Trump’s Second Term Dispels Any Notion of CEOs Saving Us From Climate Crisis


Corporate actors have shed any pretense of climate action and now openly back Trump’s doubling down on fossil fuels.

By Derek Seidman , 

Truthout

Published

November 28, 2025

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks as CEO of Social Capital Chamath Palihapitiya, White House “AI and Crypto Czar” David Scahs, U.S. President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates listen during a dinner at the State Dining Room of the White House on September 4, 2025, in Washington, D.C.Alex Wong / Getty Images
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Billionaire executives have long been lauded by the corporate media as unfettered heroes advancing human progress. But the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidential term should dispel any notion that wealthy CEOs will save us from the twin crises of creeping authoritarianism and intensifying global climate chaos.

Today, many of these supposed icons have wasted little time groveling to Trump as he consolidates new levels of centralized power to advance a far right agenda and doubles down on climate-destroying fossil fuels. I’m not speaking of the openly reactionary oligarchs like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, but of the likes of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and BlackRock’s Larry Fink, who in times past have directly or indirectly criticized Trump’s authoritarian tendencies.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Board directors and CEOs driven by profit motives have long shown that they favor corporate interests over democracy at home and abroad, while climate pledges by big businesses have always smacked of greenwashing and largely avoided the underlying need to stop extracting and burning fossil fuels.

Board directors and CEOs driven by profit motives have long shown that they favor corporate interests over democracy at home and abroad.

Protesters made themselves heard at the fossil-fuel-infiltrated COP30 climate negotiations in Belém, Brazil, this month, but the summit’s final agreement doesn’t even mention fossil fuels, much less commit to phasing them out. This current conjuncture should serve as a reminder that we must look to bottom-up movements to create the power and pressure that will move us out of these crises.

“If corporate executives from polluting corporations had a conscience, we wouldn’t be here,” Rachel Rose Jackson, director of climate research and international policy at Corporate Accountability, a transnational corporate watchdog, told Truthout, speaking from COP30.

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“Visionaries” Accommodating Autocracy

Less than a decade ago, some billionaires were expressing alarm over Donald Trump’s rise.

“Trump represents an unprecedented threat to America,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in 2016.

“I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as others,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that same year.

Fast forward to 2025. Altman now regularly visits the White House as Trump’s guest and praises him as a “very refreshing change.” The Financial Times reports that Altman has drifted into Trump’s “inner circle.”

Like Altman, Zuckerberg is now a regular White House guest and has undergone his own MAGA makeover.

Altman and Apple CEO Tim Cook — as well as Amazon, Google, and Meta — all gave $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund. They were among the dozens of corporate donors who underpinned the $239 million in total donations to the fund, by far the largest inaugural haul in U.S. history.

Cook also attended Trump’s recent lavish dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. During the Saudi leader’s visit, Trump rationalized the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by telling a reporter, “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman,” and that “things happen.” According to U.S. intelligence, bin Salman ordered the 2018 killing of Khashoggi.

In 2017, both Cook and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc., lambasted Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” executive order. Today, as the Trump regime intensifies its racist assault on immigrants far beyond the scope of the president’s first term, Cook and Pichai, both billionaires, are showering Trump with praise.

The Donald Trump that Altman and Zuckerberg criticized in 2016, and that Cook and Pichai criticized in 2017, has, many believe, fine-tuned his far right autocratic policies in 2025. What explains the turnabout of these billionaire CEOs who we are constantly told are visionaries and agents of progress?

“We shouldn’t be at all surprised that these corporate executives, who have an established track record of choosing greed and power over the collective, are continuing to do whatever’s needed that allows them to make as much money as possible,” said Jackson.


Big Tech and Wall Street barons have changed their tune and toned down criticism as they seek to cash in on the artificial intelligence boom.

Indeed, Big Tech and Wall Street barons have changed their tune and toned down criticism as they seek to cash in on the artificial intelligence boom, profit from lucrative federal contracts, and dodge regulatory scrutiny.

Altman — who in 2017 said Trump was “unfit to be President and would be a threat to national security” — joined the president on his first week in office in his second term as he announced the $500 billion Stargate artificial infrastructure initiative, of which OpenAI is a core partner.

Eager to enter Trump’s good graces, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos paid $40 million to air a Melania Trump documentary on Prime Video while shifting The Washington Post to the right.

Big Tech barons — Altman, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Cook, and also Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and founder Bill Gates — are backing Melania Trump’s initiative to penetrate U.S. schools and colleges with artificial intelligence. Conveniently, Big Tech is set to profit handsomely from this.

As Truthout has reported, these same billionaires are also bankrolling Trump’s massive new White House ballroom.

Doubling Down on Fossil Fuels

Powerful corporate actors, who just a few years ago packaged themselves as ardent climate advocates, have also been quick to accommodate themselves to Trump’s doubling down on fossil fuels.

“BlackRock Chief Pushes a Big New Climate Goal for the Corporate World,” read one New York Times headlinein 2021, reporting on BlackRock’s Larry Fink’s advocacy to CEOs of taking actions to move toward “a net-zero economy.”

Because BlackRock is the world’s biggest asset manager, with a top stake in thousands of companies, Fink’s words are taken seriously as a barometer of corporate governance. In a 2020 CEO letter, Fink also stressed climate themes and said BlackRock would exit “high sustainability-related risks” like coal producers.

