What Trump Means for Tech: How Silicon Valley Got on Board

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[00:00:33] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Monday, January 27th. I'm Belle Lin for The Wall Street Journal. The new Trump administration is shaping up to have profound effects across the tech industry, from regulation and policy to artificial intelligence investment and development. All this week, we are exploring what President Trump's second term could mean for the tech industry over the next four years and beyond.

[00:01:01] And a lot has happened just in the first week. Coming up on today's show, prominent big tech leaders raced to praise Trump after his victory. Some donated a million dollars to his inaugural fund and were in attendance at his inauguration.

[00:01:20] WSJ Global Tech Editor Jason Dean joins us to discuss how Trump won over some of Silicon Valley's tech leaders and what it means for the future of Amazon, Google, Meta and other key tech players.

[00:01:40] So, Jason, let's start with President Trump's inauguration, where you had the likes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, just to name a few of the big tech CEOs with front row seats. It was a pretty striking image to see them at the inauguration. What kind of relationship do you think that signals between the Trump administration and big tech?

[00:02:03] Yeah, it was really striking and a real contrast to the imagery and the substance at the start of his previous administration with the tech industry. There's several factors at work here. Obviously, these companies are very interested in being in his good graces. Part of that is defensive. They all have had crosshairs on them, really from both sides of the political spectrum, but in many regards, especially from the right.

[00:02:29] And obviously, there's been personal animus on Trump's side towards some of these CEOs historically. So, first and foremost, they do not want to be targets to the best they can avoid that. But they also see an opportunity. You know, many of these companies felt like they were also in the crosshairs in the Biden administration, particularly in regulatory issues. Several of them have been sued by the government for antitrust.

[00:02:55] And they felt like there was successive regulation governing the tech industry. And they see Trump as someone who could fundamentally change that and embrace policies that are good for them and for their investors. And what might some of those policies look like? What are some of the changes that would be good for the big tech companies? I mean, you can see some of them already.

[00:03:22] I mean, he's been very vocal about embracing policies that favor cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. It wasn't like the Biden administration was anti-AI, but they weren't quite as fulsome in their embrace. And obviously, they were quite tough on the crypto industry. And that's a sector that venture capital firms in Silicon Valley have invested enormous sums in and have a lot at stake.

[00:03:47] I'm sure they hope that these antitrust suits they're facing might go away, or at the very least, that there won't be stricter enforcement or continued strict enforcement of antitrust regulations so that there might be an ability to do more deals, which could be beneficial both for the big companies and for the investors in startups who could see exits on their investments and have really been constrained in that over the last four years.

[00:04:14] That's right. And in addition to the CEOs that we just talked about, I could rattle off a litany of venture capitalists, folks like Marc Andreessen, David Sachs, who are having a much bigger voice in the Trump administration this time as compared to the previous and even Trump's first administration. So with the influence of these folks, has there been a rightward cultural shift in Silicon Valley, broadly speaking?

[00:04:40] There has been at a certain level. The people running these companies, the people running these venture capital firms, not uniformly, but for many of them, there has been a shift. Some of it is a shift in their perspective on politics and how it relates to the tech industry. Some of it is perhaps a broader shift in their mindset. I mean, Elon Musk is a very clear example of both.

[00:05:04] And that is not necessarily true across the board for the VC sector, nor is it true necessarily for the rank and file employees. And yet we are not seeing the kind of demonstration of outrage at the scale we saw in the first Trump administration. And that reflects not necessarily that all the people at these companies are on board with the embrace of Trump and his policies and views,

[00:05:32] but the fact that the power dynamics between tech companies and their employees have shifted a lot in recent years. When they were in the mode of hiring as many people as they possibly could, even predating the pandemic, but definitely supercharged by the pandemic, there was an aversion among the companies to alienating their employees. You know, that's shifted a lot as they have scaled back. And now it's much more of a buyer's market for tech talent.

[00:06:02] Coming up, many of the tech industry's biggest players have positioned their chess pieces. But where will this game go? And what's at stake for these tech companies? That's after the break.

[00:06:14] Let's talk about Stargate, this $500 billion, supposed $500 billion AI data center infrastructure investment that Trump announced just in his first week in office with the CEOs of Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank sort of all lined up behind him.

[00:06:42] What do you think is the significance of announcing an investment like this within Trump's first week in office? He and they are trying to send a signal. It's very significant for OpenAI. OpenAI's leader, Sam Altman, historically very much a Democrat, very vocal in his opposition to Trump in years past. Also, bitter enemy of Elon Musk, who is closer to Trump than anyone in the tech world or really anybody else in business.

[00:07:10] And so for him to be able to be in a White House announcement with these other powerful CEOs and the president's blessing for this project puts OpenAI in a much better position than they might have feared they'd be in in a Trump administration. And you rightly kind of nod to the fact that you have to see whether this is really $500 billion. There's a lot of big numbers in these announcements, and that was true in the first Trump administration.

[00:07:40] They don't always play out the way that the announcements suggest, but we'll see. We will see. And speaking of timelines, again, we are just about a week into the new Trump administration, and there's no shortage of news between tech and Capitol Hill. In terms of the relationship between technology, the technology sector, and Trump, where do you think it all kind of goes from here? It's going to be fascinating to watch.

[00:08:06] This is very much the honeymoon period, and not all of the problems have gone away just because of the big announcements and happy talk and atmospherics of the inauguration. There are still dividing lines between some of these companies and Trump, between some of these companies and Republicans more broadly, and between some of these companies and others of these companies.

[00:08:31] How those fault lines and fissures grow or don't is going to be really fascinating to watch. TikTok, he's completely done a 180 on that and now has embraced it and is minimizing the very security, national security issues about TikTok that he was the most prominent champion of pointing out in his first administration. Not everybody in the Republican Party is on board with that view.

[00:08:56] The sell or be banned law was championed by a lot of people in the Republican Party. Not to mention the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is a bitter competitor with TikTok. You know, Meta Platforms, Instagram in particular, is the number one rival of TikTok. So there's fault lines there. Tim Cook was at the inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook are also very bitter foes.

[00:09:19] The list goes on and, you know, he has put some people in place in his administration who are still pretty hawkish about anti-trust regulation as it applies to the big tech companies. And then you have other issues like China that plays into the TikTok issue but plays more broadly when you're talking about policy around AI and chips. You have people who have been very vocal in their opposition to China, China's government in the tech industry who are part of this group.

[00:09:48] And you also have people like Elon Musk and Tim Cook who do a lot of business in China and favor engagement. So it's safe to say that this will not all be as smooth over the next four years as it has seemed to be over the last week. That was our global tech editor, Jason Dean. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Catherine Millsop. Logging off, I'm Belle Lin for The Wall Street Journal.

[00:10:18] We'll sign back in this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.