Donald Trump is portrayed as privately savouring the attention of Silicon Valley’s richest men during his second term in the White House, with a new book alleging that the 80‑year‑old president revelled in tech titans such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg effectively ‘worshipping’ him in Washington and at Mar‑a‑Lago.
For context, the claims come from Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, a 464‑page account by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that charts how Donald Trump, re‑elected in 2024, tightened his grip on power, rewired parts of the federal government and sought to bend America’s cultural and media landscape to his will. The authors say they drew on extensive anonymised interviews and internal accounts, and that they approached everyone named in the book for comment. IBTimes UK cannot independently verify these claims, so take everything lightly.
The book’s most eyebrow‑raising passages describe a White House and Florida retreat that became revolving doors for tech billionaires who had once kept Trump at arm’s length, or actively opposed him, but were now jostling for influence.
According to Haberman and Swan, Trump summed it up to his sometime confidant Musk in blunt terms. Referring to Zuckerberg and Bezos, he allegedly told the Tesla chief: ‘They hated me. And look at them now.’ Musk is said to have replied with two cutting words, calling it ‘first‑class grovelling’.
The authors also recount Trump boasting that a billionaire who had previously attacked him was now ‘kissing my a–’, a crude phrase he reportedly repeated to visitors as a kind of victory lap over Big Tech.
Donald Trump And Silicon Valley’s Changing Tone
It can be recalled that relations between Donald Trump and Silicon Valley were toxic through much of his first term. He railed against ‘Big Tech censorship’, attacked Bezos over The Washington Post’s coverage and was finally banned from Meta platforms after the 6 January Capitol riot, when Zuckerberg’s company concluded he had incited violence. Against that backdrop, the book’s description of a second‑term thaw, or at least a transactional rapprochement, is striking.
Haberman and Swan write that after his 2024 win, Trump, then 78, repeatedly paraded evidence of newfound warmth from technology leaders to guests at Mar‑a‑Lago. Zuckerberg, in particular, appears as a recurring fixation.
The book describes Trump proudly sharing what it calls ‘gestures of goodwill’ from the Meta boss, including a letter from one of Zuckerberg’s children expressing excitement about ‘the golden age of America’ under Trump’s renewed leadership. The authenticity of that letter has not been independently confirmed, but in the authors’ telling, it became part of the president’s private mythology about conquering his enemies.
A former aide, speaking anonymously, told the authors: ‘(Trump) fed off it. For someone who had spent years attacking Big Tech, seeing them come back to him like that was deeply validating.’ Another person familiar with the exchanges is quoted as saying it ‘wasn’t just politics – he saw it as personal vindication’.
That word, vindication, sits at the heart of this portrait. The tech bosses were not just donors or advisers, they were trophies.
Bezos, The Washington Post And A President Who ‘Got Off On’ Deference
The news came after years of very public animosity between Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post. Trump had cast Bezos as part of a coastal elite determined to undermine him, while the newspaper delivered some of the most dogged reporting on his administration.
Yet in Regime Change, Bezos is depicted sending the president a smiling selfie with his wife, Lauren Sánchez, after the 2024 election, which Trump supposedly flaunted to visitors. At a post‑election dinner, the pair allegedly found common ground in their exasperation with the Post itself.
‘The people there are terrible,’ Bezos is quoted as saying of the paper’s business side. ‘They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen.’ According to someone briefed on the dinner, there was ‘a sense of mutual grievance’, with Trump feeling aggrieved at the paper’s coverage and Bezos, in that moment at least, distancing himself from its management.
You do not need to be a psychologist to see why this would appeal to Trump. Here was the billionaire he had spent years bashing, coming to him to complain about his own flagship newspaper. One source quoted in the book says Trump ‘got off on’ these reversals of fortune, especially when they involved figures who had once looked down on him.
The pattern, as described by Haberman and Swan, was familiar. Trump wanted visible shows of loyalty, concrete proof that he was the gravitational centre of American power. Whether that meant a flattering letter, a carefully chosen selfie or a public climbdown after a ban, he wanted something he could wave in front of people.
That impulse extended far beyond tech. The book notes that Trump even took to decorating parts of the White House himself, at one point using a tube of super glue, a strange little detail presented as symbolic of his urge to physically stamp himself on the building.
An unnamed official told the authors: ‘He wanted to leave his mark everywhere – physically, politically, culturally. And he wanted people to acknowledge that power.’ Subtle it was not.
Elon Musk, Status Games And Measuring Power
For starters, Elon Musk’s role in the narrative is not simply that of a cheerleader. The book casts him as both participant and wry observer, someone who enjoyed the access but was not blind to the grovelling around him.
Haberman and Swan say Trump viewed Musk as a kind of mirror, another man obsessed with scale, wealth and spectacle. Their reported conversation about Zuckerberg and Bezos, and Musk’s ‘first‑class grovelling’ line, captures the slightly mad, status‑drunk atmosphere the authors describe in Trumpworld after 2024.
They characterise Donald Trump as ‘the most powerful president of our lifetimes’, operating with almost no internal constraint and with an intense focus on how he was perceived. In that context, his relationships with Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk were not side stories but central to how he measured his own influence in an era when politics and technology are hopelessly entangled.
A former administration official put it this way: ‘For Trump, it wasn’t enough to win his second term. He wanted the people who once dismissed him to come back and, in his view, recognise his authority. That was part of the appeal.’
It is worth repeating that much of this relies on unnamed sources and reconstructed conversations. Nothing is confirmed yet so everything should be taken with a grain of salt. The tech billionaires involved have not publicly endorsed this version of events, and some may well contest it.
Still, the picture is vivid: an ageing president holding court at his private club, flashing texts and photos from the world’s richest men and treating each overture as another notch on the bedpost of power. Not exactly the stuff of a standard policy memoir, but very much the Trump story this book wants to tell.
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