Trump is demolishing the East Wing of the White House to make way for a gilded grand ballroom. The president says taxpayers won’t be footing the $300 million bill and that private donors, himself included, will pick up the tab.
Big Tech will be paying for a lot of it, if the list of donors released by the White House Thursday is anything to go by (though it does not say how much each contributed). Featured are some of the country’s biggest tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Google-owned YouTube has already agreed to pay more than $20 million to the project as part of a controversial settlement to end a lawsuit Trump filed in 2021 and the companies are big donors to Trump’s “nonprofits.”
Crypto is well represented, too, with donations from Ripple, Tether America, Coinbase, and both Winklevoss twins (Cameron and Tyler feature separately). Defense and telecom giants like Lockheed Martin, Comcast, T-Mobile, and Palantir also appear.