President-elect Donald Trump was optimistic Monday at his first post-election news conference, saying there was a big difference between now and when he took office in 2016: Some of his former opponents are now nice to him.
“Everyone wants to be my friend,” he said of the way he is treated by CEOs of major tech companies, whom he has portrayed as adversaries in the past. “I don’t know, my personality changed or something.”
During the wide-ranging news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump said one of the biggest differences of the past four years is that “everyone was fighting me.”
“The biggest difference is that people want to get along with me this time,” he added.
The comments marked Trump’s first news conference since winning the election and the first event he has hosted himself since November.
Trump referred to 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 did a fantastic job at Apple. He talked about the future of Apple. It’s going to be a bright future. But we have a lot more, and not in that industry,” he said. “We have a lot of great managers coming in, the top executives, the top bankers, they called.”
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 some of them criticized policies put in place when he was last president — and left him out after the January 6, 2021 uprising of social- media platforms had banned.
For example, in 2020, executives criticized Trump for his executive order freezing new visas for foreign workers, arguing that immigrants have helped strengthen the U.S. economy, and technology companies in particular.
In the aftermath of January 6, Trump was banned 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 far-right social media app Parler in 2021 and a bid Amazon made for a $10 billion Pentagon contract.
The thawing of relations is emblematic of a broader turn to the right in the tech sector, with some of the other leading figures now taking on official and unofficial roles in Trump’s second administration. The most prominent is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, whom Trump has tapped to lead a government efficiency ministry alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotech executive. Trump has also appointed venture capitalist David Sacks and technologist Jacob Helberg as business advisers.
During the news conference Monday, Trump also signaled he would be willing to pardon New York Mayor Eric Adams, who was charged in September with bribery and fraud as part of a nearly decade-long scheme.
“Yes, I would, I think he has been treated quite unfairly,” Trump said, adding that he does not know the “seriousness” of the matter but said the allegations against the mayor do not seem fair. “I mean, I should see it, because I don’t know the facts.”
Regarding the reported drone sightings over New Jersey and New York, Trump said: “The government knows what’s happening.” He declined to say whether he had received an information letter about this.
“For some reason they don’t want to comment, and I think they’d be better off saying what our military knows and what 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, as he does,” Trump said. “It was cold-blooded, just a cold-blooded, terrible murder.”
When asked if there were plans to end a ban on TikTok next month, Trump said: “We’ll take a look at Tiktok.”
“You know, I have a warm place in my heart for TikTok,” he said, adding that he thought his electoral performance with young voters was partly due to his use of TikTok. “I won in the youth category by 34 points. And there are people who say Tiktok has something to do with that.” According to national exit polls, Trump lost the majority of voters under the age of 44.
Trump also said he plans to sue the Des Moines Register because the newspaper’s final poll of the election cycle showed Vice President Kamala Harris with a 3 percentage point lead. Trump ultimately won the traditionally red state by more than 13 percentage points.
Trump’s news conference was his first since he won the 2024 election, although he has attended other organizations’ events, attended a SpaceX test launch and gone to numerous sporting events. By 2016, during the same period, Trump had already held eight “victory rallies” across the country and hung out with the press in the Trump Tower lobby numerous times. And Biden had 15 events hosted by his new administration in 2020.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
