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Bill Gates Became the Last Billionaire to Congratulate Trump
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Bill Gates Became the Last Billionaire to Congratulate Trump

Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg are among the three dozen billionaires who have congratulated Trump so far.

With Kyle Khan-Mullins And Phoebe LiuForbes Staff


“Oh“America is a nation of builders,” said Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. sent On Tuesday night at 23:50 on X, the social media platform he owns, hour Before the Associated Press called the presidential race in favor of Donald Trump. Writing from Palm Beach County, where he spent Election Night with Trump, he added: “You will soon be free to build.”

As votes rolled in that showed the billionaire former president was ready to take back the White House, some of his conservative billionaire friends backed X. Some were celebratory, such as crypto billionaire Tyler Winklevoss. sent “We are on the threshold of a new American Renaissance.” Some, like surrogate and former GOP presidential candidate, have begun offering explanations for Trump’s rise Vivek Ramaswamywho claims that “voters reject censorship, laws, and fraud.” Others were still impatient with the networks: “@cnn’s refusal to call states clearly won by @realDonaldTrump is ridiculous,” hedge fund manager Bill Ackman said. wrote Even as millions of votes remain pending in then-uncalled states in the Rust Belt, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, at 11:40 p.m.

The next day, many other billionaires, including Michael Dell and Jeff Bezos, took to the internet to react to Trump’s victory, congratulating him in many cases. Respondents also included some of Kamala Harris’ biggest supporters, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and businessman Mark Cuban. addressed Congratulations to Trump after deleting some of his earlier pro-Harris posts. bill gates, Quietly donated $50 million to Harris campaignHe was among the last to text Trump, congratulating him and Vance and saying America is strongest “when we use creativity and innovation to improve lives.”

The wealthy have always focused on politics, but their ability to do so has increased in the past decade. Now they can donate unlimitedly, so these days Every choice is more expensive than the last. And in the age of social media, they can speak directly to large numbers of people who find them worth listening to. Forbes We analyzed posts about X by the 200 richest American billionaires since October 1, using the accounts we could find. Billionaires often have large followings on X; Musk, the most followed person on the platform, has more than 200 million followers. Overall, more than 2,000 election-related posts on these accounts were viewed 10 billion times.

Of these posts, 472 mention Kamala Harris and 652 mention Donald Trump. Using RoBERTa, a machine learning model trained on over 100 million posts on X, Forbes also analyzed the sentiment of these posts. As of midnight Wednesday, posts mentioning Trump appeared slightly more optimistic; According to a sentiment analysis, 49% of those posts were classified as “positive,” compared to 35% for posts mentioning Harris. (However, given that he has emerged as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, even spending election night with the presidential candidate, it’s possible that Musk’s ownership of the

Here are some of the latest pro-Trump posts from billionaires, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: killed his Washington PostHarris’ support Last week, the day before executives from space company Blue Origin met with Trump. As of 3:15 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, no billionaires had posted anything openly anti-Trump after Trump was declared the winner, but Mike Bloomberg published a critical article “Dealing with an inattentive president is a tiring job, but it can and must be done — and it’s a job for members of both parties,” he writes in Bloomberg News. Forbes I will continue to update this post with reactions throughout the week.:

Also Mark Zuckerburg sent Facebook-owned

Some of the most negative posts about Trump came from Democratic Illinois governor JB Pritzker, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Mark Cuban. Shark Tank Although as of Wednesday morning Cuban had deleted his explicitly pro-Harris posts. (Cuban declined further comment in an email. Forbes.) The only posts expressing disappointment with the election results came from billionaire Mailchimp co-founder Ben Chestnut (who lives in Georgia, a swing state that turned red yesterday), Bloomberg, and Reid Hoffman:

Among the 1,000 latest billionaire posts as of midnight Wednesday, according to machine learning classification (one model A large dataset of unstructured text was trained on the BERT model and related modeling technique developed by Google BER Topic):

1. Encouraging people to vote on both sides (72 posts)

2. Swing states and the role of undocumented immigrants in them, largely from Musk and Trump themselves (34 posts)

3. Economic issues, including national debt and tariffs (23 posts):

4. Discussions on voter fraud (22 posts):

But many billionaires have followed Musk’s lead and done more than just tweet or give money. Cuban has been a frequent stand-in for Harris on cable news and on the stump. Miriam Adelson wrote a column While supporting Trump as “the right man for the job, the only man” in the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper he owns, Hoffman He described Harris as tech-friendly In the pages of The New York Times. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and pharmaceutical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong have blocked newspapers they own.Washington Post And Los Angeles Timesof supporting Harris, respectively.

And of course, some billionaires are talking about the election, but not in X. Although Donald Trump posted a lot on X on election day, he largely keeps his posts limited to Truth Social, the Twitter impersonator that dominates his net worth. Mark Zuckerburg posts only on Facebook-owned Threads, is perhaps ” he praised.

At least one person felt that X predicted what would happen in the future, even resharing a post saying that X was more indicative than polls. At 1:17 a.m., as things looked even bleaker for Harris nationally, Musk wrote to his followers: “You are the media now.”

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