“Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on his decisive victory,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on Wednesday. “We are in a golden age of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to help bring the benefits to everyone.”
Pichai, like several other tech CEOs, has made an effort to connect with Trump recently as his victory appeared to be a growing possibility.
“I actually got a call from Sundar, Sundar, who’s great, from Google, he’s a great guy, very smart. The head of Google,” Trump said during a rally last month. “And he said, ‘Sir I just want to tell you, what you did with McDonald’s was one of the single biggest events we’ve ever had at Google.’”
Trump has recounted that story on at least two other occasions, once at a Las Vegas rally and once while speaking to podcaster Joe Rogan. During an interview in Chicago on Oct. 15, Trump said he called Pichai because he was frustrated with a lack of positive stories about him, calling Google “rigged just like our government is rigged.”
Trump has long gone after Google and other tech companies, routinely accusing them of bias and controlling what results get shown to the public. In 2019, he claimed Pichai was “working very hard to explain how much he liked me” and the Trump administration.
