Welcome to Big Tech Easter: YouTube, Meta, and Amazon all get sponsor spots at the White House Egg Roll

It’s not a secret: tech’s biggest players have been cozying up to the Trump administration. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Google itself all donated $1 million to Donald Trump‘s inauguration fund earlier this year. But that wasn’t enough for the three companies. All of them just chipped in for the White House’s first significantly corporate-sponsored Easter Egg Roll.

The Easter Egg Roll has been a thing since 1878, and in those 147 years, it’s been primarily sponsored by the American Egg Board, a nonprofit collective of egg producers that now donates around 30,000 small and medium eggs to the event each year. There has been brand participation in the Egg Roll in previous years (we’ll get into that below), but 2025 marks the first year big tech corporations have made such sizable financial contributions.

Per CBS, the White House paid event company Harbinger to put together corporate sponsorship packages for the Egg Roll and find companies to fill them. YouTube, Meta, and Amazon all paid at least $75,000 and up to $200,000 to host activations at the event. YouTube sponsored the Bunny Hop Stage, Meta offered an “AI-Powered Experience and Photo Opportunity,” and Amazon paid for a “Family Photo Opportunity Celebrating Reading” as well as a reading nook, in line with its Kindle ambitions.

It’s not clear exactly what amount each company paid, but we do know sponsors that paid $200,000 received a “custom 30’x30′ branded activation” at the Egg Roll plus four tickets to the White House Easter Egg Roll brunch with Melania Trump, with choice of a meet-and-greet or a White House tour.

Other sponsors included NASA, the Toy Association, the New York Stock Association, the International Fresh Produce Association

All money they paid went to the White House Historical Association, which was founded by Jackie Kennedy in 1961 and is dedicated to preserving the White House and its history.

We mentioned before that companies have had presences at the Egg Roll before. That list includes YouTube, which tells us this is its third year hosting an activation at the Egg Roll. In 2023, it brought creator Art for Kids Hub to lead a drawing activity, and in 2024 it brought SciShow Kids host Jessi Knudsen Castañeda to help kids construct “robo paws” so they could learn about animal physiology and robotics. For 2025, it brought YouTuber Go With YoYo to hang out on the branded Bunny Hop Stage.

“YouTube’s participation in the White House Easter Egg Roll has become an annual tradition, and we do so in line with the administration’s process. Our goal is to provide an opportunity for kids to meet their favorite creators, and we look forward to having a presence once again this year,” a spokesperson tells us.

All that being said, the amount of corporate sponsorship at this year’s Egg Roll was unusual. As Business Insider points out, the White House generally sought to keep the Egg Roll non-corporate, and its brand partnership opportunities were extremely limited and “tightly controlled.” This appears to be the first year the White House has worked with an event company and put together buy-in packages.

There’s also something to be said for the fact that YouTube, Meta, and Amazon were all approved for placements, and all have ties to million-dollar, Trump-supporting donations. We’ll see if that trend continues into White House events over the next four long years.