On Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Jason Tanz put forward a theory in a piece he wrote for Wired. In Tanz’s view, it was “Silicon Valley utopianism” that, in a roundabout way, propelled the once-outsider Republican candidate to power. Trump, he argued, had exploited loopholes in the tech giants’ dearly held progressive values to win the election.
At the time, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos said the president-elect was “dangerous”, his behaviour “eroded our democracy” and he was trying to “chill” the media. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, likened Trump to dictators and even compared him to Adolf Hitler. Later, in the wake of the 6 January Capitol riots, Facebook and Twitter ceremoniously banned the former president from their platforms.
But big tech appears to have made peace with the demagogue. With less than a week until Trump’s second inauguration, the Silicon Valley heavyweights who once openly decried Trump have made a sharp 180-degree turn.
Apple, Uber, Amazon, Meta and Sam Altman have each pledged $1m to Trump’s record-breaking inauguration fund. That’s small change for the elites of Silicon Valley – yet it is also a significant show of support, especially compared with the small amounts pledged to Joe Biden’s inauguration.
It’s possible, but unlikely, that these tithes show big tech’s enthusiasm for annexing Canada or invading Greenland (although, should that happen, they might enjoy its sizable mineral resources). Instead, Bezos and his big-tech counterparts have simply sensed which way the wind was blowing.
Political, economic and cultural circumstances in the US differ greatly from 2016. For one, Trump is no longer an outsider. This time, he won the popular vote and has control of both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. The so-called resistance that sprang up in the wake of his first victory can do little about the democratic mandate that Trump now possesses.
Another major difference is that, in 2016, technology platforms seemed to be at the peak of their ascendancy – all-powerful businesses that governments could not rein in.
Back then, Facebook was essentially the only show in town. Social media was the wild west, largely free of regulation. But this is no longer the case. Regulators began to up their scrutiny of social media platforms in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This has produced a far stricter regulatory environment, particularly in the UK and Europe.
The ‘big disinfo’ industry, which arose to scrutinise the social media giants, is losing its bite (although it may have been ineffective to begin with). Meta is flailing for relevance, having invested billions into the non-starter that was the Metaverse and fighting off competition from the likes of TikTok.
Elon Musk is proof that flattery can help big tech get its foot into the door of government. With a show of support and pinning his flag to Trump, Musk was given a brand new role all of his own – heading up the US Department of Government Efficiency.
And it appears that private conversations at Mar-a-lago are already helping Zuckerberg’s Meta reduce the economic burden around fact-checking, which it claims cost the business about $100m in 2022.
Trump’s support seems to have emboldened Zuckerberg to go up against European regulations. Indeed, he says Meta will “work with president Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.
The backdrop to all this is that, globally, regulators have found their teeth. In the US, Lina Khan, the head of the competition authority, has heavily scrutinised big tech, while the EU has levied enormous antitrust fines against companies such as Google. Europe is also taking a hard line on AI regulation.
Trump has already decided on a replacement for Khan and promised to scrap Biden’s executive order on AI safety. It’s perhaps little surprise that technology companies are circling their wagons around the new president. To win the backing of an ostensibly “America-first” government, whether through subsidies and contracts or M&A approval and deregulation, domestic tech companies might have calculated that paying alms to Trump is merely the cost of doing business.
It is no coincidence that the messaging around AI has changed, too. OpenAI is setting out its vision for a so-called America-first AI. The company is emphasising national security and the strength that AI can bring to the nation, especially in one-upmanship over China, Trump’s personal bugbear.
These shifts in the Valley could have major repercussions. They could further entrench the ‘splinternet’ that technologists have long warned of, where digital economies drift into their own siloed islands and where data no longer freely flows according to universal principles. The Meta announcement, for example, puts Zuckerberg at odds with the regulatory trajectory in Europe.
Although the online outrage machine is attempting to project a moral logic on to Silicon Valley’s apparent about-face, the only logic at play is a cold one: how to maximise shareholder value. And that, rather than an exploitation of the “utopian” values Tanz wrote of in 2017, is the value businesses really stick to, when push comes to shove.
