In the prologue to her fiendishly enjoyable tech memoir/history Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, the reliably prickly US journalist Kara Swisher rotisseries some of the industry’s biggest names for skulking into that infamous 2016 meeting with president-elect Donald Trump and kissing the ring.
“And on December 14th, the people – or more accurately, ‘sheeple’ as I called them in print – who had helped invent the future slipped in through the back entrance of Trump Tower to enable a fascist. Even though the president-elect had openly attacked Amazon and Apple by name, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook joined many others to compete in a non-televised episode of The Apprentice: Nerd Edition,” she writes. She adds that by halfway through Trump’s (first) term, “it was dead clear that I had underestimated how compromised the tech companies would become”.
Hah. Well, it’s eight years since that inglorious meeting, and November has been a hold-my-beer moment for that compromised sector. Why slither through the back door when it’s possible to genuflect and enter by the front door, like Elon Musk? Or, voluntarily declaw, like Washington Post owner Bezos, who blocked the paper from endorsing a presidential candidate – which was to have been Harris – and post-election was quick off the mark with a congratulatory X tweet. At least he didn’t post to Trump’s far-right platform Truth Social. Yet?
In the US, the initial post-election take – at least in the tech C-suite and the media – was that tech was quietly celebrating because Trump and his allies have voiced (kind of) anti-regulatory and non-interventionist business views.
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Now, the crypto crowd, including Musk, who significantly bankrolled the Trump campaign’s closing weeks, clearly hope to reap a handy switcheroo since the whole sector had taken a battering after, ahem, high-profile collapses, failures, arrests and imprisonments. Make crypto great again has, at least for now, worked. But I predict that Trump will do for crypto what benefits him personally and – unless JD Vance gets elected to head the follow-on administration in 2028 – a needed crypto clean-up and crackdown will come once Trump exits the White House.
However, I seriously doubt many other Big Tech Trump enthusiasms are likely to be rewarded, much less the congratulations posted on social media by the heads of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Open AI etc. Let’s start within the US and a headspinning two weeks of cabinet appointments.
Two weeks ago, many tech chief executives were posting congratulatory hopeful hints about engaging on regulation, investment and – but of course – innovation. And last week, many tech investment and crypto figures were publicly gushing during a Las Vegas gathering of the conservative political advocacy group the Rockbridge Network (cofounded by incoming vice-president Vance). One predicted “the regulatory cutbacks are going to be profound” while one of the founders of tech incubator Y-Combinator enthused, “Everything is on the table!” Many were confident of a major rollback of AI development restrictions.
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Yet this week, Trump chose a major anti-Big Tech figure for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) one of the most powerful federal regulatory agencies, which doesn’t quite signal unbridled deregulation. Then, of course, there’s Trump’s long history of publicly whining about many of Big Tech’s top-tier companies and leaders (regardless of whether they’ve bended the knee) such as Meta/Zuckerberg and Amazon/Bezos.
Why slither through the back door when it’s possible to genuflect and enter by the front door, like Elon Musk?
Trump’s FCC pick, Brendan Carr, wrote the chapter on the FCC in the notorious far-right Trump-win economic plan called Project 2025, which was so publicly unpopular that Trump had to distance himself from it during his campaign. At least until now. Here’s what Carr says about Big Tech in Project 2025: “Today, a handful of corporations can shape everything from the information we consume to the places we shop. These corporate behemoths are not merely exercising market power, they are abusing dominant positions.” Sure sounds like a prelude to big-R Regulation to me.
Then, finally, there’s the non-trivial regulatory elephant in the room, especially for AI: the EU (and other world regulatory jurisdictions). OpenAI and other AI companies and investors can burble all they wish about freedom to innovate, but there are significant restrictions in what they do and how they operate in a market larger than the US and, surely, essential to their bottom lines.
The same is true for all of big (and small) tech. Strong EU regulations around data collection and handling, privacy protections, online advertising, use of cookies, antitrust, crypto, social media, AI and other areas mean none of these companies or individuals can just do what they want, even if – and it’s a big if – Trump greenlighted it all.
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Perhaps the unlikely tech bellwether here is far-right tech investor and company founder Peter Thiel, who loomed very large in terms of donations and opining (à la Musk now) in 2016. Yet once Trump was elected, and Thiel clearly wasn’t needed, he faded in influence and visibility. So much for payback. He was not significantly involved with – nor donating towards – Trump 2024.
The only certainty over the next four years is that, like Swisher in 2016, we’ll all underestimate just how much (mostly useless) kowtowing room for further Trump-era compromise lies ahead for today’s tech companies and leaders.
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