100 Days In, Trump's Silicon Valley Romance Isn't What It Seemed

Anupam Chander is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown University. This year, he is at the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London. His new paper, The National Security Internet, describes the risks of a national security approach to internet regulation.

The image of Donald Trump taking the oath of office in the Capitol Rotunda while flanked by leaders of some of the biggest tech companies in the world is etched in our political memories. On January 20, 2025, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and tech pioneer Elon Musk watched from prime seats, closer than members of Trump’s cabinet. For many, it revealed a formidable and dangerous alliance between politics and the technology industry. On Elon Musk’s platform, X, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) concluded: “All you need to know. The billionaires are in charge. Not you.”

Just the week earlier, in his farewell address on January 15, 2025, President Joe Biden warned about the “oligarchy … taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” He pointed to the “potential rise of a tech-industrial complex,” modifying President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of a “military-industrial complex” with a new fear.

There is good reason to fear a Big Tech-political alliance: tech companies can supercharge a surveillance state, giving political leaders enormous powers.

Those who proclaim a Big Tech-Trump alliance can certainly point to some evidence for that thesis. The following, I think, are the principal demonstrations of such an alliance.

• First, we saw Elon Musk, now crowned the head of “DOGE,” a new Department of Government Efficiency, happily wielding “the chainsaw for bureaucracy.” His threat to the federal workforce and programs seemed to confirm the idea that tech billionaires were now in charge of the federal government. Some even labeled him the co-President.
• Second, Musk committed as much as $300 million to the election of Donald Trump.
• Third, the Trump Administration warned the European Union not to target American Big Tech companies unfairly. That stance is clearly in line with a longstanding grievance offered by American tech giants.
• Fourth, the Trump Administration rescinded the Biden Administration’s Executive Order on AI.
• Fifth, Apple CEO Tim Cook seems to have convinced Trump to delay tariffs on smartphone imports. Perhaps that proves the alliance thesis.

However, 100 days into the Trump administration, the notion of a Big Tech-Trump alliance does not hold up to close scrutiny thus far. Early hopes among Big Tech leaders for a friendly Administration have given way to a harsh reality: this is less a partnership than a one-way pledge of fealty.

Actions speak louder than words

First, the Trump Administration appointed avowed Big Tech critics to key roles at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice, the entities charged with enforcing fair competition and antitrust law. If personnel is policy, Trump’s policy seems to be to continue the Biden Administration’s crackdown on Big Tech. (The EU’s Competition Chief had found common cause with the Biden Administration, with European Commission Vice-President for the digital age Margrethe Vestager declaring that the Biden Administration is “deeply aligned” with the European Union on cracking down on Big Tech.)

In mid-April, a Little Tech Competition Summit sponsored by Y Combinator drew the Administration’s leading tech enforcers, alongside the Biden Administration’s FTC Chair, Lina Khan. The conference took aim at Big Tech. The Biden Administration’s “Hipster antitrust” seemed to have been rebranded as “MAGA antitrust.” (The conference title is a reminder that Little Tech often vies to be Big Tech. Y Combinator was led as recently as 2019 by Sam Altman, who some see as joining the ranks of Big Tech in his role as the CEO of OpenAI.)

Second, the Trump Administration has continued the Biden Administration’s efforts to break up both Google and Meta—hardly consistent with the narrative of a Big Tech-Trump alliance. Under the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice is seeking to force Google to sell Chrome, and the Federal Trade Commission is seeking to force Meta to sell Instagram and WhatsApp, in addition to substantial penalties. The FTC filed a new lawsuit against Uber in April.

Third, the Trump Administration has intensified export controls on advanced AI chips to China, significantly undermining Nvidia’s business. The administration barred Nvidia from selling its H20 chip, which Nvidia had specifically designed to comply with Biden-era export controls, to Chinese customers. This action forced Nvidia to take a $5.5 billion charge in the first quarter of 2025 due to unsellable inventory and lost revenue opportunities. The Nvidia incident shows that even a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to seek a dispensation might not prove successful: an early report that the Administration had reversed course on the H20 following a Mar-a-Lago visit by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang seems not to have proven accurate.

Fourth, Trump’s tariffs (now totaling a massive 10% baseline across the world) undermine Big Tech, inviting retaliation across the world. Many have suggested that the EU will retaliate by targeting American tech firms.

Fifth, if Big Tech companies were getting what they wanted, we would expect to see the results in the stock market, which is, after all, a measure of future prospects for these companies. It is true that the market value of these companies rose after Trump’s election, in anticipation of more tech-friendly policies. However, since Trump took office, his actual policies have proven an unmitigated disaster for Big Tech. We can see this in the stock price of Big Tech’s “Magnificent Seven” companies—a group consisting of Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla, Google parent Alphabet, and Facebook parent Meta Platforms. Since that fateful inauguration, the Magnificent Seven’s combined market value has dived by $4.2 trillion, or 24%, through April 21, 2025.

Return to the evidence of the alliance we described earlier. A closer examination suggests that the examples of the alliance in operation are not as robust as might appear on the surface.

