I wonder if this whole stunt still ended up costing them more than a boring 2025 year, though. I'm sure they wanted the soft power of just speaking money with an openly corrupt president, but they never anticipated the hassle the president would be without all the safeguards in place during term 1.

I'm sure people like David Ellison made off like a bandit, being able to push mergers (or at least, try to push mergeers) that would have been stopped early under any other administration. I don't think Apple was doing any blatantly bold moves like that, though.