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Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and other business leaders congratulate Trump

Business leaders were swift to offer their congratulations to Donald Trump on his election victory, less than four years after they criticized him for his role in the January 6 insurrection.

Some of tech’s business leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook all publicly congratulated Trump for his win.

“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos said in a statement. “No nation has bigger opportunities.”

“Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads. “Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”

“Congratulations President Trump on your victory! We look forward to engaging with you and your administration,” Cook wrote on Twitter/X.

The influential Business Roundtable, a powerful lobbying group with more than 200 members, who are the chief executives of companies such as JPMorgan, Walmart, Google and Pepsi, said in a statement: “Business Roundtable congratulates President-elect Donald Trump on his election as the 47th President of the United States.”

“We look forward to working with the incoming Trump Administration and all federal and state policymakers,” the group said.

Billionaire Mark Cuban, who endorsed Kamala Harris, was one of the first to congratulate Trump just after 1am ET.

“Congrats @realDonaldTrump. You won fair and square,” Cuban wrote. “Congrats to @elonmusk as well.”

Elon Musk, Trump’s highest-profile business backer, celebrated with a post on X declaring victory for himself. “It is morning in America again,” he wrote. Trump has floated giving Musk an influential role in his administration.

The reaction presents a stark contrast to how the leaders responded to Trump after the 2020 election. Cook had called the insurrection “a shameful chapter in our nation’s history”, while Zuckerberg said: “I believe the former president should be responsible for his words.”

Bezos, meanwhile, had congratulated Joe Biden for his victory four years ago with a post. “Unity, empathy and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era,” he said on Instagram, posting a picture of Biden and Kamala Harris.

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It’s something of an about-face that was seen leading up to the election. Trump had started to brag that executives such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Zuckerberg were calling him, seemingly trying to rebuild relationships that had been strained during Biden’s presidency.

Bezos has had a particularly fraught relationship with Trump. But in October the Bezos-owned Washington Post chose not to endorse any candidate in the US presidential election. The Post had planned to endorse the vice-president.

While coalitions of former executives had endorsed Harris, and said that many CEOs were probably going to vote in support of her, the business community appears poised to transition to a second Trump term. By Wednesday afternoon, US stock markets were soaring on news of Trump’s victory.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage