President-elect Donald Trump was upbeat at his first post-election press conference Monday, saying there was a big difference between now and when he took office in 2016: Some of his former adversaries are now being nice to him.
“Everybody wants to be my friend,” he said about how he’s being treated by CEOs of major technology companies, whom he has portrayed as adversaries in the past. “I don’t know, my personality changed or something.”
During the wide-ranging press conference at his Mar-a-Lago property, Trump said that one of the biggest differences over the last four years is that “everybody was fighting me.”
“The biggest difference is that people want to get along with me this time,” he added.
The remarks were Trump’s first news conference since he won the election and the first event he has hosted himself since November.
Trump referenced recent meetings with Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai and former Alphabet President Sergey Brin. He also said he plans to meet with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos later this week.
“Tim Cook was here. I think he’s done an incredible job at Apple. He talked about the future of Apple. It’s going to be a bright future. But we have many others also, and not in that business,” he said. “We have a lot of great executives coming in, the top executives, the top bankers, they were calling.”
Several major tech companies, including Amazon, Meta and OpenAI have already donated $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund.
Trump has had a complicated history with many of Big Tech’s CEOs as a number of them criticized policies enacted when he was last president — and banned him from social media platforms following the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
In 2020, for example, executives lambasted Trump over his executive order to freeze new visas for foreign workers, arguing that immigrants have helped strengthen the U.S. economy, and specifically technology companies.
In the wake of Jan. 6, Trump was barred from using his Twitter and Facebook accounts. He later sued Facebook, Twitter and Google over some of the bans.
Trump had also feuded with Bezos over his ownership of The Washington Post, Amazon’s decision not to do business with the far-right social media app Parler in 2021 and a bid Amazon made on a $10 billion Pentagon contract.
The thawing of relations is emblematic of a broader right-ward turn in the tech sphere, with some of its other leading figures now taking official and unofficial roles in Trump’s second administration. Most prominent is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, whom Trump has tapped to lead a Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotech executive. Trump has also named venture capitalist David Sacks and technologist Jacob Helberg to business advisory roles.
During the press conference Monday, Trump also signaled that he would be willing to pardon New York City Mayor Eric Adams who was charged in September with bribery and wire fraud as part of a scheme that spanned nearly 10 years.
“Yeah, I would, I think that he was treated pretty unfairly,” Trump said, adding that he doesn’t know the “gravity” of the case but said the allegations against the mayor don’t seem fair. “I mean, I’d have to see it, because I don’t know the facts.”
On the reported sightings of drones over New Jersey and New York, Trump said, “The government knows what is happening.” He declined to say whether he had received an intelligence briefing about it.
“For some reason, they don’t want to comment, and I think they’d be better off saying what it is our military knows and our president knows. And for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense.”
Trump commented on the suspected shooter in the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione, and the people who have praised him for committing the crime.
“It’s really terrible that some people seem to admire him, like him,” Trump said. “It was cold-blooded, just a cold-blooded, horrible killing.”
Asked if plans to stop a ban on TikTok next month, Trump said, “We’ll take a look at Tiktok.”
“You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” he said, adding that he thought his electoral performance with young voters was in part due to his use of TikTok. “I won youth by 34 points. And there are those that say that Tiktok has something to do with that.” Trump lost the majority of voters under 44, according to national exit polls.
Trump also said he plans to sue The Des Moines Register over the newspaper’s final poll of the election cycle showed that Vice President Kamala Harris led by 3 percentage points. Trump wound up winning the traditionally red state by more than 13 percentage points.
Trump’s press conference was his first one since winning the 2024 election, though he has attended other organizations’ events, attended a SpaceX test launch, and gone to numerous sporting events. In 2016 during the same period, Trump had already held eight “victory rallies” around the country and gaggled with press in the lobby of Trump Tower numerous times. And Biden in 2020 had held 15 events organized by his incoming administration.
