President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that the outreach from chief executives from the business community is vastly different from his first term as president eight years ago, saying that now, "everybody wants to be my friend."
Trump made the comments in his first press conference since winning the November presidential election. Trump spoke to reporters after announcing that SoftBank Group Corp. plans to invest $100 billion in the U.S.
"I don't know, my personality changed or something," Trump said at Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump was asked about his meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook last week at Mar-a-Lago. That came after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg flew in to Florida on Thanksgiving. Trump has also met with Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google co-founder Sergey Brin; a date with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is on tap for sometime this week.
"I had dinner with, sort of, almost all of them, and the rest are coming," Trump said Monday, adding that it's "one of the big differences between the first term."
"In the first term, everybody was fighting. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend," he said.
Trump added, "We have a lot of great executives coming in — the top executives, the top bankers, they're all calling."