The red wave that swept Donald J. Trump to re-election did not, despite what some podcasters might claim, originate in Silicon Valley.
Here, in bluer-than-blue San Francisco, rank-and-file tech workers still largely vote for Democrats. And while some prominent tech leaders came out in support of Mr. Trump — most notably, Elon Musk, and a cluster of right-wing executives and venture capitalists who bankrolled his campaign — many others either supported Kamala Harris or parked themselves comfortably on the sidelines.
But whether they voted for Mr. Trump or not, nearly everyone in tech will feel the consequences of a second Trump term, from social media companies to crypto investors to the companies trying to build next-generation artificial intelligence systems.
Mr. Trump’s first term was wild and unpredictable, creating a noisy day-to-day business environment that even the biggest tech companies struggled to navigate. It’s likely that more chaos and uncertainty lie ahead.
But here are a few predictions I already feel confident making.
Musk vindicated
Elon Musk, already the tech industry’s most visible and polarizing figure, may have done more than anyone else in America to elect Mr. Trump. He was not only one of Mr. Trump’s biggest donors and his highest-profile supporter on the campaign trail — he turned X, the social network he owns, into a megaphone for the MAGA movement, flooding users’ feeds with pro-Trump content and urging people to vote for him.
No one in Silicon Valley has ever put his thumb on the scale this hard. And no one will benefit more from a second Trump presidency than Mr. Musk, who will become the most powerful businessman in America (if he wasn’t already).
If Mr. Trump appoints Mr. Musk to an official position in the new administration — he’s suggested he might put him in charge of a new “department of government efficiency” that would cut the federal work force — Mr. Musk will be in the enviable position of getting to pick who regulates his companies, including Tesla and SpaceX. He could also try to fire anyone who gets in his way. Or he could do to government workers what he did to Twitter, ordering huge layoffs and keeping only the ones he deems loyal.
In any case, it’s all upside for Mr. Musk, whose $44 billion purchase of Twitter and the money he spent getting Mr. Trump elected now look like chump change, compared to the value of the influence he’ll wield in the new administration.
C.E.O.s kiss the ring
It won’t just be Mr. Musk cozying up to Mr. Trump. Many Silicon Valley leaders will try to get on the good side of the incoming administration in a hurry.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, some tech leaders stood up to him, quitting various advisory councils and challenging some of his policies. But they saw that publicly opposing Mr. Trump carried a price. (Sometimes a literal one: Amazon has argued in court that it lost out on a $10 billion contract with the Defense Department because of Mr. Trump’s “personal vendetta” against Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who owns The Washington Post.)
They won’t make the same mistake again. Some prominent tech leaders started currying favor with Mr. Trump before the election in case he won, including Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, whom Mr. Trump previously threatened to put in jail. Even Mr. Trump’s old foes, like Mr. Bezos, have largely steered clear of criticizing him. (Mr. Bezos already sent Mr. Trump a congratulatory message on X.)
A few tech leaders will quietly fume about Mr. Trump, and some may even dare to oppose him publicly. But given the displays of obsequiousness we saw during the campaign, I would expect to see most tech chief executives quietly tolerate — if not enthusiastically support — his second-term agenda.
Crypto swoons
Mr. Trump used to be skeptical of crypto. But over the past year, he has become a vocal supporter of the crypto industry, and has made campaign promises to various industry causes in exchange for millions of dollars in contributions from pro-crypto groups. (Including, somewhat oddly, vowing to commute the prison sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road dark web market, who has become a folk hero in libertarian crypto circles.)
It’s a safe bet that in a second Trump administration, the crypto industry will get most of what it wants in Washington, starting with the removal of Gary Gensler, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who has become a villain among crypto companies for his tough regulation efforts. Crypto companies that were being sued or investigated under the Biden administration may see those cases dropped under a Trump administration, and pro-crypto voices will likely hold sway when it comes time to write new rules for the industry.
Crypto prices could go to the moon as a result. (Already, Bitcoin prices were spiking last night on the news of Mr. Trump’s strong early returns.) And the investors and crypto executives who poured millions of dollars into electing Mr. Trump and other pro-crypto candidates will likely feel like they got their money’s worth.
Antitrust woes die down (except for Google)
Mr. Trump and his allies will likely get rid of anyone associated with the Biden administration’s antitrust battles with the big Silicon Valley tech companies. (Already, Mr. Musk has said that Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who spearheaded the agency’s cases against companies like Amazon and Meta, will be fired.) You’d also expect Mr. Trump to clear out the Justice Department, and replace the enforcers responsible for bringing cases against companies like Apple.
