If for some, sharing a meal with Donald Trump is a nightmare, others do not hesitate to get their hands on the wallet to meet the President of the United States. His famous residence of Mar-A-Lago, located in Palm Beach, in southeast Florida, is ready to welcome you for a privileged moment in his company. But everything has a cost and you will have to start saving seriously. According to the American magazine Wired, which has had access to direct information on these meetings, business leaders can get a tête-à-tête with Donald Trump against the modest sum of $ 5 million (almost 4.7 million euros)!
For a group dinner, the addition is a little less salty, but you will still have to pay $ 1 million per person. The invitation is accompanied by an explicit message: “You are invited to a candlelit dinner with, as a special guest, President Donald J. Trump.” On the header of the invitation card, we can also see the Maga Inc. logo, a political action committee responsible for raising funds for the presidential campaign of the republican candidate in 2024.
Individual dollars meetings have become a “Very popular subject” In the business community, a familiar source of these meetings in Wired says. This craze is particularly marked in the tech sector, some of which do everything to report to Donald Trump their allegiance and submission. Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), but also Sam Altman (Openai) or Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber), all multiply the signals towards the American president. By declarations and measures taken within their companies, but also by donations to finance the inauguration ceremony of January 20.
Monitor the influence
At the top of the list of these generous donors from tech, there are of course Elon Musk and its $ 260 million (around 243.5 million euros) invested in favor of the Republican candidate during his campaign. Enough to spend a lot of time at the table with Donald Trump, even if no dinner of this type would have been officially organized since his election on November 5, 2024. The Washington Post reports, however, that one of these “meetings” would have taken place on January 19, 2025, the day before his inauguration.
More than the dinners themselves, it is above all the underlying objectives of these questions that question. Donald Moynihan, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, in the United States, wonders: “What concerns us is not so much fundraising as access and influence … People who hope to obtain favorable treatment consider that it is in their interest to give money to Donald Trump.”
Donald Moynihan adds: “What is particularly worrying is the absence of ethical safeguards in the current Trump administration, where the border between its companies and the presidency seems nonexistent.” The case of Elon Musk perfectly illustrates this trend and raises serious questions. If tech giants and other business leaders seek to buy an influence from Donald Trump, it is difficult to ignore the risk of an increasing porosity between the business world and the political sphere.
