The times they are a changin': once disdainful towards Trump, big tech now embraces him

“In the first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend,” Donald Trump, now beginning his second term as US President, said late last year. He meant the bigwigs of the tech industry – and he’s right. But is the alignment permanent?

In 2021, right after the January 6th insurrectionist riot at the Capitol, Meta banned Trump’s accounts, and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said he was “disgusted” by Trump’s rhetoric.

In October 2016, even before Trump entered the White House for his first term, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, said that Trump’s treatment of the press “erodes our democracy.” Earlier, Bezos tweeted: “#sendDonaldtospace.”

And then there’s Elon Musk, the world’s richest person with more than $400 billion in the bag. In 2022, he tweeted this about Trump: “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for him to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”

Fast forward to late 2024 and early 2025. Musk has given a quarter of a billion dollars to support Trump’s election campaign and is now basically living with Trump and advising him. Zuckerberg is now in a full bear hug with the MAGA crowd, and Bezos will stream Trump’s inauguration on Amazon Prime Video. Oh, and a fawning documentary about Melania Trump.

These ultrawealthy tech billionaires have also secured seats of honor at Trump’s inauguration. The icing on the cake, Zuckerberg will host a black-tie ball to honor Trump with Republican megadonor Miriam Adelson.

What happened? It’s only been a few years, after all. Do these tech leaders really like Trump? Maybe. For example, Bezos told The New York Times in November he thought Trump had “probably grown over the last eight years.”

Still, even if the billionaires are just in it for themselves, caring only for their own wealth, this wouldn’t explain why they’re sucking up to Trump now when they were mostly trying to stay away from him during his term.

Is this classic “pay to play?” Or might they be seeing what we, the regular folks, cannot – that America has really turned away from progressive ideas for the longer term and that they’ll have to work under conservative powers for quite a while now?

Wild swings for some, stability for others

“Trump won the popular vote, and he also now has both the House and the Senate. The difference is significant – Trump does have the political power he didn’t have before,” Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a think tank supportive of big tech priorities, tells Cybernews.

“They have to recognize the political reality, which is that the things that Trump is asking for are things that have been accepted and voted for by the majority of the electorate. Elections have consequences.”

Castro’s conclusion is that the big tech CEOs cannot afford to maintain “that centrist or even center-left position” anymore, at least not now. But then he adds: “It’s not that I think that Silicon Valley was necessarily to the left to begin with.”

That’s important. Like all large and public-facing businesses, big tech companies simply have to react to the adjusting political reality – which, in democracies, is regularly changing. Otherwise, there’s too much to lose.

Of course, in the case of Musk, his posture began to change way before the 2024 election. He himself has said that he voted almost exclusively for Democrats for decades but then soured on President Biden over issues like unions or government support for Tesla – again, that’s costly for Musk’s businesses.

According to Ryan Broderick, who writes the web culture newsletter Garbage Day and recently ridiculed Zuckerberg for his decision to “end censorship” on Facebook, Musk used to post purely liberal content on social media – pride flags and all.

But that changed, and he now rages about all the things the MAGA people are obsessed with – alleged government censorship, unfair mainstream media, out-of-control immigration, and the woke culture.

Obviously, he now has X, a platform, for all his shenanigans. Then again, as Broderick told the BBC, Musk has always been uniquely unpredictable, even unstable: “He craves attention and is a political chameleon.”

Having said that, Musk’s wild swing probably means he now has to almost overdo it all. It’s not attractive, and it signals immaturity.

Then again, Musk has all this cash, so he doesn’t care – but some do. To Google CEO Sundar Pichai or Apple’s Tim Cook, being predictable and even politically neutral should help their case with the new administration – all these antitrust cases won’t go away on their own, will they?

Various accusations have flown around at one time or another, but Pichai has always referred to Google’s political neutrality in algorithm results as “sacrosanct” – too important to be interfered with.

And voila – when asked if he would break the search engine up, Trump said in October it wouldn’t be in the US national interest.

Cook’s relationship with Trump has always been steady, too. Trump said during his first term that he respects the Apple CEO because Cook respects him – and “always” calls him directly.

The makeover of Mark Zuckerberg

However, of all the shifts in recent months, Zuckerberg’s has probably been the most stunning. Of course, the Meta CEO has always been – or imagined as – the liberal darling.

For years, Zuckerberg promised to connect the world and unleash civic society. No one really minded that all Facebook cared about was monetizing our data, and everyone was pretty glad when Meta launched Threads, an alternative to a virtual cesspool of conspiracies now known as X.

But then, in 2023, Meta lifted its ban on Trump, and last year, after an assassination attempt on Trump, Zuckerberg immediately called him a “badass” and said he was “praying” for him. After Trump’s victory, it was time to finish the makeover.

