When the US election result pushed shares in the artificial intelligence chip giant Nvidia to a record high and did the same to the price of bitcoin cryptocurrency, the market gave its verdict on what Trump redux means for at least parts of the technology world: a boom.
Stock in the electric vehicle (EV) company Tesla surged by nearly 15%, which must have cheered its boss, Elon Musk, whom Trump called a “super genius” on Wednesday.
But what about the people who do not own stock in Silicon Valley firms but do use their products? Tens of millions of users of Musk’s social media platform, X, will now have to decide if they are willing to post in a place owned by a figure who looks likely to be a central part of Trump’s administration.
Musk could be tasked with “making recommendations for drastic reforms” aimed at the efficiency and performance of “the entire federal government”, Trump has said. This could grant Musk huge power over the agencies that regulate his and other tech companies.
X had already become, according to the independent tech analyst Benedict Evans, “a coordinating site for misinformation” and many felt its amplification of false claims polluted the election. Might a Trump administration then do anything about misinformation on social media?
“He won’t,” said Evans. “He likes misinformation. There is a widespread view in tech that content moderation got out of hand and we need to pull back on this. At most you might need to think about amplification [of misinformation] but not deleting stuff.” So expect a wilder ride on social platforms, perhaps, as they pitch towards the right.
The 47th president will have a key role steering some hugely consequential years for the development of AI and handling the tech oligarchy of the big five firms – Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon – which wield the data and processing power that shapes the social and economic lives of billions of people. Here, where issues of competition, freedom of expression and national security are at stake, Trump’s gushing admiration for Musk masks a more complex attitude.
As a populist railing against elites, Trump might be expected to try to bring down tech monopolies. It was under Trump’s first presidency that the Justice Department began an investigation into Google resulting in a case against the firm for suppressing competition.
During the election, Trump called Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, to complain that the company’s search engine was not surfacing enough good news stories and he threatened to have the justice department prosecute the firm for election interference. He also threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg if Facebook did “anything illegal” in the campaign.
“He has, at least through people that he appointed, a record of being tough on tech in terms of competition issues,” said Prof Rebecca Haw Allensworth, associate dean at Vanderbilt University law school. “Since then, we’ve seen him cosying up to tech in general, and Elon Musk in particular. So that cuts the other way.”
Trump will probably take office with cases under way challenging the market power of several big tech firms, spearheaded by the anti-monopoly chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan. Many expect she will be fired. Yet Trump’s vice-president pick, JD Vance, has voiced support for aspects of her monopoly-busting approach. He said during the campaign he shared “her view that we should be concerned about big tech companies and some of the mergers that lead to the censorship of American citizens.”
Trump also thinks the tech giants give the US global clout, at a time when AI is becoming a matter of national security.
“China is afraid of Google,” Trump said last month when he questioned whether a corporate split of Google could “destroy the company”.
“What you can do without breaking it up is make sure it’s more fair,” he said. “We want to have great companies,” he added. “We don’t want China to have these companies.”
Other dilemmas: should he make it harder for China to build the high-powered microchips needed for AI? Should AI code remain open source to encourage innovation among smaller companies or does that simply gift computing power to geo-political rivals. Trump said he would “save TikTok” after a ruling that its Chinese owners must sell it if it is to continue in the US, but the trade-offs are everywhere.
In other areas, any Trump plan to cut incentives for EV manufacturers would be “an overall negative for the EV industry”, said Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush, an LA financial services firm. This would probably help Musk’s Tesla because its existing competitive advantage would be exaggerated if its rivals were hobbled. There are reports Trump may only tweak the subsidies rather than scrap them. If Trump’s trade tariffs limit imports of cheaper Chinese EVs, that would further help Musk.
Previously sceptical, Trump is now supportive of cryptocurrency, with that industry hoping, after making big donations to the Trump campaign, that regulation gets lighter. Crypto-linked stocks in Coinbase, MicroStrategy, Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings have jumped between 11% and 21%.