BlackRock and other financial firms had also joined global initiatives, such as Climate Action 100+ and the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, that professed commitments toward net-zero emissions and meeting the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Many have long said all this was merely a form of greenwashing.

“The vast majority of these corporate climate commitments, when inspected between the lines, were extremely deceptive,” said Jackson, without concrete obligations around emissions reductions and relying on carbon offset markets that allowed companies to continue polluting.


“The vast majority of … corporate climate commitments, when inspected between the lines, were extremely deceptive.”

“These plans were riddled with false solutions with no meaningful time commitments and were essentially just PR spins of the new brand of corporate greenwashing,” Jackson added.

In 2021, BlackRock’s former chief investment officer of sustainable investing published a stunning USA Today op-ed stating that “the financial services industry is duping the American public with its pro-environment, sustainable investing practices” and that in essence, Wall Street is greenwashing the economic system and, in the process, creating a deadly distraction.”

Now, in 2025, the flimsiness of these business assurances around climate has come into focus as CEOs rush to ditch net-zero pledges and flee even nonbinding climate initiatives.

Since 2024, for example, BlackRock has exited both Climate Action 100+ and the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative. Other powerhouse banks and asset managers that previously gave lip service to coordinated climate action — from JPMorgan to Bank of America, from State Street to Invesco – have also left the climate initiatives.

All told, financial firms that oversee around $14 trillion in assets are pulling out of Climate Action 100+.

Fink has also changed his tone and his tune. As a keynote speaker at a March 2025 energy conference dominated by the fossil fuel industry, Fink proudly sported a “Make Energy Great Again” bracelet.

Nor is it just Wall Street and Big Tech firms retreating from climate commitments. Major users of plastics (a key product of fossil fuels) — such as PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Nestlé — have abandoned previous climate initiatives.

“Climate action isn’t expected from this administration, and so true to nature, corporations are ever quick to capitalize on this,” said Jackson.

“I think that tells us everything we need to know about their motives,” she added. “But importantly, we should have never needed this moment to have that confirmation.”


Big Tech and Big Oil



Tech leaders have also fashioned themselves as climate champions, with billionaire CEOs across Silicon Valley touting net-zero and other “sustainability” commitments.

But the data center boom and Big Tech’s cozying up to a fossil-friendly Trump has eroded pretenses of the industry’s prioritizing of climate issues, with energy-guzzling artificial intelligence giving new life to dying fossil fuel infrastructure and fracked gas production.

Carbon emissions of major tech firms are “really going through the roof,” climate policy analyst Silke Mooldijk told The New York Times in August. In 2024, Google’s greenhouse gas emissions grew by 11 percent while Amazon’s grew by 6 percent. Even Microsoft’s emissions, which slightly dipped, were still higher than in 2021.

The Financial Times also reports over 85 gas­fired power facilities are being developed globally to feed data centers, which gobble up astronomical amounts of energy to power artificial intelligence.

Even when tech firms do claim to pursue climate aims, it’s often through purchasing carbon offsets and green power credits, versus reducing direct emissions.


Even if Big Tech’s entire supply chain was fully decarbonized, it would still be undergirding fossil fuel production.

Moreover, even if Big Tech’s entire supply chain was fully decarbonized, it would still be undergirding fossil fuel production. Artificial intelligence and cloud services provided by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon widely support the exploration and extraction of oil and gas by corporations like Chevron and ExxonMobil.

“Big Tech and AI are the largest partners of the fossil fuel industry,” said Jackson. “They directly enable the fossil fuel industry to find oil in hard-to-reach places, not to mention that their data centers generate an energy demand that’s met by fossil fuel suppliers.”


Hope in Bottom-Up Action



If anyone had illusions that billionaires will save us, the second Trump term should categorically dispel them.

“It’s very clear that you can’t trust anything they say, and you must judge them for what they do,” said Jackson. “What they do is deceive, lie, manipulate, obstruct, and align themselves with whatever agenda allows them to make as much money as possible.”

But Jackson, speaking to Truthout from the COP30 conference in Belém, Brazil, expressed hope in the global bottom-up movements for corporate accountability and climate justice.

“The solutions are there,” she said. “The singular thing we lack is not the technology or money, but the political will to hold corporations accountable for their role in causing the climate crisis and in blocking action to address it.”

While corporate polluters suggest false remedies and technofixes to our climate crisis, it’s the bottom-up movements across the world that offer real hope with their solutions, including an immediate moratorium on all new fossil fuel extraction, ending subsidies for fossil fuel production, implementing climate finance plans based on countries’ fair shares to help developing countries move towards 100 percent renewable energy, and securing land and tenure rights for Indigenous peoples and local communities.

“Those solutions are the lasting, proven, meaningful, people-centered solutions led by Indigenous peoples and local communities, led by all of us working together at the local level to global level, to actually end fossil fuels, to decrease emissions, and to transition to renewable energies,” Jackson said.

With that in mind, Jackson added, we must focus on taking action and avoid falling into despair.

“If we cower and give into grief and fear,” she said, “we’re doing exactly what these corporate executives and the Trump administration want us to do.”


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Derek Seidman
Derek Seidman is a writer, researcher and historian living in Buffalo, New York. He is a regular contributor for Truthout and a contributing writer for LittleSis.