At the beginning of January, Meta announced it was ditching fact-checkers in exchange for X-style community notes. In theory, it’s a cute idea, but it’s very doubtful that it’ll actually work.

Meta is also eliminating some content politics around hot-button issues, including immigration and gender, and the platform is seemingly saying goodbye to its diversity and inclusivity initiatives. These are all moves the MAGA people wanted – and they’re happening.

“Less moderation may seem more authentic,” Irina Raicu, director of Internet Ethics of the Markkula Center at Santa Clara University, told Cybernews, “but social media platforms amplify outrage and trolling, not healthy debate.”

But America’s conservatives love X, and they’ll now love Facebook or Instagram, too. To some, like tech critic Paris Marx, Zuckerberg’s transformation isn’t surprising at all – it was actually perfectly predictable.

“The future Zuckerberg wants is one where tech billionaires like himself can play in the gated world of suburban tech campuses and Hawaiian compounds without criticism or accountability while telling the rest of us that toys like VR headsets and the metaverse will save their lives,” Marx wrote in his newsletter Disconnect.

“It doesn’t matter that their tech ambitions are little more than sci-fi fantasies. Silicon Valley’s alliance with the extreme right will allow them to keep preaching how much tech will save the world for a little longer – all while they continue to degrade life for everyone.”

Bezos, by the way, is already behaving like the master censor observers feared he might become when he bought The Washington Post back in 2013.

First, the Amazon CEO, seeing Trump was more than likely to prevail and deciding to play it safe, blocked The Post from endorsing Kamala Harris’ candidacy before the presidential election.

Then, probably also eager to make up for his liberal past, Bezos made sure The Post rejected a cartoon by a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Ann Telanes, where she depicted media and tech titans abasing themselves before Trump.

Telnaes resigned and hundreds of thousands of people canceled their digital subscriptions to the daily – which adopted the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness” during Trump’s first term. Bezos, meanwhile, is probably preparing for another trek to Mar-a-Lago.

A cartoonist shows the way for courage and principle, while a major newspaper tramples on freedom of expression and humiliates itself in the process: @AnnTelnaes leaves the @washingtonpost after the rejection of a cartoon showing @JeffBezos kowtowing to Trump. 👇 pic.twitter.com/QjWHOUFpiC

undefined Chappatte Cartoons (@PatChappatte) January 4, 2025

No one likes them, and they care

The tech gurus are all speaking to Trump’s people now – there’s much to do and find out during the transition.

They might also be afraid – right after the election, Trump picked his loyal Republican comrade Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Carr said after Trump’s victory that the FCC should rein in big tech companies.

Carr also said the FCC should impose transparency rules on big tech companies and essentially decimate Section 230, the famous 1996 statute shielding internet companies, including social media platforms, from liability.

These big tech bigwigs cherish Section 230 and will surely play by the rules of the new administration if they want less regulation and more tech-friendly decisions. This is a stance of “preemptive compliance,” according to Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist.

“Musk has so much power because when he sends out these tweets, he can get a story written about what he says. He can significantly influence debate. He can meet directly with policymakers,”

Daniel Castro.

However, perspective is also important. Yes, the tech bosses are rushing to kiss Trump’s ring now, but it’s also a fact that more US billionaires supported Harris than Trump prior to last year’s election.

Some donated to both – it’s just smart. And some who supported the Democrats in the past saw that it didn’t stop the Federal Trade Commission from filing prominent lawsuits against them. Besides, the definition of neutrality can change, ITIF’s Castro told Cybernews.

“They've always tried to be neutral, but what neutral is looks different today than it did four years ago. Eight years ago. Meta has always tried to be politically neutral. For a long time, they thought being politically neutral was moderating content and putting up these warnings,” said Castro.

“And now they're saying, you know what? We don't think that's actually being neutral. The companies are not trying to make politically charged or culturally charged decisions anymore.”

Finally, at least to Castro, it’s significant that the tech leaders are now much more visible than before. Visibility converts into impact and influence – just look at Musk.

“Musk has so much power because when he sends out these tweets, he can get a story written about what he says. He can significantly influence debate. He can meet directly with policymakers,” said Castro.

“I think you're seeing more tech CEOs embrace that model where they're really working on their public image.”

That’s something America’s rich really need to work on, actually. Most Americans hate them, and the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of the American health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, on December 4th demonstrated that in full color.

Thousands on social media actually congratulated the killer, Luigi Mangione, after he was arrested. It’s as if America was loudly proclaiming that, you know what, he had a point – that the US healthcare system is cruel and inhumane.

“Thompson’s death has been a real shock to the system for America’s ruling class, who seem to be realizing for the first time that the majority of the country will not mourn their deaths,” Broderick wrote on Garbage Day.

So if the rich want to be loved again, they have to be more proactive and at least try to show the people that they’re just like everyone else – even though, of course, they’re not. Again, look at Musk.