President Donald Trump is sworn in today, and we’re about to find out what happens when the government is actually as corrupt as our most moronic conspiracy theorists imagine.
“Trump’s inauguration, flooded with money, lacks benefits for big donors” The New York Times reported, somewhat inaccurately. Sure, Trump supporters ran out of VIP tickets, but that’s not what donors were buying. This is pure, obvious corruption – the kind of corruption that triggered shame, back when we were a population that could still feel that emotion.
So what are these men buying?
Our tech overlords all have problems and want to buy the solutions. I guess it was easier than creating products that people actually like.
“First buddy” Elon Musk spent at least a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Donald Trump. Corporations and wealthy donors have sent half a billion more since his election. Amazon, Google, Uber, Microsoft and Meta each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, as did Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. (Joe Biden’s inauguration hardly received that kind of largesse.) “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” Trump said in December. “During this term, everyone wants to be my friend.”
Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the three richest men on the planet, would be present at the inauguration; they were to sit with elected officials and cabinet candidates, before the ceremony was moved indoors. (Cook will also be present.) Musk will have office space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, according to The New York Times.
So what are these men buying?
Real market opportunities are rarer than before. Tech executives and investors have become openly angered by the societal repercussions of their products and the unacceptable lack of adulation from citizens. Zuckerberg in particular seems to be bored with Facebook, his main source of money, and is looking for a new toy. He spent at least $46 billion, plus the cost of rebranding the company on the Metaverse, only to discover that his Big New Thing had no legs. Its latest big thing is AR glasses, which depend heavily on the AI policy (and, likely, tariffs) Trump will dictate.
Perhaps no one has spent more to escape public scrutiny than the crypto industry.
Almost every major tech company has at least one pending lawsuit. Apple has an antitrust suit pending. Google just lost one. There is also a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission that could remove Instagram and WhatsApp from Meta. Trump cares little about the real purpose of antitrust enforcement: getting companies to compete for customers with good products. All the ongoing litigation is just leverage for Trump to punish anyone who doesn’t play by the rules. And Silicon Valley is more disinterested in consumers than ever. “Get out of jail free” is a pretty famous card in the game of Monopoly, after all.
Perhaps no one has spent more to escape public scrutiny than the crypto industry. “The crypto guys are blowing it up,” said an anonymous Trump adviser. Axios. “Before it was $1 million, it was a big number. Now we’re seeing some people giving between $10 (million) and $20 million. » They want a friendly Securities and Exchange Commission. Venture capitalist and PayPal mobster David Sacks has already been named “crypto czar.” And there’s a pending executive order to name crypto “a national imperative or priority — policy language intended to guide government agencies in working with the industry,” according to Bloomberg. We may even be about to witness our first ever presidential coin pump and dump.
Crypto serves no purpose other than crime and gambling, and less regulation means more chances for people to get scammed by the next FTX. (Speaking of gaming, Robinhood donated $2 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.) On top of that, the executive order means a greater likelihood of crypto being injected into new government projects — whether it’s useful or not. Crypto capture could even extend to gentler enforcement of the various criminal industries that rely on it.
And then there are taxes, of course. Billionaires don’t want to pay them, and Trump is in favor of it. Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent said “the most important economic issue of the day” was ensuring tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy were maintained. Bessent himself is accused of tax fraud.
Massive privatization could make things even more profitable for the tech industry
But those are just small potatoes. The real money is in the military. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen — also a Meta board member and major investor in X — recruited Trump administration staffers and even influenced Defense Department and agency hiring intelligence, The Washington Post reports. As usual, he revealed the game by bragging about it on a podcast.
Silicon Valley investors have generally been bullish on defense technologies, such as Anduril and Palantir, the industry’s poster children. (a16z is a major backer of Anduril, and both companies are founded and owned by some of the Valley’s earliest MAGA loyalists.) They want to shift Pentagon spending away from old-school contractors like Lockheed Martin, which seems so panicked that when the “Big Tech Alert” X account said it had unfollowed Musk, the Lockheed account said it was “inadvertent.”
