Mr Viral
Opinion We all know the US’s incoming president, Donald Trump, has gone off-script in a way that is almost comical. Gulf of America? Make Greenland great again? Taking over the Panama Canal?
Unfortunately, there’s a method to his pronouncements. After all, he was elected president, and millions of Americans think he’s God’s gift to the country.
But, why are tech leaders and billionaires cosying up to him?
In the case of Elon Musk, many would guess that power and money lie at the heart of the new friendship. Musk, who also seems to be wandering further into internet troll territory by the day, has become the “First Buddy.”
It wasn’t always that way. After all, Musk said Trump didn’t have “the sort of character that reflects well on the United States,” and advised that people shouldn’t elect him back in 2016. As recently as July 2022, Trump called Musk a “bullshit artist.” Mind you, this came after Musk said he’d let Trump back on Xitter. Following that, Musk suggested, “It’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.” Well, that didn’t happen, did it?
Instead, in the wake of more sparring between the two, Musk “fully endorsed” Trump after the former president was shot in an attempted assassination. He, along with tech billionaire Peter Thiel, pushed their hand-picked vice-president candidate, JD Vance, to be Trump’s running mate.
Then, fueled in no small part by Musk’s financial and social networking clout, Trump became president. Since then, Musk, along with another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, were chosen to lead the non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to, as Trump said, “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle the Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Sure. Whatever you say.
Musk seems to want attention and power almost as much as Trump does. And, my friends, that’s saying something! He now believes the UK should boot Prime Minister Keir Starmer out of 10 Downing Street and seems to have strong opinions on how things should run in the EU as well. Good luck with that.
While money talks, it’s this columnist’s opinion that Trump’s ego won’t stand for Musk hogging the spotlight. I expect Trump to throw a fit at Musk sometime soon. We can then look forward to the two of them calling each other names for the next four years from Xitter and Truth Social. Won’t that be fun?
And the rest of the tech world?
Let’s start with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who’s pivoted to Trump after suspending his accounts for two years back in 2021. He dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in late November and has since made several policy changes at Meta that align with Trump’s view. In case you’ve been under a rock – and if so why didn’t you invite me so that I too could have been spared all this? – Zuck has ended fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram; contributed a million bucks to Trump’s inaugural fund; replaced Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, a Republican operative, as head of global policy; all while adding Dana White, Trump ally and the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, to its corporate board.
Firing the fact checkers with no notice while enabling Meta users to use racist, sexist, you name it, terms to insult others is all of a piece. As for politics, “Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US,” said Zuck. He also added he was moving what remains of the community standard group from too-liberal California to the political-fair, right-wing state Texas.
Just as Xitter has become a fascist haven, Facebook may soon join it as social networking continues its descent into the gutter.
Other tech leaders haven’t gone as far as Musk and Zuck, but they’re also bending the knee to Trump.
For example, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has expressed optimism about Trump’s second term. He’s also contributed $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and has supported some of Trump’s agenda. The Amazon titan’s biggest shift, though, is his increasingly heavy-handed control of The Washington Post, which he’s shifting from being one of America’s great independent newspapers to clamping down on editorial, reportedly blocking the paper’s endorsement of then Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
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Why? In this columnist’s opinion, it is all about the money. If you don’t have a long memory, you may not recall that in 2019, Amazon accused Trump of pressuring the Pentagon not to award it a $10-billion cloud contract, Jedi, because he hated Bezos. The company would surely not want a repeat performance.
It’s the same story for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. It’s all about preserving their companies. Trump, freed from restrictions by a rubber-stamp Supreme Court, will be free to do pretty much whatever he wants. What they want is for him not to target their businesses.
It’s perhaps a different story with Musk, Zuck, and Thiel; they’re there for the power, in my opinion. The others? They’d be saying nice things about President-elect Kamala Harris in an alternative world, while Trump et al would be having fits about the election being stolen once again. ®
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