Yo, tech bros, I feel your pain. Trump’s messing with my personal wealth, too

As epic frat-boy parties go, this one was awesome, you guys, like, literally. All the tech titans made it there, yo. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sanchez’s cleavage … you guys, it was killer.

And at the centre of it all, a vision in orange perma-tan, was the greatest frat boy of them all – US President Donald Trump.

How their fortunes have tumbled since the tech titans’ roll call at President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez with her fiance, the Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Tesla boss Elon Musk.Credit: AP

Seven weeks on from their new BFF’s swearing-in, though, the hangover lingers. Trump’s main band of merry moguls, apparently now identifying as ardent Republicans, have seen their personal fortunes plummet and their companies’ reputations in freefall. Elon Musk’s net worth has dropped by a reported $US148 billion ($235 billion) since December. Amazon shares have tanked, such that Bezos has seen $US29 billion wiped off his bottom line.

Then there’s Zuckerberg, whose Meta stocks have also dropped, costing him a cool $US5 billion, thanks in part to his association with a certain powerful friend with no benefits whatsoever.

It’s enough to make you come over all teary, actually. Can someone pass me a $100 bill? I might need to blow my nose.

No, wait, I have a better idea. Gather round, tech titans, let’s form a healing circle. I realise I’m not a billionaire thought leader. Nor, indeed, am I technically a bro. But, like Zuckerberg at Trump’s inauguration, I would probably get papped staring awkwardly at Lauren Sanchez’s pendulous cleavage if we ended up sitting next to one another. Also, I, too, have seen my personal wealth take a pounding of late. I keep forgetting to bring cash to the local sushi joint and those thieving scoundrels charge an extra 1.5 per cent on credit card transactions. At this rate, I will probably be filing for bankruptcy by the middle of May.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, how to alleviate woes and be a tech bro pro. Here’s what I’ve got:

Elon Musk: The head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency has spent the first few weeks in his gig slashing spending faster than he’s been accumulating baby mamas. Actually, that’s probably slightly unfair – the newly minted father-of-14 is slashing spending at roughly the same pace as he’s accumulating baby mamas. The Musk-owned Twitter or X or whatever it’s called is a frightful panic room where civilised discourse goes to die. Meanwhile, the bottom is falling out of his beloved car business, with more than a dozen “violent or destructive acts” directed at Tesla facilities since Trump’s inauguration in January. Listen here, Elon: I say this with love. Offload X to someone with a bouncer’s raison d’etre and a basic grasp of the rules of courtesy, turn in your White House staff pass and go back to Tesla. Make like one of those eerily silent cars and don’t move until you’ve spent 12 hours plugged into something electrical.

Mark Zuckerberg: I’m loath to make too many suggestions for improvement here because, frankly, I’m concerned that Lauren Sanchez’s prodigious hooters worked some sort of terrifying voodoo magic on Zuckerberg, rendering him highly allergic to reality. How else to explain a recent decision to turn off online fact-checkers and replace them with something called Community Notes, which sound suspiciously like a seldom-frequented sub-thread of one of my kids’ school parents’ WhatsApp groups? This, from the same guy who spent last year arguing that social media users were no longer interested in accessing the news from those websites, but now claims they are instead invested in “civic content”. Here’s some civic content for you, Zuck: if you cancel news and eliminate fact-checkers online, you get … actually, you get my kids’ school parents’ WhatsApp groups. There’s a lot of civic content about whether Friday is sports uniform day or not. Trust me, not even you can turn a quick buck out of that schlock.

Jeff Bezos: Bezos is to journalism what Zuckerberg is to high fashion, but why should that stop him dictating terms to the staff of The Washington Post? To be fair, he bought the paper back in 2013 but rightly remained largely hands-off for the first decade or so. An edict last year that the paper should not endorse Kamala Harris for US president was followed by a directive that it should narrow its opinion topics to personal liberties and the free market. A staff exodus followed in short order because, let’s face it: there are only so many ways to sandwich the phrase “you could totally see Jeff Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sanchez’s push-up bra at Trump’s inauguration” into a piece about the free market without alerting the censors. Let go and let God, Jeffrey.

And speaking of God, how is your new BFF in the Oval Office? Has he posted any civic content about his inauguration anywhere lately? Again, may I say, what an epic party, bro. Nothing screams “good times” like Lauren Sanchez’s underwear and a bunch of tech titans hell-bent on imposing their weird realities on the rest of us.

Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.