President Donald Trump raised a record-shattering $239 million for his inauguration fund from donors eager to please the famously transactional president-elect.
Trump himself had set the previous record—$107 million—in 2017. For January’s events, about 140 people and companies gave $1 million or more, The New York Times reported.
The Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee was required by law to report the donations to the Federal Election Commission, but did not have to report how the money was used—or spend it in any specific way.
That made inaugural fund donations the perfect vehicle for currying favor with the administration.
At the time, tech giants Meta, Amazon, and Google made a point of publicly announcing their $1 million donations in the lead-up to the events, the Times reported. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Apple CEO Tim Cook personally donated $1 million each.
Now, a new election commission filing reveals that campaign mega donor Elon Musk’s tech investor friends John Hering, Ken Howery, and Keith Rabois also gave $1 million each. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Britain, Warren Stephens, donated $4 million the same day Trump announced his ambassadorship nomination, according to the Times.
Other major corporate donors included JP Morgan Chase, Delta Air Lines and Target, all of which gave at least $1 million. The biggest donations came from the poultry producer Pilgrim’s, which gave $5 million, and the crypto company Ripple Inc., which gave nearly as much.
The committee actually refunded about $6 million in donations because some of the events were so full that seven-figure donors couldn’t get in, according to the Times.
Tech billionaires including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos were rewarded for their fealty with prime seats for the president’s inauguration ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda.
They don’t seem to have received much in the way of a return on their investments, The New York Times reported earlier this month.
Thanks to the president’s trade war, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have lost trillions of dollars in combined market value since January, as Trump’s tariffs promise to drive up the prices of many of their products.
The government has also refused to drop its landmark antitrust case against Meta, and has slashed federal funding for research into emerging technologies like quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
Executives may have hoped that flattery and seven-figure donations might earn them special treatment from Trump, but so far, the relationship has been a “one-way street,” a former Federal Communications Commission official told the Times.
The 2025 inaugural committee hasn’t said how much money it spent on Trump’s inauguration weekend, but even with the various events planned, inauguration expenses have never come anywhere near $250 million, the paper reported.
Trump’s allies have said the rest of the money will be funneled to the president’s other sponsored projects, including a presidential library. The $346 million raised by his two inaugural committees is more than every other committee combined since 1973.
