Donald Trump mocked Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos behind their backs after both men tried to ingratiate themselves with him following the 2024 election, according to a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. The episodes, laid out in Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, show two of the most powerful business figures in America trying to reset their relationship with a president they had once opposed.
The timing matters because the book was obtained before its June 23 release, and it captures the scramble around Trump as he moved toward a second term. Weeks after Zuckerberg and Bezos met with him, Trump was still describing their messages to associates as “kissing my ass,” a blunt line that matched the way he kept replaying their outreach as proof of his political comeback.
One of the clearest examples involved Zuckerberg, who texted Trump a photo of a letter written by one of his grade-school-age children. The child said they looked forward to the “golden age of America,” a phrase Trump had been repeating at rallies during the presidential campaign. The message was meant to flatter him. Instead, it became part of the material Trump later used to boast about how far even his critics had come.
Bezos took a different route. Over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, he denigrated The Washington Post to Trump and essentially described it as one of his worst financial investments. A person familiar with the Bezos episodes said he had long worked with presidents of both parties, had donated $100 million to Barack Obama’s presidential library, and intended to work with whoever next occupies the Oval Office. That history complicates the book’s portrait of a man currying favor, but it does not erase the fact that Bezos was trying to make his peace with Trump.
Trump later told guests and visitors, “You would not believe the texts I got from these tech guys. I’ve got to show you.” He also said, “Think of where these guys were in 2016,” and added, “They hated me. They were doing everything they could to knock me down. And look at them now.” Elon Musk, hearing the account, replied: “First-class groveling.”
The scenes fit a broader picture of influential Silicon Valley leaders moving quickly after the election to get on the right side of the incoming president. Trump arrived shortly after Thanksgiving 2024 and played the national anthem over the speakers, only for it to be the version by the J6 Prison Choir. The book says Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook also met with him, underscoring how wide that post-election courtship ran.
For Bezos, the unanswered question is not whether he tried to ease tensions with Trump; it is what specific business favor he was hoping to win. The book does not identify it. What it does make clear is that Trump saw the outreach as an admission of defeat, and he was happy to repeat it to anyone who would listen.