The one tech giant that may not benefit from a changing of the antitrust guard is Google. Pro-Trump conservatives, including JD Vance, have been angry at Google for years. They have claimed, without much evidence, that the company is biased against conservatives, and Mr. Trump supported efforts to break it up during his first term. These days, the company is regularly cast as a punching bag in right-wing culture wars, even for issues such as whether its A.I. systems can generate racially accurate images of historical figures, and it hasn’t been as adept at lobbying Republicans as some of its peers.
It’s going to be a hard four years for Google in Washington, no matter how many courtesy calls are made by Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive.
TikTok survives
One tech company that may be toasting Mr. Trump’s victory is ByteDance, the Chinese conglomerate that owns TikTok.
Under the “TikTok ban” bill that was passed by Congress and signed into law earlier this year, ByteDance was supposed to sell off TikTok’s U.S. operations by January, or face a nationwide ban. That probably won’t happen now, because Mr. Trump, who spent much of his first term in office trying to ban TikTok, changed his mind this year, reportedly after an intense lobbying effort by a major ByteDance investor. Since then, he has pledged to save TikTok in the United States.
Mr. Trump can’t repeal a law without Congress, and TikTok could lose its appeals in court, so there’s still a chance a TikTok ban might go into effect. But Mr. Trump could simply refuse to enforce it, or otherwise make good on his pledge to leave the company alone.
A.I. progress accelerates
Neither Mr. Trump nor Ms. Harris said much about artificial intelligence on the campaign trail. But it’s a safe bet that A.I. progress will continue under a second Trump administration, and might even speed up.
Some of the tech elites who supported Mr. Trump — including the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen — are associated with the “accelerationist” wing of the A.I. movement, and have opposed any A.I. regulations that could slow down the industry.
To be honest, I’d bet against Mr. Trump spending much time thinking about A.I. at all. (He might delegate it to Mr. Vance, who does seem to have some interest in the subject.) But to the extent Mr. Trump’s views on A.I. will be shaped by the people in his orbit, it’s likely to be in the direction of encouraging American tech companies to race ahead of rivals in China and elsewhere, and removing regulatory roadblocks that might get in their way.
Interestingly, Mr. Musk is a bit of a wild card here. He runs an A.I. company, xAI, that would benefit from light-touch regulation. But he also worries about existential risk from A.I., and supported a controversial California bill that would have imposed safety standards on A.I. models, which many A.I. companies opposed.
Social media shifts right
For years, Republicans in Washington have been arguing that America’s leading social media companies are biased against them.
Much of this was a brazen, bad-faith attempt to work the refs — to make Silicon Valley companies so fearful of blowback that they would bend their rules for conservatives — rather than a genuine interest in neutrality on social media. (The tell is that those same Republicans haven’t made a peep about Mr. Musk’s pro-Trump electioneering on X.)
Obviously, X will be friendly turf in a second Trump administration. And some alternative social media networks, like Threads and Bluesky, may see an uptick in left-leaning users who blame X and Mr. Musk for helping Mr. Trump get elected.
But I’d expect more big social media companies to go the same way as X, shifting their policies and practices to the right pre-emptively to avoid fights with the new administration.
They may not go as far as Mr. Musk in reinstating neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists and classifying “cisgender” as a slur. But social media chief executives aren’t eager to revive their first-term battles with Mr. Trump over content moderation and political bias — and some of them, like Mr. Zuckerberg, now seem to regret their previous stances.
Silicon Valley goes purple
There are plenty of ways a second Trump presidency could turn out badly for Silicon Valley. And tech leaders may sour on him if his campaign pledges — such as an immigration crackdown that would affect their hiring plans, tariffs that would make their products more expensive, or anti-abortion policies that would threaten the health of female employees — wind up being too disruptive.
But in the near term, the clearest sign of Mr. Trump’s growing acceptance among tech elites will be if supporting him stops being a social taboo.
Harry Stebbings, a venture capitalist who hosts a podcast that is popular with Silicon Valley’s investor class, recently claimed that 90 percent of his guests “refuse to discuss politics and the election on the show, then proceed to declare their support for Trump the minute the recording is over.”
Now that Mr. Trump has been elected, many of those elites may feel emboldened to speak their minds. If they do, it could shift the vibe of the whole industry, making Silicon Valley start to feel more like a swing state.
Mind you, I’m not predicting a full political realignment. Most tech workers will still vote for Democrats and support progressive causes. (This is California, after all.) But in the workplaces of Silicon Valley, and on the podcasts and YouTube channels where the sector’s mythology is spun, it is likely to be a far different picture than in 2016, when Trump supporters, if they existed, mostly kept it to themselves.
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