As Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president, it was the “row of tech executives” sitting behind him in the Capitol rotunda that caught the eyes of many observers. The tableau made for a “landmark moment”, showing just how much Silicon Valley has “seized power” in the Trump White House, said The Times.
Who is in the inner circle?
Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sundar Pichai of Google, Tim Cook of Apple, and Elon Musk were all given “prime seats” at the inauguration, said The Hill, but “not every billionaire tech mega-donor” got a “prime spot”. Despite Trump’s promise to invest $500 billion into enhancing US artificial intelligence infrastructure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Alexandr Wang of Scale AI had to make do with a seat in the overflow room.
The ceremony “reveals where power truly lies”, said Matthew D’Ancona in London’s The Standard. The presence of these “craven sycophants” has ushered in the “era of the Tech Baron”.
What do they want?
The ‘tech bros’ arrived with a variety of agendas. Musk wants “more power”, said The Times, and a new space race, which would benefit his SpaceX company – the “de facto” outsourced rocket provider for Nasa missions. Bezos, who hopes his Blue Origin program will join SpaceX on the “Nasa contracts list,” also wants to make “representations” on behalf of The Washington Post. The Bezos-owned newspaper has been plunged into turmoil since it declined to endorse a candidate in the November election, defying expectations that it would back Kamala Harris.
For Sam Altman, it is about lobbying the president to continue America’s “all-in support” of AI to “maintain supremacy over China, which is competing strongly” in the sector. As for Zuckerberg, he wants Trump “not to throw him in prison”, something he “threatened to do last year”.
There’s an ideological element at play, too, said Vox. Zuckerberg has signalled a cultural shift at Meta to clamp down on supposed left-wing bias and during a recent appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he claimed that the “corporate world is too ‘culturally neutered'” and needed to “become a culture that has more ‘masculine energy'”.
Their agendas are very different, but what the “broligarchs” share is a “passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity”, said Vox, “and their own roles as its would-be saviours”.
So what does Trump want from them?
America’s “fast-paced” tech sector is “one of the key engines” of growth Trump is depending on for America’s economic growth and “keep the promises” he made during the campaign, wrote Chris Stokel-Walker The i Paper.
Freedom of speech was a key tenet of the Trump campaign and his stance on social media is a chance for him to brand himself a free-speech champion. But the passages about free speech in his executive order were “performative”, Steven Buckley, a lecturer in social media and US politics at City St George’s University, told the paper. They’re really “signals to his cabinet picks” that they “have the green-light” to “bully and intimidate” those who speak out against Trump.
What does this mean for us?
Deregulation of artificial intelligence in the US risks the loss of “common sense safeguards” that have protected Americans against fraud, discrimination and unsafe practices, said Stokel-Walker.
Trump’s influence on social media bosses is an uncomfortable prospect for minority groups, too. In addition to Meta’s ideological pivot, Bezos has deleted the words “LGBTQ+ rights” and “equity for Black people” from Amazon’s corporate policies.
More broadly, said The Standard, the impression is that Trump has “surrounded himself with a crew of high-tech robber barons” who are “already too powerful and will soon become even more so”. They see Trump as the “perfect prospective enabler” of their project to bring about a “gilded age for the digital few”.