Elon Musk wasn’t always such a big fan of Donald Trump. In December 2016, he reluctantly joined Trump’s business advisory council, only to leave it a few months later after the Republican president pulled out of an international climate agreement. Trump also played hot and cold with the tech industry. During his first term in office, he was generally critical of Big Tech tycoons and their power, even as critics lined up to argue that social media platforms, exploited by foreign agents and hyper-political outlets, had helped deliver him to the White House.
A “techlash” got going under Trump and eventually became vaguely bipartisan. Democrats contended that social media platforms allowed right-wing radicalism to flourish, while Republicans decried what they saw as limits on conservative expression. The pressure only grew under the Biden administration. There have been dozens of congressional hearings involving tech companies on issues including privacy, political bias, election integrity, child safety, content moderation and algorithms, and there are now U.S. government investigations into — and in some cases, litigation against — Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Tesla, among others.
In the last few years, Democrats especially have shown that they would like to see more accountability from these companies and perhaps break a few of them up. So it may be no surprise that tech moguls are ready to give Trump another chance. Musk, after spending more than $250 million on Trump’s re-election, has signed on to help slash the federal budget as co-leader of a brand-new Department of Government Efficiency. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, refused to let his newspaper, The Washington Post, endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, and recently said, about the prospect of a second Trump presidency, that he’s “very optimistic this time around.” Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive, whose social networks took a more hands-off approach to election misinformation than they had in earlier cycles, called the way Trump reacted to being nearly assassinated “badass.”
But the honeymoon might not last. As a trio of recent books show, Trump’s relationship with tech companies has been volatile, and could be again if he senses disloyalty from his newfound allies.
In THE EVERYTHING WAR: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power (Little, Brown, 390 pp., $32.50), the Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli focuses on Amazon’s insatiable quest for growth and market control — from Bezos’ bet on the World Wide Web in the 1990s to the company’s transformation into a behemoth that regularly tangles with American presidents.
Mattioli describes Bezos as Trump’s “nemesis,” noting that the president-elect was obsessed with The Post’s criticism of him during his 2016 campaign. At dinner the following year, Bezos tried to explain press freedom to Trump, to no avail. “The president couldn’t believe that an owner of a newspaper wouldn’t use it to attack his enemies and wouldn’t influence coverage,” Mattioli writes. In 2018, when Amazon was the front-runner for a cloud computing contract with the Pentagon, she reports, Trump told his secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, to “screw” the company and scuttle the deal.
