Trump wants your attention — and the world's richest men can help him
When President Donald Trump was flanked at his inauguration by tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai, with the CEOs of Apple and TikTok nearby, he was surrounded not just by a handful of the wealthiest men on the planet — but by executives who oversee platforms that, in some combination, virtually all Americans engage with.
When President Donald Trump was flanked at his inauguration by tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai, with the CEOs of Apple and TikTok nearby, he was surrounded not just by a handful of the wealthiest men on the planet — but by executives who oversee platforms that, in some combination, virtually all Americans engage with.
For a president whose rise, fall and comeback are all intertwined with his innate ability to capture attention online and on TV, those executives hold the keys to algorithmic and policy tweaks that could depress or further enhance his political — and financial — standing. In turn, Trump could influence policy in emerging technologies in ways favorable or unfavorable to the executives and their companies, via his actions on domestic regulations and pressure on foreign governments to follow suit.
The dynamic — which flows downstream from a rightward shift in Silicon Valley after the Covid pandemic — has the chance to reshape what was long an adversarial relationship between Trump-era conservatives and big tech companies, which has been marked by years of disdain over content moderation practices and threats to strip legal protections.
Conservatives see a chance to advance their tech priorities on a host of fronts where they may not have seen possibilities before. But they say they still harbor skepticism of the platforms that recent policy shifts and photo-ops have not softened. For example, Steve Bannon, the influential former top White House aide under Trump, has continued to rail against the tech leaders and their agenda even as they become cozier with Trump.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said: “One of the reasons you see these guys now changing their tone on President Trump in particular is that they know how to read an election return. These guys are businesspeople. The attention economy is their business, and these are their consumers. And I think they can look at election returns and realize, ‘Oh, gee, huh, this is where a majority of the public is.’”
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