| Monday is Inauguration Day and many of the country's corporate leaders will be in Washington to celebrate. Today Ted Mann writes about the turnaround from President-elect Donald Trump's last term in office. Plus: The great big batteries averting blackouts and an introduction to golf's younger, cooler sibling. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Programming note: Businessweek Daily will be off Monday. See you Tuesday. In December 2016, Jeff Bezos sat at a Trump Tower conference table among a group of fellow tech executives, looking a little bit like the social media needle-scratch meme. Frozen in an awkward smile, the Amazon.com Inc. founder may have wondered (or maybe you did) how he came to find himself in that position. In 2025, though, the vibes have shifted dramatically. Bezos looks a lot more comfortable now, paying tribute once again to President-elect Donald Trump alongside fellow tech founders and C-suite peers. One by one, the country's corporate titans—Netflix's Ted Sarandos, dropping by in December; Walmart's Doug McMillon, a week into the new year; Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Brad Smith, lunching on Wednesday—have made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. Some splashed cash into Trump's inaugural fund, offered congratulations and shifted policies to accord to his campaign's priorities, and, in some cases, are preparing to attend Trump's second swearing-in. (We'll see if there's room for everyone in the Capitol Rotunda.) It's a reminder of the eminent flexibility of capital and a sign that the country's corporate executives will be even more focused than before on keeping Trump appeased. Tim Cook, Apple Inc.'s chief executive officer, plans to attend the inauguration on Monday in Washington, Bloomberg reported this week. He will join Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., in attending the festivities. Also on hand, of course, will be Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX and the world's richest man, who seems to be almost permanently camped at Mar-a-Lago. When Trump takes office, he will remain close by: As the New York Times reported, Musk is expected to have an office in the White House complex, as part of DOGE, his official-unofficial government department. It's not that the CEOs didn't come through during Trump's first term. But it was often, as with Bezos, an awkward encounter. In the days after his inauguration in 2017, Trump repeatedly summoned executives to the White House en masse for a series of ostensible policy summits. These events offered the new president a chance to associate—for the benefit of live feeds and eager media—with the sort of public company leaders who'd rarely deigned to be seen with him in his past lives as a semi-buoyant real estate scion and reality TV star. The first term CEO outreach could have an ad hoc, if not chaotic, feel. In one instance, the CEO of United Technologies Corp.—an industrial conglomerate and defense contractor with whom Trump had tussled and then made up over the course of 2016—rushed from Connecticut to Washington on a last-minute invite to one of Trump's televised gatherings, only to be left out in the rain because a White House aide hadn't put his name on the Secret Service's list. This time, it's clear the companies will be coming around to meet the man. Take Pfizer Inc. CEO Albert Bourla, who dropped in for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, and later played down the risks of Trump nominating anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services.  Trump and Zuckerberg have a new relationship. Photographer: NurPhoto/Getty Images Zuckerberg will co-host a black-tie gala for Trump next week, and in the meantime has been mastering his MAGA tone, declaring that companies lack "masculine energy" on a Trump-friendly podcast, adding a Trump-friendly ultimate fighting personality to his corporate board. "I think," Zuckerberg explained recently to Joe Rogan, "he just wants America to win." But Bezos might've had the most dramatic turnaround of all the big CEOs. In Trump's first term, the newly elected president seethed about his coverage in the Washington Post and ranted about all the areas in which Amazon stood to benefit from doing business with the government, from package delivery to cloud computing contracts. He delighted in appending the owner's name to the newspaper's title at rally after rally, imploring his supporters to hate them both. And yet, here's Bezos now, praising the incoming president and agreeing with Trump and Musk that there is "too much regulation in this country." His newspaper spiked a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, to much outcry, killed an editorial cartoon mocking Bezos and his CEO peers for kissing up to Trump, and endorsed all but four of his controversial cabinet-level picks. In an interview at the New York Times Dealbook summit, Bezos explained his current good feelings about the president who marked him with perhaps the largest bulls-eye of any business leader during his first four years in office. Trump is "calmer than he was the first time," Bezos said. "You've probably grown in the last eight years," he told his interviewer. And of the president-elect, 78, Bezos added: "He has, too." | 
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