In case you missed it: President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is convening a tech summit at Trump Tower next week, and top execs from Apple, Alphabet, Facebook and more are attending.
What Trump said about Apple, Alphabet and Facebook — the tech companies he’s meeting this week
Not pretty.
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
As one person familiar with the summit plans told my boss, Recode’s Kara Swisher, “Look, this is obviously a circus.” So, let’s do some social media-searching acrobatics and see what Trump has said about these companies.
Apple, CEO Tim Cook
Fun fact: Jobs was a vocal opponent of larger phones. Later in 2013, Trump tweeted about iPhone screen sizes five more times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), eventually claiming that he “sold [his] Apple stock” in protest. Two years later, he got his wish, with the release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
During the standoff between Apple and the FBI earlier this year over the locked iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, he encouraged an all-out Apple boycott:
Alphabet, CEO Larry Page
Despite supposedly dumping iOS for Android, Trump has had relatively little to say about Google or its parent company Alphabet. After the botched launch of Healthcare.gov in 2013, he tweeted:
Ignoring manual retweets of people telling him to Google things, Trump most recently mentioned Google after FBI director James Comey resurfaced Hillary Clinton’s email server, shortly before the election:
(Side note: Per Kara’s story yesterday, it’s not totally clear if Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was invited to the summit and, if he was, if he is attending).
Facebook, COO Sheryl Sandberg
Back in 2013, Trump was critical of the Facebook exec for having an ego. Um, sure thing, Donald:
A year before that, he also had marital advice for her colleague, CEO Mark Zuckerberg:
Apart from the tweet above alleging that tech platforms were “burying” Clinton’s emails, Trump mainly tweeted about how he would use Facebook to defeat his rivals. In May 2015, a month before announcing that he would run for president, Trump happily tweeted and Instagrammed from the company’s New York office:
Amazon, CEO Jeff Bezos
Bezos is likely attending the summit, sources told Swisher, and she predicted things “would be awkward” given Bezos’s comments about Trump and the fact he owns the Washington Post. The first thing Trump ever tweeted about Bezos, though, was an inspirational quote:
Apparently, the president-elect didn’t like the new things Bezos did with the Post, which was largely critical in its reporting on his campaign:
Fact check: Bezos, not Amazon, is the Post’s majority owner. And Post Executive Editor Marty Baron has said that Bezos has no influence on the paper’s editorial content, although the Amazon CEO said before the election that Trump was “eroding our democracy.” Have a good meeting, fellas!
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
