It doesn’t take artificial intelligence to notice that some of this country’s most influential tech leaders have decided it pays to cozy up to President-elect Donald Trump. First, of course, there was Elon Musk who singlehandedly became the Republican Party’s single biggest donor during the most recent election cycle and now seems to have taken up permanent residence at Trump’s side.

More recently, there’s Mark Zuckerberg announcing that Meta would end its third-party fact-checking — a policy that frequently inconvenienced conservatives and others who didn’t want to be contradicted on Facebook or Instagram.

But, wait, there’s more, including a lot of tech CEOs handing over checks of $1 million and above to help Trump get inaugurated in style including a certain Jeff Bezos who may have made his money with Amazon but also happens to own The Washington Post.

Bezos has been spotted dining at Mar-a-Lago. But then so have Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. We wouldn’t be surprised to find Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI — the parent company of ChatGPT — who is one of those $1 million check writers showing up in Florida one of these days as well.

Why so much face time with the folks responsible for FaceTime (sorry, a bit of Apple humor)? Because, as Willie Sutton once said about why he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.”

The next administration will have tremendous power over regulatory decisions with a major impact on the tech industry. Musk might have the most on the line given his billions in Tesla, SpaceX and artificial intelligence. Is it any wonder that he’s only too happy to be Trump’s government efficiency enforcer?

In Westeros, the fictional continent at the center of “Game of Thrones,” such an act of subservience is called “bending the knee.” It’s not about forming an alliance, it’s about demonstrating subservience.