What does Big Tech hope to gain from warming up to Trump?
NEW YORK– In a series of visits, dinners, phone calls, monetary pledges and social media overtures, major tech chiefs – including those at Apple Tim CookOpenAIs Sam AltmanMetas Mark ZuckerbergSoftBanks Masayoshi son and that of Amazon Jeff Bezos – have joined a parade of business and world leaders trying to improve their standing with newly elected President Donald Trump before he takes office in January.
“The first term, everyone was fighting me,” Trump said comments at Mar-a-Lago. ‘In this mandate, everyone wants to be my friend.’
Technology companies and leaders have done just that now cast millions in his inauguration fund, a sharp increase – in most cases – from past promises to incoming presidents. But what does the tech industry expect to gain from their renewed relations with Trump?
A clue to what the industry is looking for came just days before the election when Microsoft executives — who have largely tried to take a neutral or bipartisan stance — joined with a close Trump ally, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, publish a blog post outlining their approach to artificial intelligence policy.
“Regulations should only be implemented if their benefits outweigh their costs,” said the document signed by Andreessen, his business partner Ben Horowitz, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the company’s president Brad Smith.
They also urged the government to abandon any attempt to strengthen copyright laws that would make it harder for companies to use publicly available data to train their AI systems. And they said, “The government needs to examine its purchasing practices to enable more startups to sell technology to the government.”
Trump has vowed to rescind President Joe Biden’s sweeping AI executive order, which aimed to protect people’s rights and safety without stifling innovation. He didn’t specify what he would do instead, but his campaign said AI development must be “rooted in free speech and human flourishing.”
Trump’s pick to lead the Department of the Interior, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, has spoken openly about the need to boost electricity production to meet increased demand from data centers and artificial intelligence.
“The AI battle affects everything from defense to healthcare to education and productivity as a country,” Burgum said on November 15, referring to artificial intelligence. “And the AI that will come in the next eighteen months will be revolutionary. So there’s just a sense of urgency and understanding within the Trump administration to address this problem.
Ask about data centers has increased explosively in recent years due to the rapid growth of cloud computing and AI, and local governments are competing for lucrative deals with big tech companies.
But as data centers begin to consume more resources, some residents are pushing back against the world’s most powerful companies over concerns about the economic, social and environmental health of their communities.
“Maybe Big Tech should buy a copy of ‘The Art of The Deal’ to figure out how best to negotiate with this administration,” suggested Paul Swanson, an antitrust attorney for the law firm Holland. & Heart. “I won’t be surprised if they find ways to achieve certain accommodations and we end up seeing more negotiated resolutions and consent decrees.”
Although federal regulators began cracking down on Google and Facebook during Trump’s first term as president — and flourished under Biden — most experts expect his second administration to do the same. relaxing antitrust enforcement and be more receptive to corporate mergers.
Google could benefit from Trump’s return after he made comments on the campaign trail a division of the company is not in the national interest of the US, after a judge declared its search engine an illegal monopoly. But recent nominations from its transition team favor those who have been critical of Big Tech companies, suggesting Google won’t be completely off the hook.
Cook’s notoriously rocky relationship with the EU can be traced back to a 2016 ruling from Brussels in a tax case against Apple. Cook branded the bloc’s order for Apple to pay back up to 13 billion euros ($13.7 billion) in Irish back taxes as “total political nonsense.”
Trump, then in his first term as president, went further, referring to European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who led a campaign on special tax treaties and a crackdown on Big Tech companies, as someone who “really hates the US.”
Brussels was ultimately justified after the bloc’s top court rejected Apple’s appeal this year, although this did not stop Cook from calling Trump to complain, Trump said told in a podcast in October.
AltmanAmazon and Meta each pledged to donate $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund.
During his first term, Trump criticized Amazon and railed against political reporting in The Washington Post, which billionaire Bezos owns. Meanwhile, Bezos had criticized some of Trump’s past rhetoric. In 2019, Amazon also argued in a lawsuit that Trump’s bias against the company hurt its chances of winning a $10 billion Pentagon contract.
More recently, Bezos has struck a more conciliatory tone. He recently said at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York that he was “optimistic” about Trump’s second term, while also endorsing the newly elected president’s plans to cut regulations.
Meta’s donation came just weeks later Zuckerberg met with Trump privately at Mar-a-Lago.
During the 2024 campaign, Zuckerberg did not endorse a candidate for president, but expressed a more positive stance toward Trump. Earlier this year, he praised Trump’s response to his first assassination attempt. Yet Trump had continued to publicly attack Zuckerberg in recent months.
And Altman, who is in a legal dispute with AI rival Elon Musk, has said it is “not so concerned” about the Tesla CEO’s influence in the new government. Musk, an early investor and board member of OpenAI, sued the company earlier this year, saying ChatGPT’s creator betrayed its original goals of benefiting the public interest rather than pursuing profit.
“We have two multi-billionaires, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, tasked with cutting what they say will be several trillion dollars from the federal budget, reducing the civil service and workforce,” said Rob Lalka, a business professor. at Tulane University.
Musk, he said, has a level of access to the White House that very few others have had — access that allows him to potentially influence multiple policy areas, including foreign policy, automotive and energy policy through electric vehicles, and artificial intelligence technology policy.
“Elon Musk walked into Twitter headquarters with a kitchen sink and then posted, ‘let that sink in,’” he said. “Elon Musk then posted a status update on