Big Tech is moving quickly and aggressively to ensure it stays on President Trump’s good side.
Companies ranging from Apple (AAPL) and Meta (META) to Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN) have taken steps to improve their standing with Trump, whether that’s through promised investments in American factories or changes to their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices.
Google renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America in Google Maps, cut its DEI efforts, and removed a clause in its AI policy that would have prevented the company from using the technology for weapons.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has installed Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White as a Meta board member, curtailed DEI programs, and paid $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed after the social media network banned his account following the Jan. 6 attack.
Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, has exerted his influence over the Post’s editorial board, preventing it from endorsing Trump’s rival, former Vice President Kamala Harris, in the run-up to the 2024 election and telling the board to focus on personal liberties and free markets.
“There is an old saying in DC that you’re either at the table or on the menu,” explained Edward Mills, managing director and Washington policy analyst at Raymond James. “We saw significant resistance [from tech] in Trump 1.0, and very frequently tech [companies] found themselves on the menu through much more aggressive antitrust actions and a very unfriendly DC. In Trump 2.0 it is clear to me that they are trying to be at the table.”
Big Tech playing the game
Apple laid out the prototype for how to engage with Trump during his first administration. CEO Tim Cook took a more diplomatic route, inviting Trump to a plant that assembled the company’s Mac Pro desktop and laying out how the company relied on suppliers from across the country.
Mark Zuckerberg has made a series of changes at Meta to appease Trump. (AP Foto/David Zalubowski) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
The overtures paid off over time, helping Apple win exceptions to tariffs on goods from China. And the company has continued to follow the same playbook this time around, saying it will spend billions in the US on everything from Apple TV+ production to growing its US Advanced Manufacturing Fund from $5 billion to $10 billion.
“I think Tim Cook showed ... how to deal with the Trump administration by being accommodative, respectful, providing President Trump with good press and that helped Apple in what ... was already a precarious position of being caught in the crossfire of the US-China trade dispute,” explained D.A. Davidson head of technology research Gil Luria.
“The other CEOs of these large companies took good notes from ... Mr. Cook, and in fact, they have all made a pilgrimage to either the White House or Mar-a-Lago, and most of them have come back with deliverables,” Luria added.
For Google, that has meant making changes to its AI policy and eliminating portions of its DEI programs. In February, the company told Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Keenan that it made the changes to its DEI effort based on “recent court decisions and executive orders on this topic.” Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 seeking to end such programs.
Meta similarly gutted DEI services. In February, Zuckerberg also announced he was getting rid of fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes-style program found on X. He also said he is loosening policies on speech related to immigration and gender, claiming that it has hurt free speech on his platform.
Immigration and gender were major topics of Trump’s campaign, and he has focused on deporting migrants while targeting transgender people and nonbinary individuals via executive orders. Zuckerberg also claimed the company needed to move its trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California to Texas to combat concerns about alleged bias.
Zuckerberg had an acrimonious relationship with Trump during his first administration and is looking to win over the president in this second administration. Doing so could also help Zuckerberg as he looks to push back against regulations on tech companies in Europe and battles the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit seeking to break up the company.
Google and Amazon have also looked to improve their respective relationships with Trump. Google banned the president from YouTube following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, while Amazon faced repeated attacks from Trump during his first administration because of the Post’s coverage of the White House at the time.
Bezos's space company, Blue Origin, is also hoping to grab government contracts for space launches, and a positive relationship with Trump could go a long way in helping that effort.
Cook, Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Bezos also attended Trump’s inauguration, standing just behind the president as he was sworn in, and donated millions toward the event.
Trump previously threatened to jail Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Carl Court/Pool via AP) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
“It was almost as if Trump was demonstrating that he had won the fight and was having them take a front-row seat to his victory,” Mills said.
Fellow tech giants Microsoft (MSFT) and Nvidia (NVDA) may not have made such public overtures to the Trump administration as their peers, but they are still working with the White House to address their own concerns. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella met with Trump in January to discuss the company’s AI investments, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang joined a meeting with the president later that month.
Microsoft president Brad Smith has called on Trump to loosen certain export rules that limit Big Tech’s ability to build data centers in countries like Poland, Israel, Switzerland, and Saudi Arabia.
Huang, for his part, is contending with the potential for further export controls on Nvidia’s chips to China, which are already subject to limits, as well as Trump’s planned 25% tariffs on semiconductors. TSMC CEO C.C. Wei is also hoping to avoid taking a hit from Trump's tariffs, laying out his company's investments in a press conference with the president.
It’s still early in this second administration, and tech companies have another four years before a new president takes office. There’s no guarantee their efforts to appease Trump will work, and there could still be hiccups down the road.
“There is the normal way in which D.C. works, and then there's the Donald Trump way in which D.C. works,” Mills said.
Now Big Tech has to make sure it's figured that out.
Sign up for Yahoo Finance's Week in Tech newsletter. ·yahoofinance
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
