For, maybe the first time in my life, hats off MS.
The Guardian Techscape email.
The CEOs of the biggest tech companies in the world are looking at the neck-and-neck polls, picking up their phones, and putting their ducks in a row for a potential Donald Trump presidency. The former US president has never shied away from threatening revenge against his perceived enemies, and tech’s leaders are heading off retributive regulatory scrutiny.
Apple’s Tim Cook, famously called “Tim Apple” by Trump during a press conference, phoned the former president to discuss Apple’s European legal troubles, Trump said in an interview late last week. Trump seems to have browbeaten Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai enough times that the tech exec called him to praise his photo op at a McDonald’s. Trump was so pleased about the conversation that he mentioned it twice – once at a rally and once on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the world.
The previous week, Trump had railed repeatedly against Google, accusing it of favoring Kamala Harris in search results. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg called Trump in July after the first assassination attempt against him. Not long after, Zuckerberg called Trump’s response to the attempt on his life “badass” on a podcast. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy dialed Trump to exchange pleasantries, according to CNN. In the same orbit, executives at Jeff Bezos’s space exploration company Blue Origin spoke to Trump after a campaign event in Austin, the Associated Press reported.
Absent from the discussion: Microsoft chief Satya Nadella (pictured top, with Trump and Bezos), who has not endorsed a candidate or made a phone call to either presidential hopeful.
Elon Musk doesn’t need to call, as he was on stage with Trump on Sunday night (pictured above), the final person to speak before the Don himself in Madison Square Garden. The two have rapidly become the closest of political allies, and Musk has even put himself on the legal line, facing a lawsuit by the Philadelphia district attorney for his $1m sweepstakes. If things swing Musk and Trump’s way, SpaceX might fare far better than Blue Origin amid Bezos’s refusal to endorse a candidate in the Washington Post last week.
The CEO phone calls do not indicate that Trump will win. He might! But powerful people like to press both sides of the scales of influence if they can, and so it goes with tech CEOs. Trump has also received visits from a raft of foreign ambassadors. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser remarked last week that more billionaires have, in fact, supported Harris than her opponent; however, Trump’s mafia-esque rewarding of genuflection makes him more likely to dole out favors to those who make a show of calling him.
Harris herself boasts deep ties to the tech industry from her time as a senator for California and the state’s attorney general, but she’s not making hay of those relationships as she fights for swing-state votes. To read more on that, read this piece: Kamala’s tech ties: what is Harris’s relationship with Silicon Valley?