Welcome to the age of gangster tech fix

President Donald Trump is being sworn in today, and we’re about to find out what happens when the government really is as corrupt as our most demented conspiracy theorists imagine.

“Cash-flushed Trump inauguration ends benefits for big donors” New York Times reported, somewhat inaccurately. Sure, Trump’s people ran out of VIP tickets, but that’s not what donors were buying. This is pure and blatant corruption – the kind that caused shame when we were a people who could still experience that emotion.

All of our tech owners have problems and want to buy solutions. I think it was easier than making products that people actually like.

“First Buddy” Elon Musk spent at least a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Donald Trump. Corporations and wealthy donors have sent half a billion more since he was elected. Amazon, Google, Uber, Microsoft and Meta each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, as did Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. (Joe Biden’s inauguration hardly got this kind of joke.) “In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump said in December. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.”

Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the three richest people on Earth, are said to be attending the inauguration; they would sit with elected and cabinet-appointed officials before the ceremony moved indoors. (Cook is also reportedly attending.) Musk will have office space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building near the White House, according to New York Times.

So what are these men buying?

Real market opportunities are rarer than they used to be. Tech executives and investors have become openly angry about the social consequences of their products and the unconscious lack of admiration from citizens. Zuckerberg in particular seems bored with Facebook, his main money maker, and has been looking for a new toy. He spent at least $46 billion plus the cost of a company rebranding in the Metaverse, only to discover that his Big New Thing had no legs. His latest Big New Thing is AR glasses, which are heavily dependent on whatever AI policies (and, likely, tariffs) Trump dictates.

Almost every major tech company has at least one lawsuit pending. Apple has an antitrust lawsuit pending. Google just lost one. There’s also a Federal Trade Commission suit that could take down Instagram and WhatsApp from Meta. Trump cares little about the actual purpose of antitrust enforcement: to make companies compete for customers with good products. The entire pending lawsuit is just a tool for Trump to punish anyone who doesn’t fall in line. And Silicon Valley is more disinterested in consumers than ever. “Get Out of Jail Free” is a pretty famous card in the game of Monopoly, after all.

Perhaps no one has spent more to buy a break from public scrutiny than the crypto industry. “The crypto guys are just blowing it,” said an anonymous Trump adviser Axios. “It used to be $1 million was a big number. Now we’re looking at some people giving like $10 [million] or $20 million.” They want a friendly Securities and Exchange Commission. PayPal’s venture capitalist and mobster David Sacks has already been named a “crypto czar”. And there’s an executive order pending to name crypto “a national imperative or priority — strategic wording intended to direct government agencies to work with the industry,” according to Bloomberg. We may even be about to witness the toss and toss of our first presidential coin.

Crypto is good for little except crime and gambling, and less regulation means more chance of people getting scammed by the next FTX. (Speaking of gambling, Robinhood donated $2 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.) What’s more, the executive order means a higher likelihood that crypto will find its way into new government projects — whether it’s useful or not. no. Capturing crypto can also extend to soft-pedaling the various criminal industries that rely on it.

Then there are taxes, of course. Billionaires don’t want to pay them, and Trump is good for that. Scott Bessent, the nominee for Treasury Secretary, said the “most important economic issue of the day” was to ensure that tax cuts for the ultra-rich stay in place. Bessent is accused of being a tax evader himself.

But these are all small potatoes. The real money is in the military. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen — also a Meta board member and major investor in X — has recruited Trump administration staff and even influenced Defense Department and intelligence agency hiring. Washington Post reports. As usual, he left the game bragging about it on a podcast.

Silicon Valley investors have generally been bullish on defense technology like industry poster children Anduril and Palantir. (a16z is a big supporter of Anduril, and both companies are founded and owned by some of the earliest MAGA loyalists in the Valley.) They want to shift Pentagon spending away from old-school contractors like Lockheed Martin , who appears to be so horrified that when the Big Tech Alert X account pointed out that it hadn’t followed Musk, Lockheed’s DM account said it was “unintentional.”

