President-elect Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet for another tech bro Wednesday night, with Amazon boss Jeff Bezos spotted at Mar-a-Lago.
Bezos and fiancée Lauren Sanchez were seen sauntering into Trump’s Florida estate Wednesday night for a dinner with the incoming president. The pair walked hand in hand behind Trump and his wife, Melania, to huge cheers. They dined at a table with the Trumps.
Another guest at Mar-a-Lago posted a picture of the gathering on Instagram and claimed that Elon Musk arrived mid-dinner and sat between Bezos and Trump.
Lieba Nesis, a reporter and lawyer who took the shot, said it had seemed that Bezos was “on a mission to win Trump over” before Musk arrived unceremoniously around 50 minutes later, catching his fellow billionaire “off guard” and making him “uncomfortable like he had been c--k-blocked.”
“The tension between Musk and Bezos known rivals is palpable as they do their best to engage politely but clearly have no love for each other!” she added.
However, a person close to Bezos rebutted those claims in a chat with the Daily Beast. “There was no friction whatsoever, it was a fantastic dinner, a really great time,” they said.
Trump appeared elated with how things went, writing on Truth Social on Thursday morning: “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!”
Bezos, who has donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration through Amazon, has been on frosty terms with Musk.
Musk previously wrote on X that he’d heard “Bezos was telling everyone [Trump] would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock.”
Bezos, who owns rival space firm Blue Origin, shot down the claim, saying: “Nope. 100% not true.”
Musk, the SpaceX CEO and X owner, who has recently become Trump’s righthand man, apparently led the charge on collapsing a bipartisan deal on the debt ceiling on Wednesday.
On Thursday, he tried to calm relations with the world’s second richest man, Bezos, saying on X that he enjoyed a “great conversation” with The Washington Post owner.
Bezos’ Palm Beach visit comes as Amazon workers walk out of plants at one warehouse in San Francisco, and six delivery stations in southern California, New York City, Atlanta, and Skokie, Illinois.
Bezos, not traditionally an ally of Trump who once called him Jeff Bozo, recently expressed excitement at Trump’s return to the White House. “I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York earlier this month. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. If I can help do that, I’m going to help him.”
“We do have too many regulations in this country,” Bezos added.
Trump and Bezos’ relationship recently experienced an uptick when the Amazon founder’s newspaper, The Washington Post, broke with tradition and refused to back a presidential candidate earlier this year. The move came after years of the paper backing Democratic candidates for president.
Trump said at the New York Stock Exchange last week that he was excited by his tech-heavy diary.
“I want to get ideas from them,” Trump said after being named Time’s Person of the Year. “Look, we want them to do well.”
