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Trump has ascended to the presidency once again, but this time did it surrounded by billionaire tech CEOs – including Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg and of course Elon Musk.
It’s our clearest signal yet that the tech industry is going to get plenty of attention in the next four years.
After all, that’s what Musk et al have paid for: access to the most powerful office in the US.
As Biden departed office, he warned against allowing an oligarchy of tech billionaires to run the nation. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom,” he said last week, later referring to the “tech-industrial complex”.
Trump correctly noted that Big Tech generally previously backed the Democrats, saying they ditched Biden because they “didn’t know what the hell he was talking about,”. He has also clearly stated, in the way that only Donald Trump can, that he didn’t need their money and claiming “they’re not going to get anything from me”.
Indeed, it’s not all good news for tech. After all, those long threatened tariffs against China will have a serious impact on the industry, if they do come into effect as promised at the beginning of February.
So let’s look into the motives of Bezos, Cook, Zuckerberg and all.
On one hand, their aim is likely simple: to avoid being the odd one out. Don’t show up with $1 million in donations for the inauguration and you risk your company becoming the target of Trump’s ire – and he’s long been annoyed at tech giants, pinning his loss to Biden on their meddling.
And then we come to lucrative contracts. Peter Thiel, a long-time backer of now Vice President JD Vance, has his invested in a range of companies that work with government, from defence to health, notably Palantir.
Musk’s SpaceX already works closely with NASA and Starlink is used by military forces around the world. His companies are also hoping to push past regulators to allow driverless cars, and Trump signalled a desire to get to Mars, long a Musk goal. However, Trump has already signed an executive order revoking electric vehicle targets introduced by Biden, which Tesla-owning Musk won’t be too happy about – though tariffs against Chinese rival BYD might help put a smile back on his face.
Of course, both Thiel and Musk have some wilder ideas about governance, but it’s unclear how far Trump and the Republicans will allow tech bros to push boundaries – making money while shrinking the state is bread and butter for Trump’s party, but that may be as far as this experiment goes.
One of Trump’s moves on his first day in office was to revoke one of Biden’s orders designed to address AI risks, which required AI developing companies to share details of safety audits with the US government. But, as Reuters notes, Trump didn’t undo a more recent Biden order about making energy available for AI data centres. He has also added fuel to the climate-change sparked fire by pulling out of the Paris Agreement and saying all that extra energy wouldn’t be coming from renewables – “we’re not going to do the wind thing,” he said, in favour of oil and gas.
It’s clear that efforts to make the internet safer and to battle misinformation are no longer a priority in the White House. Zuckerberg’s Meta ditched pre-existing definitions of hate speech, in particular anti-trans messages, relegating them to mere insults – which, of course, are allowable.
And no wonder Zuckerberg was quick to fall in line: Trump has previously said he’d like to see the Facebook-founder in jail after the now-President was booted off the social network in 2021 after the January 6 violence at the Capitol. (Twitter also banned Trump, but that was lifted when Musk bought the social network.)
Before Trump even took office, he took credit for sorting out the TikTok ban, which came into effect the day before the inauguration, meaning the Chinese social app was only offline for a short period in the US. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew attended the inauguration, as did social influencers Jake and Logan Paul.
Of course, Trump actually raised the spectre of a threat from the app back in 2020, but memories are short these days.
