What a Trump victory means for tech world: Boost for crypto, Musk

Another Trump presidency will be good for crypto and Elon Musk, but every big tech company may not benefit

By Kevin Roose  The red wave that swept Donald J. Trump to re-election did not, despite what some podcasters might claim, originate in Silicon Valley.

 

In San Francisco, rank-and-file tech workers still largely vote for Democrats. And while some prominent tech leaders came out in support of 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 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.

 

 

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

 

Musk, already the tech industry’s most visible and polarising figure, may have done more than anyone else in America to elect Trump. He was not only one of 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 Musk, who will become the most powerful businessman in America (if he wasn’t already).

 

If Trump appoints Musk to an official position in the new administration – he has suggested he might put him in charge of a new “department of government efficiency” that would cut the federal work force –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 Musk, whose $44 billion purchase of Twitter and the money he spent getting Trump elected now look like chump change, compared with the value of the influence he’ll wield in the new administration. 

 

CEOs kiss the ring

 

It won’t just be Musk cosying up to Trump. Many Silicon Valley leaders will try to get on the good side of the incoming administration in a hurry.

 

During 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 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 Trump’s “personal vendetta” against Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, who owns ‘The Washington Post’.)

 

They won’t make the same mistake again. Some prominent tech leaders started currying favor with Trump before the election in case he won, including Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, whom Trump previously threatened to put in jail. Even Trump’s old foes, like Bezos, have largely steered clear of criticising him. (Bezos already sent Trump a congratulatory message on X.)

 

A few tech leaders will quietly fume about 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

 

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 are likely to 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 Tuesday night on the news of Trump’s strong early returns.) And the investors and crypto executives who poured millions of dollars into electing Trump and other pro-crypto candidates are likely to feel that they got their money’s worth.

 

Antitrust woes

 

Trump and his allies are likely to get rid of anyone associated with the Biden administration’s antitrust battles with the big Silicon Valley tech companies. (Already, Musk has said 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 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 J D Vance, have been angry at Google for years. They have claimed, without much evidence, that the company is biased against conservatives, and 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 AI 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 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 this year, ByteDance was supposed to sell off TikTok’s US operations by January, or face a nationwide ban. That probably won’t happen now, because 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.

 

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 Trump could simply refuse to enforce it, or otherwise make good on his pledge to leave the company alone. 

 

A.I. progress accelerates

 

Neither Trump nor Harris said much about artificial intelligence on the campaign trail. But it’s a safe bet that AI progress will continue under a second Trump administration, and might even speed up.

 

Some of the tech elites who supported Trump – including the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen – are  associated with the “accelerationist” wing of the AI movement, and have opposed any A.I. regulations that could slow down the industry.

 

To be honest, I’d bet against Trump’s spending much time thinking about AI at all. (He might delegate it to Vance, who does seem to have some interest in the subject.) But to the extent 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, Musk is a bit of a wild card here. He runs an AI company, xAI, that would benefit from light-touch regulation. But he also worries about existential risk from AI, and supported a controversial California bill that would have imposed safety standards on AI models, which many AI 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 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 Musk for helping 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 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 Trump over content moderation and political bias — and some of them, like 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 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 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 from what it was in 2016, when Trump supporters, if they existed, mostly kept it to themselves.