Among all the images of people cozying up to President Donald Trump at today’s inauguration, one in particular will be worth remembering over the next four years. During the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, you could see some of the most powerful men on the planet positioned immediately behind members of the Trump family on the dais. There’s Tiffany, there’s Eric, there’s Ivanka and Don, Jr., and then, smiling and clapping right alongside the family, the tech titans: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook. In visual proximity, they’re as close to honorary Trumps as anyone could be.
The power that each of these men represents may be rivaled by only the presidency itself. Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta; Bezos founded Amazon and Blue Origin and owns The Washington Post; Pichai runs Google; Musk heads Tesla and SpaceX and owns X; Cook is Apple’s CEO. TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, was also in attendance in a back row, and OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, was reportedly seated in the overflow crowd in Emancipation Hall. These business leaders directly control the tools that billions of people around the world use to communicate, to receive information, to be entertained, to navigate and understand the world. Even an incomplete list of products overseen by these people is striking: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Gmail, Google Search, Google Docs, Android, iPhones, iPads, Macs, iMessage, Starlink, ChatGPT, TikTok—the world’s foremost technology platforms, in line behind Donald Trump.
It’s not unusual for business leaders to rub shoulders with presidents and other elected officials. But this was something else: Inauguration seats closest to an incoming president tend to be reserved for a president’s family and figures in politics, and the tech executives on Trump’s dais have been hard at work ingratiating themselves into his universe. In the lead-up to today’s events, they have demonstrated a remarkable spinelessness. Most attempted to curry the incoming president’s favor by giving million-dollar donations to his inaugural fund—in effect, kissing the ring. They gave relatively little, if at all, to Joe Biden’s fund; some run companies that had previously declared they would reassess their political donations following the January 6 insurrection—a stance that clearly did not stick. The events of that day have been memory holed. Now Zuckerberg and Musk have reoriented their products in direct service of the MAGA movement, disposing of content-moderation policies and proclaiming a supposed commitment to free speech that serves the loudest and most odious users. TikTok exalted Trump yesterday when it brought its service back online following a brief shutdown: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” the app wrote in a pop-up sent to users. Fewer than five years ago, Trump had issued an executive order that would have effectively banned the app, calling it a threat to national security.
Regardless of past policies and stated principles, it seems that, as always, business is business. Each tech leader on Trump’s dais has a clear financial interest in courting the president. Meta, Google, and Apple all face antitrust suits; TikTok could still be shut down in the United States; and OpenAI, like other generative-AI firms, is doing whatever it can to avoid growth-limiting regulation. Musk’s companies have been under numerous recent investigations or reviews by federal regulators. Plus, he will need the support of the government to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” as Trump put it in his speech today.
The tech industry has officially placed itself in the palm of Trump’s hand. What will happen the next time the FBI wants to get into a Facebook account or an encrypted iPhone—when the definition of a political threat has changed based on the president’s whims? What will happen if Google Search delivers search results that are at odds with Trump’s agenda?
What cannot be forgotten is that these men—who for years have behaved as if they answer to no one—appear to stand for little more than the accrual of wealth and power, regardless of what it means for the people who use their products. Today, they bent the knee.
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