Donald Trump said he is being embraced by business executives — a stark reversal from when he first won the White House eight years ago — as tech leaders and founders flock to Florida to meet with the president-elect.
"We have a lot of great executives coming in, the top executives, the top bankers, they're all calling," Trump said at a press conference Monday in Florida, adding that he recently met with billionaire Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Alphabet Inc.'s Google.
The president-elect spoke to reporters after announcing that SoftBank Group Corp. planned to invest $100 billion in the US following his meeting with Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son.
Trump has held a series of conversations with tech leaders at his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, in recent weeks. These include a November dinner with Meta Platforms Inc.'s Mark Zuckerberg and meetings last week with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple Inc.'s Tim Cook. Trump also said he plans to meet this week with Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos.
"I had dinner with, sort of, almost all of them, and the rest are coming," Trump said, describing the outreach from the business community as "one of the big differences between the first term."
"In the first term everybody was fighting. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend," he added.
The president-elect had a mixed record with top business leaders during his first White House term. Trump dissolved two economic advisory councils only months after forming them as business leaders quit en masse following his response to a White nationalist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. Other executives kept Trump at arm's length, fearing backlash from employees or customers.
Trump praised Cook, saying he's done an "incredible job" leading Apple, and described the iPhone maker as having a "bright future." During Trump's first term, Cook largely fended off tariff threats by successfully convincing Trump that additional duties would benefit a South Korean rival, Samsung Electronics Co.
For his second term, Trump is again vowing to impose sweeping new tariffs, including a 10-20% across-the-board levy on all foreign goods and tariffs as high as 60% on Chinese products. Those pledges have sparked concern among business leaders, who fear the duties could upend supply chains and disrupt trade relationships.
On Monday, Trump reiterated his vow to apply "reciprocal" tariffs on other nations.
"Almost in all cases, they're taxing us and we haven't been taxing," Trump said, adding, "Tariffs will make our country rich."
