In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, Big Tech companies became central hubs of the so-called “resistance” against him, firing up censorship and deplatforming campaigns, culminating in the then-former president’s banishment from Facebook and Twitter after the Jan. 6, 2021 riot.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google founder Sergei Brin famously led thousands of employees in protest against Trump’s immigration policies. During the 2020 campaign, Big Tech platforms even censored discussions of the Hunter Biden laptop story in order to curry favor with his father and Trump’s opponent — former Vice President Joe Biden.
But since Trump’s reelection in November, Big Tech executives appear to be bending the knee rather than trying to kneecap their former foe.
Pichai and Brin, for instance, traveled to Mar-a-Lago to dine with Trump. Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos followed suit in getting face time with Trump, the New York Times reported. The month before, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with the former and incoming president at Mar-a-Lago.
The knee-bending continued when Meta, Amazon and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman each announced donations to Trump’s inaugural fund within days of one another, further cementing tech’s shift away from the anti-Trump banner.
“I do see it as this overt, if not explicit, apology for them meddling in things they ought not be meddling, which is with our democratic elections,” Joel Thayer, a D.C.-based tech and telecom lawyer, told the Daily Caller News Foundation, referring to rampant social media and search engine censorship in the 2020 elections.
“And on the other end, they’re acknowledging that the population has shifted,” Thayer said. “The way we think about Trump-like policies is actually fairly good for the American worker and just individuals in general. And you saw that through the popular vote.”
Before the recent outpouring of support from the likes of Zuckerberg and Pichai, Elon Musk’s endorsement of Trump proved to be a game-changer. According to former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s early backers in 2016, Musk made other tech executives feel “safer” in coming out to support the former president during the campaign.
Tech investors David Sacks and Marc Andreesen were among the relative handful of tech world notables who supported Trump in the general election. Andreessen recently told Bari Weiss of The Free Press that the tech moguls’ new embrace of Trump can be boiled down to the Biden Administration’s “anti-capitalist” policies that showed a “seething contempt” for the tech industry.
“I don’t think there’s been an administration this radical on economic and tech policy I don’t think in like — ever,” Andreessen said, adding that President Joe Biden’s office has had an “extreme level of anti-business, anti-tech animus.”
The Biden-Harris plan to increase taxes on unrealized gains, for example, had the potential to kill small businesses and prevent new tech startups which had historically driven the industry, he argued on Weiss’ Honestly podcast.
This move would particularly harm the rapidly-growing AI industry, which is heavily reliant on private innovation. The Biden Administration wanted tight oversight of the sector, placing sweeping restrictions on AI via executive order in 2023, while Trump has vowed to allow the industry to “freely develop.”
Andreessen told Weiss he was left “very scared” for the AI industry after meeting with the Biden Administration.
“They said, ‘look, AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control,’” Andreessen said. “They actually said flat out to us, ‘don’t do AI startups like, don’t fund AI startups, it’s not something that we’re going to allow to happen, they’re not going to be allowed to exist.’”
Andreessen was told that the administration was considering classifying all AI science, allowing it only to be developed by the federal government.
congrats to President Trump.
i wish for his huge success in the job.
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 6, 2024
Biden similarly moved to place heavy restrictions on cryptocurrency and advocated for a federally-controlled digital dollar. Not long after Trump was elected, he nominated pro-crypto Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Paul Atkins — cryptocurrency stocks suddenly skyrocketed in response.
The Biden Administration has largely targeted Big Tech, slapping Google, Amazon, Meta and Apple with antitrust lawsuits within his single term, aiming to crack down on their market dominance.
Amazon previously made no effort to hide its left-leaning bias, removing books from its site that criticized the transgender movement and Covid-19 vaccines. In September it was forced to address an “error” in which Amazon’s Alexa apparently expressed support for Vice President and former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris over Trump.
Despite this, Bezos and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy both came out in support of Trump following the election.
“Congratulations to President-elect @realDonaldTrump on a hard-fought victory,” Jassy wrote in an X post. “We look forward to working with you and your administration on issues important to our customers, employees, communities, and country.”
Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 6, 2024
“Every company is going to want to just talk to the leaders and see how things are going to shape up and potentially even influence some of those policies,” Thayer said. “I think it’s an acknowledgment that the Overton window has shifted a bit, and it’s shifted in a way that seems to align with Trump-like priorities.”
At least some tech companies may be worried about Trump’s trade agenda, Thayer explained. Trump’s proposed tariffs on Chinese goods in particular could have monumental impacts on the tech world. (RELATED: Trump Sends Clear Message To Big Tech With His Pick For Top DOJ Spot)
“Apple will probably make a very hard case that it should be exempted from all of these tariffs,” Thayer told the DCNF. “And so I imagine that they are almost certainly trying to beg and plead to fall outside the scope of some of those interactions.”
As recently as 2023, Forbes reported that over 95% of Apple products are manufactured in China.
Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly asked Trump under his previous administration to take a softer stance on immigration to allow the company to source more foreign tech workers. Cook met with the president-elect earlier this month, according to The New York Times.
“Apple and Google in particular are certainly trying to cater to Trump a little more aggressively than other tech companies, mainly because they’re in the hot seat,” Thayer said.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew quickly followed suit and met with the president-elect on Monday at Mar-a-Lago as a ban on the Chinese-owned app looms near, CNN reported.
During Trump’s first term in office the then-president deemed the video sharing platform a national security threat and pledged to ban the app unless TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, abandoned ownership and sold it to a U.S. company. Biden has since followed through on the promise, and a ban of the app is set to go into effect in 2025.
Despite his position during his first term, Trump has seemingly softened his stance on TikTok, suggesting he may consider ways to reverse the ban. This shift is possibly due to narrowing public support for the ban, especially among young voters, with whom Trump has gained appeal. Trump has also touted his popularity on the platform leading up to the election, jokingly stating in a speech Sunday, “Maybe we got to keep this sucker [TikTok] around for a little while.”
For the historically Democrat Silicon Valley, the tides appear to be shifting at least in part due to the policies of the Biden Administration. The tech industry, which has experienced significant growth in recent decades that has been largely driven by private innovation and small startups, may struggle under strict government control, and Trump could be seen as a potential solution to its challenges.
“They were very cozy with the Democratic Party for a very long time, and now I think they’re starting to recognize that there’s now an overt majority of folks who just flat out don’t agree with Democratic priorities, and so at the end of the day, they are going to have to come back and talk to the other people in power,” Thayer said.
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