news to both the Wall Street Journal and CNN, with the Journal reporting that Amazon’s donation was “being prepared” as founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos was preparing to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago next week.
“Amazon also will stream the inauguration through its Prime Video business, a separate, in-kind donation valued at $1 million,” the Wall Street Journal reported, citing an anonymous source.
This week, Facebook parent company Meta also revealed it would be donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration after its CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago.
Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos has repeatedly sought to align himself closer to Trump in the past year.
In July, following the near-miss assassination attempt against Trump in Pennsylvania, which left one rally-goer dead and several others injured – including Trump himself – Bezos praised Trump’s “tremendous grace and courage” in a post on X.
“Our former President showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire tonight,” he wrote at the time. “So thankful for his safety and so sad for the victims and their families.”
The Bezos-owned Washington Post Bezos also declined to endorse a presidential candidate ahead of the election in November, despite having previously endorsed President Joe Biden against Trump in 2020 and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” wrote Bezos in an op-ed following the decision. “What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
Last week, Bezos declared that he was “very optimistic” about Trump’s second term in the White House.
“He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation and from my point of view, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him because we do have too many regulations in this country,” he said.
Bezos also said Trump had “grown” as a person since his first administration and was “calmer” now than he was before.
“You’ve probably grown in the last eight years. He has, too,” claimed Bezos. “What I’ve seen so far is that he is calmer than he was the first time, more confident, and more settled.”
In 2015, Trump warned on social media, “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!”
