Silicon Valley billionaires once resisted his pull. Now they’re lining up to line his pockets.

The billionaires of Silicon Valley aren’t done playing nice with Donald Trump. They’re now showering him with pleasantries, well wishes, and wads of cash.

On Wednesday, Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund just weeks after founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg flew to Palm Beach, Florida to meet with Trump and Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago home. In Save America, a coffee-table book that Trump published in September, Trump wrote that Zuckerberg had plotted against him during the 2020 election and would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did it again.

The next day, Amazon confirmed that it would also give $1 million to Trump’s fund. In addition, it’ll livestream the inauguration on Amazon Prime Video, and founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos will meet with Trump in the coming days. In 2019 Amazon sued the Trump administration, alleging that the president had canceled a defense contract with the company because Bezos was his “perceived political enemy.”

Then, Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, developer of the ChatGPT chatbot, said he’s planning to make a personal donation of—you guessed it—$1 million to the inauguration fund. Altman is a prominent Democratic donor but told the New York Times that “President Trump will lead our country into the age of A.I., and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead.” Then, the A.I. search-engine firm Perplexity, said it was announcing—please, make it stop—$1 million to Trump’s inauguration too.

Billionaires have also been supporting Trump through their media holdings. Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff, whom Politico called “Tech’s woke CEO” in 2019, is the owner of Time magazine, which just named Trump its Person of the Year for 2024. (It’s an honor previously bestowed on Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Henry Kissinger, and Vladimir Putin, so it’s not all glory.) On X, Benioff congratulated Trump, writing, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation. We look forward to working together to advance American success and prosperity for everyone. May G-d bless the United States of America. ❤️ 🇺🇸” Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times’ billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, each blocked their respective papers from endorsing Kamala Harris over Trump in the run-up to the election.

The Trump-era oligarchy stretches far beyond Elon Musk’s personal involvement in the Trump campaign and administration. It stretches far beyond the bipartisan ring-kissing that ensued directly after the election, when tech billionaires lined up to congratulate Trump on a well-fought victory. Now the stakes are financial, a relinquishment of liberal values among the world’s richest men, a prioritizing of good business practices and lucrative government contracts over morals and principles—all in the name of throwing our wannabe-fascist forever king a fabulous anointment and celebratory ball. When Trump takes office again in January, he’ll be bathing in not merely his own gold coins—a Scrooge McDuck incarnate—but those of the robber barons of today.

By all indications, these donations are uncoerced and perfectly legal, more of a recognition that the ethos of the Trump administration is one of a pay-to-play administration—or at least a pay-to-stay-on-the-glorious-leader’s-good-side administration. A million dollars might not get Silicon Valley a free pass for four years nor the laissez-faire utopia that they’ve dreamed of, but it could temporarily show Trump that they’ve given up the Resistance act and are ready to play the rules of the Art of the Deal, however he defines them.

Bezos, Zuckerberg, and their peers have given up the act—they’re ready to snuggle up to Trump if it’ll make them a single cent or save them an ounce of discomfort.