Imagining the day when tech finally says no to Trump

Tech executives turned on the administration in the past. They can again.

This past week, President Trump hosted the who’s who of Big Tech at the White House. The videos are weird. As I watched, I wondered how long it will take for these CEOs to regret this display. The gathering didn’t muster nearly the level of shock and outrage among industry watchers that accompanied a similar conclave at Trump tower in December 2016. Less than a year after Trump won reelection, it’s become accepted truth that Big Tech and Silicon Valley are on his side. There’s some difference of opinion over why this is so, but whether out of venality or ideological alignment, the tech industry is not just in step on the march into authoritarianism. It’s building the road.

This wasn’t always a foregone conclusion.

During the early days of the first Trump administration, Google and other tech companies took pains not to anger the new president and risk his capricious wrath. They still took the meeting when called, but in private they wrung their hands. I know, because at the time I was working for Google on their comms team.

When Trump signed an executive order banning travel from Muslim-majority countries on a Friday afternoon, the head of communications told me we wouldn’t be making a statement because it didn’t directly affect us. At the time, the thinking was to avoid upsetting Steve Bannon, who had threatened antitrust action against the company. Within twenty-four hours, that calculation changed. When Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who immigrated as a child from the Soviet Union to flee religious persecution, showed up in protest at the San Francisco airport alongside the community gathered in opposition to the ban. He told a reporter that he was there because he too was a refugee. By Sunday evening Google made a statement condemning the ban and shortly afterwards the company announced it would donate to non profits such as the ACLU to fight for immigrant rights. Other tech executives began making statements against the ban, and the industry’s tacit support for the Trump administration all but evaporated. That’s why it was remarkable, in hindsight, to see Sergey Brin with his new girlfriend fawning over Trump at the meeting.

This time around, the question is: Could anything Trump does drive a wedge between tech’s leaders and the Administration? What could that be?

Imagine:

After months chipping away at the rights and safety of the LGBTQ+ community, the administration cheers on the U.S. Supreme Court as it considers overturning the 2015 decision granting equal marital rights to same-sex couples. Gay marriage becomes illegal once again, stripping hundreds of thousands of individuals and their families of their status, rights, and benefits. Since coming out in 2014, Apple CEO Tim Cook has publicly supported LGBTQ+ rights, and even called the 2015 decision a “victory for equality, perseverance, and love.” Would Cook, who was full of praise for Trump this week, find the gumption to stand by his principles and speak out against the Trump administration—tariff exemptions be damned?

The administration has dispatched ICE agents across the country to kidnap and deport workers and families, often with no due process and sometimes in the dead of night. Currently, ICE is largely targeting the Latino community, but as the operation expands so will the collateral damage. Imagine that South Asian community members get swept up in these raids, and the wrong person is sent to Alligator Alcatraz: a beloved Silicon Valley VP. South Asian-Americans in the tech industry are up in arms, mobilizing a powerful Silicon Valley constituency. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella makes a public statement condemning the government’s stance on immigration. Google workers protest outside the detention center. Sundar Pichai’s hand is forced and he too issues a statement demanding the release of said VP.

Crisis has once again engulfed OpenAI, this time after Sam Altman struck a backroom deal with the administration that padded his own pockets while shortchanging the company. The irony is rich: the very employees who went to the mat to save his job two years ago now know exactly how much leverage they hold—and they’re threatening to use it, vowing to walk unless Altman scraps the scheme and publicly distances himself from the Trump White House.

Long-time tech industry giant and co-founder of the iconic startup incubator Y Combinator Paul Graham has been critical of the administration’s support for Israel and Palantir’s work with ICE, which he believes violates the Constitution. He’s gone so far as to publicly accuse the company of “building infrastructure of the police state.” One of the original ‘anti-woke’ leaders in Silicon Valley, who has guided hundreds if not thousands of founders and startups over his decades in the industry, Graham has little tolerance for poor business decisions and faulty economic logic. As the Trump administration stacks his cabinet and advisory cohort with unqualified friends and paying supporters, finding dubious new ways to enrich his family and surrogates, could he push Graham off the sidelines and into the political fray? Perhaps Trump follows through on threats to require shares of public companies be granted to his government, as he’s announced with Nvidia. Free market principles fly out the window (as an aside, just this week we saw a major Trump tech supporter, Joe Lonsdale, say that Trump taking a stake in Intel was “cronyism in some form”). And maybe Graham flies off the handle, calling on his network of investors and founders to do the same. Thousands of tech executives join together to craft an open letter to the president demanding he allow businesses to make their own decisions. If their demands have real teeth—warnings of voided contracts or a mighty new Super PAC —a political realignment could be effected.

In less than a year, this administration has already gone well beyond breaking promises and rupturing norms. It is threatening the viability of the US Bill of Rights and constitutional system, not to mention an international order based in human rights consensus. Americans are protesting across the country in record numbers. For now tech remains steadfast by President Trump’s side. However, that alliance is vulnerable—as it has been in the past—to personal violations. These are still individual decisions made by individual people. And everyone, as they say, has their breaking point.

We can still hope that in a future not so far away, when the President calls a televised meeting of the industry’s heavyweights he’ll be met with conscientious objection. We can still imagine that in the end, Trump will be left sitting alone in his office, having burned all but his final bridge.

Elsewhere it was a truly wild week in tech news, much of it not very good.

Despite being found to be an illegal monopoly, Google doesn’t really have to change anything. Former Biden advisor Tim Wu described the remedy as chickenshit. Nidhi Hedge from the American Economic Liberties Project said: “You don’t find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot. Similarly, you don’t find Google liable for monopolization and then write a remedy that lets it protect its monopoly. This feckless remedy to the most storied case of monopolization of the past quarter century is a complete failure of his duty and must be appealed.”

Anthropic setting a lawsuit with authors for $1.5 billion. At first glance it sounds like a huge number but authors only got $3,000 per book. That sounds like pennies an hour for authors. This is akin to someone robbing your house and then afterwards, while they have your most cherished belongings, you have to bargain to be paid for them. The Silicon Valley business model is like no other, and yet they keep winning.

The FTC dropped its effort to ban noncompete agreements. The rule, finalized under the Biden administration, would have voided nearly all existing noncompete agreements and made it illegal for management to make workers sign noncompetes.

Big tech added over $400 billion in stock value. From Ari Levy at CNBC: “Add it up, and the U.S. tech industry’s eight trillion-dollar companies gained a combined $420 billion in market cap this week, lifting their total value to $21 trillion".

Geoffrey Hinton lunch with the FT. Hinton is considered one of AI ‘godfathers’. He said this: “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It’s going to create massive unemployment & a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.” I liked it because we often get caught up in regulating a technology when a more direct way to either keep a company in check or if they’re allowed to do the thing, just tax them.

Google got a $45m contract from Netanyahu’s office to promote Israeli propaganda. Good scoop from Jack Poulson and Lee Fang.

An FT interview with Arundhati Roy who’s lived through corporations and media in India kowtow to Modi’s agenda included this: “what I am surprised to see is, we [in India] have some cliché ideas about white folks, you know, like they have some intrinsic dignity… But they’re bowing and scraping and behaving exactly like the people who are crawling on their knees to Modi.”

With all that’s happened this week, it’s easy to give up hope, but try not to, keep plugging away. Our time will come.