What does Big Tech's alliance with Donald Trump mean for the US?

The alliance between Big Tech and the new US president Donald Trump is causing concern

Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk during the 60th presidential inauguration in Washington, DC
(Image credit: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

As Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, only his family stood between him and the tech moguls, among them the three richest men in the world – Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Not since Dwight Eisenhower’s post-war military-industrial complex has there been “such unity of purpose between political and economic power”, says Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph. As Joe Biden warned in his farewell address, “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms”.

In a show of intent, on the day of his inauguration, Trump revoked a 2023 executive order from Biden that sought to reduce the risks of AI. The day after, he announced Stargate, a $500 billion private sector investment in AI infrastructure, says Natalie Sherman on the BBC. The explosion of AI has created a massive demand for data centres, along with water and power. Stargate, which will create an estimated 100,000 jobs over the next four years, is a joint venture by OpenAI, Oracle, Japan’s SoftBank and MGX, a tech investment arm of the UAE government.

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.