Musk’s SpaceX has a number of contracts with the US military and intelligence agencies, including so-called Starshield satellites. He used his influence to interfere in the war between Russia and Ukraine and even reportedly received phone calls from Vladimir Putin. The military’s interest in artificial intelligence has also inspired a new race in everything from building data centers to cloud computing. Musk’s xAI, which is also similar to OpenAI, Meta and Google, could legitimize itself through DoD contracts.
Andreessen has already expressed his dissatisfaction with Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, which will likely be repealed.
This ain’t some friendly clown car all these men piled into
The rush to AI is likely also of interest to Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon, as well as a number of startups. As early as 2017, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman wrote to Elon Musk that the company should aim for a “government project (when: ??)”. (I’ve heard rumors that OpenAI has requested government funding around this time; Microsoft is also reportedly introducing DALL-E to the military in 2023.) Microsoft has the most to lose in these negotiations: Senators Ron Wyden and Eric Schmitt have expressed concerns that the Department of Defense is too dependent on it as a supplier. CEO Satya Nadella once made a pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to kowtow to Trump and Musk.
Massive privatization could make things even more profitable for the tech industry. Data and research are an obvious boon, but Elon Musk’s criticism of the F-35 program suggests a much broader focus. Increased military investment in drones, for example, would likely benefit Anduril. Musk already makes rockets, which means SpaceX is just a small step away from making missiles. And if the Trump administration follows through on its threats of mass deportations, there will undoubtedly be demand for more databases, mass tracking and detention centers.
But this isn’t a friendly clown car that all these men have piled into. Their interests simply don’t align. Zuckerberg is the biggest beneficiary of the TikTok ban and practically begged Trump to punish Apple for him. Trump may have changed his mind about banning TikTok, perhaps because a major conservative donor has a 15% stake. Apple depends on Chinese manufacturing and needs exemptions from tariffs promised by the Trump administration. Andreessen called for the breakup of Google, which is now appealing its monopoly ruling. Everyone wants to steal Microsoft’s contracts. Jeff Bezos and Musk are rivals for space contacts.
If we know anything about Trump’s first term, it’s that he likes people who compete for his favors. Sure, that means mess, but it also means funny bedfellows. For example, everyone hates the EU regulatory regime. It’s easy to imagine Zuckerberg, Musk and Cook teaming up to get Trump to dismantle the EU’s digital services law – then immediately turning on each other. Being in Trump’s good graces is a zero-sum game, and the price is that the clown car will eventually go over a cliff.
Selective enforcement puts every business under a sword of Damocles
Keeping Trump happy might be expensive, but less expensive than legal battles. Selective enforcement puts every company under a sword of Damocles: Get it wrong and you could be torn to shreds by lackeys in Congress or the FCC. Just look at TikTok’s flattering appeals to Dear Leader. The Supreme Court upheld TikTok’s ban, but if Trump just punishes people he doesn’t like, nothing will happen to TikTok. (Importantly, the law is still in place to keep other Chinese competitors in line.) Did I mention that TikTok CEO Shou Chew received a front-row invitation to Trump’s inauguration from of the man himself?
I guess I have to explain why this makes the US an even shittier place to live, given the “wise” cynicism I’ve seen about how everything is already shit here. Tech companies, by boosting their bottom lines, have made their experiences worse, a phenomenon so widespread and so well recognized that there is now slang for it. Whether it’s scams, child predation, worker exploitation, or user privacy violations – pick your poison – Trump has offered tech a way to redeem itself from the consequences. This makes life much worse for everyone who isn’t a billionaire.
Some will say that this is a good thing, that corruption happens in the open rather than in the shadows. But public and open corruption allows even more rot to fester in secret. Consider all strong governments; Besides their progress in terms of corruption, what have they innovated? Silicon Valley leaders present themselves as titans of industry, but what they are really building is a golden age of discord.
