President-elect Donald Trump was upbeat at his first post-election press conference Monday, saying there was a big difference between now and when he took office in 2016: Some of his former adversaries are now being nice to him.
“Everybody wants to be my friend,” he said about how he’s being treated by CEOs of major technology companies, whom he has portrayed as adversaries in the past. “I don’t know, my personality changed or something.”
During the wide-ranging press conference at his Mar-a-Lago property, Trump said that one of the biggest differences over the last four years is that “everybody was fighting me.”
“The biggest difference is that people want to get along with me this time,” he added.
The remarks were Trump’s first news conference since he won the election and the first event he has hosted himself since November.
Trump referenced recent meetings with Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai and former Alphabet President Sergey Brin. He also said he plans to meet with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos later this week.
“Tim Cook was here. I think he’s done an incredible job at Apple. He talked about the future of Apple. It’s going to be a bright future. But we have many others also, and not in that business,” he said. “We have a lot of great executives coming in, the top executives, the top bankers, they were calling.”
Several major tech companies, including Amazon, Meta and OpenAI have already donated $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund.
Trump has had a complicated history with many of Big Tech’s CEOs as a number of them criticized policies enacted when he was last president — and banned him from social media platforms following the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
In 2020, for example, executives lambasted Trump over his executive order to freeze new visas for foreign workers, arguing that immigrants have helped strengthen the U.S. economy, and specifically technology companies.
In the wake of Jan. 6, Trump was barred from using his Twitter and Facebook accounts. He later sued Facebook, Twitter and Google over some of the bans.
Trump had also feuded with Bezos over his ownership of The Washington Post, Amazon’s decision not to do business with the far-right social media app Parler in 2021 and a bid Amazon made on a $10 billion Pentagon contract.
The thawing of relations is emblematic of a broader right-ward turn in the tech sphere, with some of its other leading figures now taking official and unofficial roles in Trump’s second administration. Most prominent is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, whom Trump has tapped to lead a Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotech executive. Trump has also named venture capitalist David Sacks and technologist Jacob Helberg to business advisory roles.
David Ingram contributed.
