Tech CEOs are practically tripping over each other to kiss the ring of reelected president Donald Trump.
It’s a stark reversal of the situation eight years ago, at which point they had to be summoned to a meeting room in Trump Tower, seemingly against their will.
But as the New York Times reports, now tech luminaries including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have reached out to the convicted felon well before election day, turning a blind eye to the dystopian future Trump personifies — and has personally promised to realize.
That’s despite Trump threatening to imprison “election fraudsters” — including Zuckerberg — as recently as August.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos congratulated Trump “on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” not long after strongarming the Washington Post, a newspaper he owns, into abandoning its traditional endorsement of a presidential candidate, in a move that was seen as transparently friendly to Trump.
Even OpenAI Sam Altman bent the knee, congratulating president Trump and wishing “for his huge success in the job” in a decidedly more muted tweet than Bezos’.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile, has pretty much made supporting Trump his entire personality.
In short, it’s a grim new development, with Silicon Valley, which has historically leaned towards a more progressive ideology, doubling down on supporting an individual who’s been convicted of falsifying business records, faced accusations of sexual misconduct from over two dozen women, and vowed to decimate sexual and reproductive health.
It’s a stark reminder that moral convictions aren’t part of the equation for tech leaders, who are primarily tasked with increasing shareholder value at all costs.
What all of this groveling will lead to remains unclear at best. Trump has historically been extremely unpredictable in his governing and the tech policies, willing to throw any allies under the bus.
To read the tea leaves, though, he has promised to repeal the existing AI regulations implemented by outgoing President Joe Biden, which were themselves largely toothless rules.
That’s despite AI companies repeatedly calling for meaningful regulations surrounding the tech.
Trump has also promised to place incredibly high tariffs on microchips, which could leave a massive dent in the competitive edge of the US tech sector.
Given his extreme anti-immigrant stance, the tech sector’s already limited labor pool could also be undermined by the possible revoking of work visas.
In short, nobody — including almost certainly Trump himself — knows how any of this will shake out. Will it be a tech sector free-for-all, with already meager regulations falling to the wayside, or will Trump slam his scepter and call for greater limits on AI chatbots that have “gone woke,” something his court jester Elon Musk has previously called for?
Following election day this week, markets surged to record highs, suggesting widespread optimism about another four years of Trump. However, whether tech leaders’ prostrating in front of their new leader will pay off in the long term is far less clear.
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