Tech CEOs Spectacular in the Face of Donald Trump: Implications for Industrial Policy and China’s Import Taxes
On Wednesday, the chief executives of the leading Big Tech companies congratulated the President-elect. Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Tim Cook (Apple), Andy Jassy (Amazon), and Satya Nadella (Microsoft) have all sparred with Donald Trump before, but they were quick to get behind him as their companies face a fresh four years of operating under an influential politician who has proved volatile.
Policies that might have hampered growth for certain tech companies will be reversed by Trump. The president-elect may also take a more hands-off approach when it comes to some tech mergers and acquisitions, analysts say.
Betsy Cooper, the director of the Aspen Policy Academy, thinks that this might be a time in which there is a picking of favorites among the big tech players.
One of the most closely-watched Trump proposals among the tech crowd has been his proposed import tariff, which could have a massive impact on both tech companies and consumer spending. Last year, Trump floated the idea of a 10 percent universal tariff and later proposed an additional 60 percent tariff on imports from China and up to 100 percent tariff on goods from Mexico.
Apple might be less vulnerable than an initial reading of these tariffs might suggest, equity research firm Bernstein said in a bullish note released Wednesday, because of the company’s ability to absorb higher tariffs. Vietnam is one of the places where Apple makes products in different regions.
The Emerging Voices of Technology and Science: The Challenge of Trump’s Re-election in Los Angeles, Calif., and an Invitation to Silicon Valley
The small staff of Backchannel was shocked by the election results eight years ago. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack that working on a technology story seemed tone-deaf, if not futile. I wrote a column to answer that impulse on my flight from New York to San Francisco and directed as much to myself as it was to readers. The technological revolution of our time is still the most important story of our time, and I argued that regardless of the size of this event, one thing hadn’t changed. Controversial politicians may either come and go or refuse to go. But the chip, the network, the mobile device, and all they entailed were changing humanity, and maybe what it will mean to be human. Our job was to chronicle that epic transformation, no matter who was politically in charge. The headline of my column was “The iPhone Is Bigger Than Donald Trump.”
This week, Trump was re-elected as president. I won’t go through all of the disqualifiers. You’ve heard it all, and to the majority of voters it doesn’t matter. It’s an unbelievable story, and the next few years will undoubtedly be the stuff of history. Maybe not in a positive way. Maybe that is what happens for a country where people expect to celebrate continuing values on America’s 250th birthday. (In the spirit of unity, I’ll use the “maybe” qualifier since losers should be humble, and who knows what’s ahead.)
I don’t flinch from the thought I had in the year before. Stewart Brand once said, “human nature doesn’t change a lot; science does and the change accumulates, altering the world irreversibly.” What is happening in technology and science remains the activity that will ultimately make the biggest impact on our species. Future generations will look back hundreds of years later and identify the period when neural net software changed everything, likely due to the fact that it was based on microchips. The country that used to occupy realestate in the western hemisphere was destroyed by the strongman with the funny hair. I no longer run the publication, but I still represent a single voice in a much larger staff. (For WIRED’s institutional view, please note the words of my boss, which I endorse.) So, speaking for myself, I emphatically reprise my 2016 statement of purpose, with a slight tweak: Artificial intelligence is bigger than Donald Trump.
Journalists must cover the second Trump presidency with relentless demands for accountability. In the short term—for some of us codgers it may be all of our remaining term!—what happens in our community and country will have a bigger influence on our daily lives than the latest version of Claude, ChatGPT, or even Apple Intelligence. (Sorry, Tim Apple.) If you lose your health care, or your reproductive rights, or find yourself in a deportation camp or a prison cell because of the policies of our returning president, the knowledge that AI, mixed reality, and quantum computers might one day redefine us won’t lessen the pain.
The day after Donald Trump got reelected, I visited an Artificial Intelligence company and interviewed one of its leaders and a top engineer. Yes, on the walk back to the office I thought about the election results and got depressed all over again. I’ll stick to the tech beat for as long as my heart is beating, and I’ll finish the article about that company as soon as possible. The biggest story in town is that of artificial intelligence.