First, while Musk holds a prominent role in the Administration, his efforts seem to be focused largely on firing workers and cutting programs in the name of efficiency (though there appears to be little to show for it thus far). While Musk may have caused layoffs and dislocation in the federal government, it’s hard to see what impact he has had on the issues that Big Tech might care about. The Administration has not yet taken significant steps to improve the regulatory environment for Big Tech. Perhaps Musk has thwarted internal efforts to tighten or even undo the H-1b immigration program, which Big Tech companies (like other big American companies) rely on. Furthermore, Musk himself is no friend of many of the Big Tech companies. He is currently suing both OpenAI and Microsoft. He has challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match, though that challenge has happily not materialized. He has a long public beef with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, criticizing, among other things, Apple App Store policies, from its content moderation to its in-app purchase fee. Musk’s own firms have been affected by the Trump Administration’s policies. One big technology firm, SpaceX, has definitely benefited from Trump’s election, with its market value jumping after election day and then maintaining that growth. The Justice Department recently dropped a Biden-era lawsuit against SpaceX alleging that the company discriminated against refugees and asylees. But his bigger company, Tesla, has seen its market value fall precipitously, although it too may benefit from a federal government more likely to turn a blind eye to any regulatory transgressions.

Second, while Musk contributed extraordinary sums to Trump’s campaign, the biggest donors to the Biden and, later, Kamala Harris campaigns in 2024 were also associated with tech companies. Biden’s top donors included Michael Bloomberg, who made his billions from putting computer terminals with financial information on people’s desks. Other top donors to Democrats also included Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn (which is now part of Microsoft). Kamala Harris’s top donors were employed at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. The only non-tech employer among the top five was the University of California (where I once worked). If this is the right-wing tech-industrial complex, it’s a rather inconsistent coalition.

Third, despite the Trump Administration’s warnings to Europe not to target US tech firms, the EU Commission went ahead with fines to Apple and Meta for 500 and 200 million euros, respectively, for violating the new Digital Markets Act (DMA). A spokesman for the National Security Council called the fines “economic extortion.” The DMA imposes special obligations on the largest digital technology firms, most of which are American. Of course, when then-President Barack Obama criticized the European Union for targeting American Big Tech companies in 2015 as protectionist, few saw that as evidence of a Big Tech-Obama alliance. Indeed, many governments naturally defend their own companies from attacks abroad, especially ones that cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, potentially impacting domestic tax revenues and investment.

Third, the rescission of the Biden Administration Executive Order on AI may not be the regulatory relief that Big Tech firms were seeking. While there will certainly be critics of that Executive Order in Silicon Valley, the US Big Tech firms were already largely engaging in the risk assessment and safety training that the Biden Executive Order demanded. Instead, the Trump Administration seems to have been more concerned that the Executive Order focused on issues such as discrimination and bias. President Trump issued a new Executive Order on Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI. That new order directs that AI not have “ideological bias or engineered social agendas.” The FTC has offered a new regulatory headache for Big Tech companies, launching an inquiry into “technology platform censorship.”

Fourth, Big Tech companies like Apple and Google benefited from the Trump Administration’s temporary delay of additional tariffs. But President Trump also had compelling political reasons not to want to see iPhone prices spike as they would have when Apple’s stockpile of phones it brought in before the tariffs was depleted.

Conclusion: between "situationship" and subservience

In its analysis of the tech industry’s politics, The Verge did not find a bromance, but a “situationship” between MAGA forces and Big Tech. When Mark Zuckerberg sat down with podcaster Joe Rogan in January, he suggested that businesses need more “masculine energy.” Indeed, Facebook dismantled the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, right before Trump returned to the White House. Big Tech companies have indeed sought to placate the Trump Administration by promising less moderation of right-wing speech.

If it is a marriage between Big Tech and Trump, it is one of convenience, limited to certain issues and subject to potentially enormous betrayals. Ultimately, the first 100 days demonstrate that the supposed Big Tech/Trump axis is less an equal partnership and more subservience for fear of the regulatory hammer on the part of Big Tech.

This last point is evident in the unusual case of TikTok. TikTok is a Big Tech company that has received a special dispensation to keep operating in the US, now for a second 75-day grace period. But Trump’s second extension of a lifeline for TikTok serves three self-interested purposes: one, fulfilling (for now) his campaign promise to save TikTok in the US; two, looking for politically friendly owners of this mass speech platform (including his oldest tech supporters—the leaders of Oracle—as well as ByteDance's US investors, including his supporter Jeff Yass); and three, making TikTok dependent on remaining in Trump’s good graces.

The larger lesson is that we should recognize that there is no singular Silicon Valley interest—that the interests of blockchain-based crypto entrepreneurs, for example, are not the same as those of more traditional Big Tech companies.

The fact that those in attendance at Trump’s inauguration also included Bernard Arnault, the LVMH CEO who was as recently as last year the world’s wealthiest man, shows that this was a demonstration of Trump's admiration for wealth—his desire to be celebrated by the richest men (and it is mostly men) in the world.