Musk’s SpaceX has a number of contracts with the US military and intelligence agencies, including the so-called Starshield satellites. He has used his influence to meddle in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and is even said to have received calls from Vladimir Putin. The military’s interest in artificial intelligence has also inspired a new race for everything from building data centers to providing cloud computing. Musk’s XAI, something similar to OpenAI, Meta and Google, could be legitimized by DoD contracts.

Andreessen has already expressed his displeasure with Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, which is likely to be repealed.

The AI ​​goldrush is also likely to interest Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon – as well as a number of startups. Back in 2017, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman wrote to Elon Musk that the company should aim for a “government project (when: ??)”. (I’ve heard rumors that OpenAI sought government funding at the time; Microsoft is also reportedly pitching DALL-E to the military in 2023.) Microsoft has more to lose in these negotiations — Senators Ron Wyden and Eric Schmitt have expressed concerns that The Department of Defense is heavily dependent on it as a vendor. CEO Satya Nadella has already made a pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to dance in front of Trump and Musk.

Mass privatization could make things even more profitable for the tech industry. The data/research stuff is an obvious source, but Musk’s criticism of the F-35 program suggests a much broader targeting. Greater military investment in drones, for example, is likely to benefit Anduril. Musk already makes rockets, which means it’s a short step for SpaceX to make rockets. And if the Trump administration follows through on its threats of mass deportation, there will no doubt be a demand for more databases, mass tracking and detention centers.

But this is not a friendly clown car that all these men have been driven into. Their interests simply do not align. Zuckerberg is the biggest beneficiary of a TikTok ban and has practically begged Trump to punish Apple for it. However, Trump may have changed his mind about banning TikTok, perhaps because a major conservative donor owns 15 percent of the stock. Apple is dependent on Chinese manufacturing and needs exemptions from the Trump administration’s promised tariffs. Andreessen has sought the dissolution of Google, which is now appealing its monopoly judgment. Everyone wants to steal contracts from Microsoft. Jeff Bezos and Musk are rivals for contacts in space.

If we know anything from Trump’s first term, it’s that he loves people who make jokes in his favor. Of course, this means mess, but it also means funny friends. For example, everyone hates the EU regulatory regime. It’s easy to imagine Zuckerberg, Musk and Cook teaming up to push Trump to oppose the EU’s Digital Services Act — and then immediately turning on each other. Being in Trump’s good graces is a zero-sum game, and the price is that the clown car will eventually go right over a cliff.

Keeping Trump happy may be expensive, but cheaper than legal battles. Selective legal enforcement puts every company under the sword of Damocles—make the wrong move and you could be ripped apart by lackeys in Congress or the FCC. Just check out the awesome TikTok calls for Dear Leader. The Supreme Court has upheld the TikTok ban, but if Trump only punishes people he doesn’t like, nothing happens to TikTok. (Importantly, the law is still in place to keep other Chinese competitors in line.) Did I mention that TikTok CEO Shou Chew got an invitation to Trump’s inauguration in the first place from the man himself?

I suppose I should explain why this makes the US a more desperate place to live, given the “smart” cynicism I’ve seen about how it’s all rotten here already. Tech companies, by padding their bottom lines, have degraded their experiences, a phenomenon so widespread and well-known that there’s now slang for it. Whether the scandals are fraud, child extortion, worker exploitation, or violations of user privacy — pick your poison — Trump has offered tech a way to buy itself out of the fallout. This makes life significantly worse for everyone who isn’t a billionaire.

There are those who will say that this is good – that corruption is happening openly and not in the shadows. But public and open corruption allows even more rot to fester in secret. Consider all governments of strong men; besides their advances in bribes, what did they invent? Silicon Valley leaders model themselves as titans of industry, but what they’re actually building is a golden age of misery.