Former and now President-elect Donald Trump has once again won the White House, becoming the first person since Grover Cleveland to win two non-consecutive presidential terms.
As financial markets surge on the news, business leaders across sectors have begun to react to the coming second Trump presidency.
Here’s what they have to say.
Billionaire Mark Cuban became one of the most outspoken supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, appearing on a number of talk shows to boost the Democratic nominee — and criticize Trump.
Cuban previously called Trump the “most unethical” and “dishonest” individual he’s ever worked with, despite having initially supported Trump’s 2016 campaign. In recent months, Cuban has also slammed Elon Musk for his support of Trump, warning that Trump will ultimately betray him.
The businessman had signed at least two pledges to support Harris, one featuring prominent former and current business executives and another designed for venture capitalists.
In a post on X early Wednesday, Cuban congratulated Trump and Musk.
“Congrats @realDonaldTrump. You won fair and square. Congrats to @elonmusk as well,” he wrote, adding “#Godpseed.”
David Sacks, a South African-born businessman and former CEO of social media platform Yammer, congratulated Trump in a series of tweets late Tuesday and early Wednesday.
“Trump was supposed to be the Left’s bad dream, a brief interlude between two decades of Obama/Biden/Harris rule. As it turns out, he’s the transformational figure, a fundamental break that they couldn’t stop, no matter what they threw at him,” he said in a post.
Sacks announced that he was backing Trump in June. In a post, he listed a number of issues that he believed the former president would handle better than the current Biden administration, including the economy, the war in Ukraine, and the border.
“It’s time to build,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said in response to a Musk post calling America a “nation of builders.”
Andreessen and business partner Ben Horowitz endorsed and donated to Trump in July, saying the Republican nominee would be the better candidate for technology startups and crypto.
Last month, however, Horowitz and his wife said they would make a “significant donation” to the Harris-Walz campaign.
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the twins behind Bitcoin exchange Gemini, have been vocal supporters of Trump this election cycle. They’ve not only touted his support of the crypto industry, but donated millions to political action committees in support of Trump reelection efforts.
“We are on the brink of a new American Renaissance,” Tyler Winklevoss said at around midnight on Wednesday.
“Time to build baby build!” Cameron Winklevoss said in a separate post about an hour later.
The twins own about 1% of all Bitcoin in the world, and became the first Bitcoin billionaires in 2017. They are believed to own about 70,000 Bitcoin.
Trump, who has positioned himself as a strongly pro-crypto candidate (and even launched his own coin), helped send Bitcoin to a new all-time high on Tuesday night.
“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities,” Amazon founder and Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos wrote on X on Wednedsday.
“Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love,” Bezos added.
The enthusiastic response to Trump’s victory comes after Bezos found himself at the center of controversy over his decision to nix The Washington Post’s tradition of endorsing a presidential candidate. At least 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of its 2.5 million customers, canceled their plans with the newspaper in the wake of the decision.
Adding fuel to the fire was that the CEO of Blue Origin, Bezos’ aerospace company, met with Trump the morning that the Post’s decision was announced. Blue Origin has a $3.4 billion contract with the government and is competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance for various contracts.
In 2019, Amazon accused the Trump administration of giving Microsoft a $10 billion contract because of Trump’s “behind-the-scenes attacks” against it, citing the then-president’s criticism of Bezos and the Post’s reporting.
On Wednesday morning, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X, “congrats to President Trump. i wish for his huge success in the job.”
Although Altman did not make a formal endorsement during the election cycle, he has largely supported Democratic candidates over the years, according to campaign finance filings.
Altman, alongside executives from Nvidia and other AI firms, met with top White House officials in September to discuss building data centers in the U.S. The U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute has also announced a deal with OpenAI to work on making AI safer.
“[I]t is critically important that the US maintains its lead in developing AI with democratic values,” Altman added Wednesday.
“Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his Threads platform. “Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”
Although the two men haven’t had the best relationship — Trump has threatened Zuckerberg with “life in prison” if he helped the Democratic party “steal the election, as he alleges happened in 2020 — Zuckerberg has made inroads to Trump in recent months.
He has publicly moved to focus on nonpartisanship and away from the liberal causes he once backed. In private, he considers himself a libertarian and declined to make a public endorsement this year.
In a recent interview, Trump said he likes Zuckerberg “much better now.”
“Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on his decisive victory,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on Wednesday. “We are in a golden age of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to help bring the benefits to everyone.”
Pichai, like several other tech CEOs, has made an effort to connect with Trump recently as his victory appeared to be a growing possibility.
“I actually got a call from Sundar, Sundar, who’s great, from Google, he’s a great guy, very smart. The head of Google,” Trump said during a rally last month. “And he said, ‘Sir I just want to tell you, what you did with McDonald’s was one of the single biggest events we’ve ever had at Google.’”
Trump has recounted that story on at least two other occasions, once at a Las Vegas rally and once while speaking to podcaster Joe Rogan. During an interview in Chicago on Oct. 15, Trump said he called Pichai because he was frustrated with a lack of positive stories about him, calling Google “rigged just like our government is rigged.”
Trump has long gone after Google and other tech companies, routinely accusing them of bias and controlling what results get shown to the public. In 2019, he claimed Pichai was “working very hard to explain how much he liked me” and the Trump administration.
“Congratulations President Trump, we’re looking forward to engaging with you and your administration to drive innovation forward that creates new growth and opportunity for the United States and the world,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Wednesday.
Nadella, unlike some of his colleagues, has largely stayed out of the election. While the CEOs of Google and Meta have reached out to Trump in recent months, Nadella hasn’t endorsed a candidate or even talked to Trump or Harris over the phone, according to The Guardian.
The company’s only major presence in the election cycle has been its regular reporting on hacking attempts against the campaigns and misinformation, as well as Nadella’s statement condemning violence after an assassination attempt against Trump in July. In May, Microsoft announced plans for a $3.8 billion AI data center in Wisconsin alongside Biden.
During the Trump administration, Nadella built a rapport with Trump and largely avoided angering the then-president.
“Congratulations President Trump on your victory!” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote Wednesday.
“We look forward to engaging with you and your administration to help make sure the United States continues to lead with and be fueled by ingenuity, innovation, and creativity,” he added.
Trump’s relationship with Cook has been better than that of most other tech CEOs. Last month, he said that Cook was necessary to take Apple to its current heights, rather than company founder Steve Jobs.
Cook frequently called Trump when he was president, sat on the administration’s Workforce Policy Advisory Board, and hosted Trump at Apple’s campus in Austin. Trump said on the PBD Podcast that Cook had called him to complain about Apple’s legal troubles with European regulators, including fines levied against the iPhone maker.
In 2019, after Cook managed to convince Trump to get Apple an exemption from a series of tariffs affecting Chinese imports, Cook gifted the then-president with one of the first Mac Pros built at its new U.S. facility. In an interview with Bloomberg News in June, Trump remarked that he found Cook to be “a very good businessman.”
Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist and the co-founder of LinkedIn, said on Wednesday that he “very much hopes” that Trump won’t participate in anti-democratic actions as the next president.
“I—and many others—raised alarms about the anti-democratic actions Donald Trump took during his first Presidency, and has promised to take this next time,” the Democratic donor wrote, pointing to Trump’s comments about punishing opponents or enacting a “crippling, 19th-century tariff regime.”
“On this day, and for Trump’s term, I very much hope they are right. I love America, and hope that the next four years will be our strongest yet,” Hoffman added.
In June, Hoffman said he was concerned that Trump would persecute his political opponents as enemies of the state, telling CNN that business leaders are afraid of retaliation. Besides donating heavily to causes opposing Trump, Hoffman also helped fund E. Jean Carrol’s lawsuit accusing Trump of sexually assaulting her, which was successful. Trump’s legal team has sought to appeal that verdict.
