Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary predicted “a lot more sucking up” from CEOs when it comes to President-elect Donald Trump because they all want to be in the man’s “circle of friendship.”

Investor O’Leary joined Peter Doocy on Saturday’s Fox & Friends Weekend, and Doocy asked about CEOs like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Metas’ Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple’s Tim Cook all making their to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the incoming president ahead of his Jan. 20 inauguration. Meta, Amazon, and others have also donated $1 million each to that inauguration.

“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump declared on Truth Social earlier this week.

Doocy asked O’Leary is someone like Bezos “actually” wants to be Trump’s friend. O’Leary argued Trump has far clearer positions on tech like crypto and AI than President Joe Biden, making “sucking up” more important than ever.

Check out the full exchange below:

PETER DOOCY: So a few hours after Donald Trump met with Jeff Bezos, he posted on Truth Social, everybody wants to be my friend. Do you think Jeff Bezos really wants to be Donald Trump’s friend?

KEVIN O’LEARY: He certainly wants to be in sync with what Trump is thinking because Trump, by every measure, has a majority of majority of mandates, and he’s going to rule supreme for at least two years until the midterms. And that includes tech, that includes social media which you’ve been talking about this morning. And all of these leaders, whether they like him or not, are going to suck up to him, and that’s exactly what they’re doing because to be cut out of the circle of friendship is a diminished position if you’re a technology leader. And you want to be in that circle of friendship with Trump right now, love him or hate him, a lot of these CEOs bashed him pretty hard, so they’ve got a lot of sucking up to do.

DOOCY: It feels new. Were these CEOs not sucking up to Biden?

O’LEARY: Biden really didn’t take a position on tech. His administrators did. They beat it up pretty badly, and they were pretty — not in support of innovation. They preferred regulation, and that’s obvious because it’s history. You don’t have to debate it anymore. That was [Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina] Khan and the rest of them. With Trump, it seems more that the idea, and this really stems from something Doug Burgum said recently, the czar of energy, but it extends to every sector, he would rather innovate than regulate. And that gives the new tonality to the Trump administration. I think it’s a good thing. I think America’s always innovated its way out of trouble. We don’t need to regulate ourselves into it, and that’s what’s happening right now. We don’t want to diminish our competition.

Watch above via Fox News.

The post Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary Says CEOs Fear Being ‘Cut Out’ of Trump’s ‘Circle of Friendship’: ‘They’ve Got a Lot of Sucking Up To Do!’ first appeared on Mediaite.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/RQMb8pO