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Comcast forked out $7.5 million to help fund President Donald Trump’s new 90,000-square-foot ballroom gold-plated ballroom and event space, with the company among the 57 corporate donors to the project.
Total donations
to the new ballroom, which is being built on the site of the White House’s East Wing, have come to $330 million, according to a Washington Post report published Thursday. Comcast and other companies had already been identified as contributors toward the ballroom but the specific dollar figures of the amounts were not previously disclosed.
Tech giants Nvidia and Apple each gave $25 million toward the ballroom, as did Charlie Ergen, co-founder and chairman of Dish Network, per the Post. The Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Foundation gave $20.27 million; Ike Perlmutter is the former CEO of Marvel Entertainment who was ousted by Disney in 2023.
Microsoft donated $10 million, while Amazon, T-Mobile and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta each gave $5 million, per the report.
In addition, Alphabet, parent company of Google and YouTube, agreed to pay Trump $22 million as part of settling the president’s lawsuit alleging “censorship” over YouTube’s suspension of his account for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. According to court documents, Trump directed the $22 million go toward the construction of the new White House ballroom.
At least $77 million for the ballroom was contributed by anonymous donors, per the Washington Post report.
As of this week, construction was continuing on the ballroom addition to the White House. After the project was met with legal challenges, on Aug. 31, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling allowed construction on the site of the demolished East Wing to continue.
Trump’s White House has said that the ballroom “will be a much-needed and exquisite addition of approximately 90,000 total square feet of ornately designed and carefully crafted space, with a seated capacity of 650 people — a significant increase from the 200-person seated capacity in the East Room of the White House.”
