Big Tech cozied up to Trump — it’s not getting much in return
For a while, it looked like President Donald Trump was going to have Big Tech’s back.
Now, the tech industry is collateral damage in his global trade war.
On Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen floated the idea of placing “a levy on the advertising revenues of digital services” if tariff negotiations with the US go south. This would be the opposite outcome that tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg were hoping for when they threw their support behind the new administration.
To someone like Zuckerberg, Trump was supposed to be the strong-armed leader to bring the overbearing EU to heel. Instead, the rhetoric between the US and EU is ratcheting up just weeks before the EU is already set to fine Meta (and Apple) for violating its Digital Markets Act.
While certainly more of a self-inflicted wound, Elon Musk’s popularity in the US has “inverted as his support for President Trump has increased,” Nate Silver wrote this week. Tesla’s stock price, meanwhile. has lost over a third of its value this year, and, thanks to tariffs, the company has removed the option to buy new, US-made vehicles in China.
As I predicted last week, TikTok is particularly screwed by Trump’s extra-aggressive China tariffs, which the country has promised to “fight to the end.” Even as it’s still business as usual for TikTok’s rank and file, the app’s fate in the US feels increasingly precarious. When asked this week about the extended deadline to reach a TikTok deal in the US, a spokesperson for China’s commerce ministry said the government “opposes practices that ignore the laws of the market economy, plunder by force, and damage the legitimate rights and interests of enterprises.”
“There’s not going to be much dialogue until that’s resolved,” one of TikTok’s aspiring bidders, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi, said this week of the tariffs. The situation is such a mess that the US stock market tanking also “drowned out the ability to infer feedback” from shareholders about AppLovin’s bid, Foroughi told Bloomberg.
If anything, this week is a reminder that the tech industry has grown so large and influential that its leading companies are tools for leverage between countries. In times of relative peace, that influence can be beneficial for Big Tech. When things get hostile, Big Tech is put in the crosshairs.
Elsewhere
- More knives out for OpenAI: While OpenAI’s counter-suit against Elon Musk was expected, I took note of the growing coalition (which includes ex-OpenAI employees) pushing this week to block OpenAI’s switch from a non-profit. Has OpenAI abused its legal status as a charity? Almost certainly. Is enough money and momentum at stake for it not to matter? Probably. But I’m still expecting this detaching from the governing non-profit to be messier than most expect.
- Google’s new layoffs: Layoffs have been expected in Google’s Platform and Devices division since employees were asked to take voluntary buyouts in January. The hundreds of people impacted this week got 60 days of garden leave and then 14 weeks of severance, plus one additional week per year served.
- More headlines: AI models are letting down their guard… ByteDance reportedly made $39 billion from TikTok last year, a 63-percent increase and about 25 percent of its total revenue… Waymo is coming to Market Street in downtown San Francisco… Google employees are now free to talk about the company’s monopoly case against the Department of Justice… Microsoft fired two employees for protesting during its 50th anniversary event… and after denying the reports for weeks, the company finally confirmed that it’s “slowing or pausing some early-stage” data center projects.
Job board
Some noteworthy job changes in the tech world:
- Guillaume Princen is joining Anthropic to lead its EMEA business.
- Clete Willems is Netflix’s new head of global policy.
- Mira Murati nabbed Alec Radford and Bob McGrew as advisors for her new AI lab.
- Dina Powell McCormick and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison joined the board of Meta.
- Hugo Barra joined the board of Sonos.
More links
- From CEO Andy Jassy’s annual letter to Amazon shareholders (and apparently Nvidia): “AI does not have to be as expensive as it is today, and it won’t be in the future. Chips are the biggest culprit.”
- The Information’s Wayne Ma interviewed Apple insiders about the leadership failure behind the company’s AI morass. My favorite details: that employees jokingly refer to the AI org as “AIMLess,” and that it took two years to remove the “hey” from the “hey Siri” voice command.
- A new IEA report says that power for data centers will “account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030.”
- Video of Careless People author Sarah Wynn-Williams testifying before Congress.
- Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke’s memo to employees about using AI at work.
- OpenAI leaders discuss what went into building GPT-4.5.
- Meet the “Technology Brothers.”
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Correction, April 11th: An earlier version of this article said that Google employees who were laid off received more severance than employees who took earlier voluntary buyouts. Each group received the same severance terms.
