Big Tech's public race to curry favour with Donald Trump

Silicon Valley's elite are making donations, appearances and high-profile appointments ahead of the president-elect’s inauguration

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has made a series of moves that realign his company to operate under the second Trump administration. Reuters

Big Tech executives are racing to secure influence with Donald Trump’s second administration, using it as a fresh opportunity to reset relations with the mercurial president-elect.

Meta and other Silicon Valley firms including Amazon and OpenAI have donated $1 million or more to Mr Trump's inaugural fund (Meta did not donate to Mr Trump's 2017 inauguration or Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration).

And chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was among a number of executives to hold court with Mr Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida since the election.

The conciliatory overtures by Silicon Valley show that its executives are hoping to turn over a new leaf with the future president, who once suggested Mr Zuckerberg could “spend the rest of his life in prison” and has previously bashed Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos.

Mr Bezos has made a number of moves in recent months, blocking the Washington Post's (which he owns) endorsement of Kamala Harris, and rejecting a cartoonist's sketch that showed the Amazon boss bowing down to Mr Trump. Amazon Prime Video also announced it is licensing a documentary film about first lady Melania Trump.

Meta has also been lurching towards a more MAGA-friendly position. The company on Tuesday said it is ditching fact-checking system with “community notes” – similar to the ones on Elon Musk's platform X – in what he said would bring the company “back to our roots around free expression”.

He also said the company would remove topics on topics such as immigration and gender that he said are “just out of touch with mainstream discourse”, and pledged to work with Mr Trump to “push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.

Meta is also realigning some of its team to be better positioned under the new administration.

The company on Monday named UFC president and Trump ally Dana White, a popular figure among conservative white males, to its board of directors.

Former George W Bush official Joel Kaplan is now Meta's chief global affairs officer, replacing Nick Clegg, formerly the leader of the UK's Liberal Democrats. Mr Kaplan defended the company's decision to move end its fact-checking system, saying that the programme “too often became a tool to censor”.

Republican Kevin Martin was also elevated to vice president of global public policy and Jennifer Newstead, who served in the State Department from 2017-2019, was recently named Meta's general counsel, Semafor reported.

According to CNBC, Microsoft also recently acknowledged that it had donated $1 million to Mr Trump's inauguration fund, although the company also pointed out that it had previously donated $500,000 to Joe Biden's inauguration fund, and $500,000 to Mr Trump's fund after his first White House victory in 2016.

Meanwhile, Apple's Tim Cook also joined other Big Tech executives in donating to Mr Trump's inaugural fund. Mr Cook, once nicknamed “Tim Apple” by Mr Trump, also donated $1 million to the inauguration, Axios reported. The company donated $57,000 to his 2017 fund.

Those reports are the latest in what has been a curious, occasionally contentious but almost always civil relationship between Apple and Mr Trump.

Mr Trump in 2016 threatened to enact tariffs on Apple products for manufacturing devices overseas, only to ask Mr Cook to serve on the administration's American workforce policy advisory board three years later.

Artificial intelligence

Some companies are posturing for a technology far more pervasive today than in 2017: artificial intelligence.

Microsoft is publicly offering suggestions to the incoming Trump White House on how to capitalise what it calls a “golden opportunity for American AI”.

“The country has a unique opportunity to pursue this vision and build on the foundational ideas set for AI policy during President Trump’s first term,” Microsoft vice chair Brad Smith wrote in a lengthy blog post on Friday.

“Achieving this vision will require a partnership that unites leaders from government, the private sector, and the country’s educational and non-profit institutions.”

Then, of course, there are the new technology companies on the block, like OpenAI, which helped put artificial intelligence into mainstream with its ChatGPT tool.

The best indicator for what to expect from Mr Trump's AI policy is likely the Republican Party’s official 2024 platform published back in July. The platform pledged to support AI development “rooted in free speech and human flourishing”, it read in part.

Mr Trump signed an executive order during his first term which sought to “drive technological breakthroughs in AI” while “reducing barriers to the use of AI technologies.”

OpenAI chief Altman said he looks forward to working with Mr Trump on how to harness the new technology, saying the US must lead the tech race against rival China.

“I think it’s very important to the American innovation economy and our position in the world that we allow our small companies to do what they do,” he said during a Fox News segment on Sunday.

“We clearly had regulatory overreach as a country.”

One tech executive who has not yet been invited to Mar-a-Lago is Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, although he told Bloomberg Television he would be happy to meet with the president-elect and offered to help the coming administration.

A change of pace

Some say that amid the re-emergence of Donald Trump in the White House, those in the most prominent of technology circles have learned how to navigate based on Mr Trump's first term.

"In the upcoming Trump era, it isn’t enough to have great tech or a strong sales team," said Sam Blatteis, chief executive of The Mena Catalysts, a market entry firm for Web3 multinationals expanding in the Gulf economies.

American tech executive Sam Blatteis said that the reemergence of Donald Trump means that the power gap is closing in Washington, but that the ideological gap is widening. Photo: Antonie Robertson

"Relationships will play an outsized role, and high tech companies must take a crash course in ‘spoken MAGA’. It is a special language — different than how they communicated with the Biden White House," he explained, referring to Mr Trump's inward looking campaign theme, 'Make America great Again'.

Mr Blatteis said that it's not necessarily a surprise that president-elect Trump has become the the "man to see" among US technology executives in the know, but no matter how well they think they know Mr Trump, he warned, they'll probably have to get used to unpredictability being the new normal.

"As Trump appoints an armada of new policymakers to run key tech-related agencies, who is running them, and how much real influence they have, is hard to pin down," he said.

"It’s about quietly having the right conversations ... politics will become more important than traditional commercial business plans in shaping market outcomes," he added.