The shift began before he even took office.
In January, Amazon, Meta, and Google each contributed $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook matched with personal donations of their own. And whereas Trump’s first inauguration had few executive attendees, his second was packed with them. Elon Musk—who, according to FEC filings, contributed $288 million toward Trump’s 2024 campaign efforts—was joined in the front row by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, plus Cook and Zuckerberg.
TikTok also spent $50,000 on an inauguration event featuring Trump-supporting TikTok influencers. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order to delay the video-based platform’s ban in the U.S.
Though many Silicon Valley workers were disappointed by the attendance by their bosses, the move paid off—particularly when it came to tariffs.
Apple lost $640 billion in market value following Trump’s April 2 tariff announcement, but shortly after, Trump exempted phones, computers, semiconductors, and other electrical components from his newly announced levies on China. Then, in early August, Trump invited Apple’s CEO to the White House to announce that the company’s four-year, $500 million domestic manufacturing plan would be increased to $600 million. At the same event, Trump announced plans to impose a 100 percent tariff on all semiconductor imports but stated that companies that invest in the U.S., such as Apple, would be exempt. “If you’re building, there will be no charge,” he said. As a measure of appreciation, Cook extended Trump a circular, glass plaque fitted with a 24-karat gold base.
Meanwhile, Trump is no longer threatening to jail Zuckerberg—who he previously said had orchestrated a “PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT” by contributing funds in 2020 toward election administration. Instead, on Tuesday, Trump praised Meta’s plans to build a $50 billion AI data center in Louisiana.
More and more companies are learning that not only is Trump willing to strike a deal, but that such an agreement could give them an edge over market competitors. Citing national security concerns, in April the Trump administration barred Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) from selling their advanced chips to China.
But the author of The Art of the Deal struck an unusual arrangement with the companies last week.
With the president’s approval, Nvidia and AMD will now resume selling their AI chips to China—so long as they hand over 15 percent of revenue generated from the sales to the U.S. government. Though 15 percent of revenue from such deals is not a negligible amount of money—it could garner an estimated $1.35 billion from Nvidia during this quarter alone—it remains a better deal for the companies than letting Trump extinguish its entire Chinese AI chip market. Because Nvidia and AMD are essentially paying the U.S. government for access to the Chinese market, Vance Ginn—the founder of Ginn Economic Consulting and former chief economist at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget—told TMD it functions as “just an additional tax on those companies.” He added: “It’s trying to tie in trade policy with a form of tax policy at the same time.”
When Trump called on Congress in March to repeal the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, the executives at Intel—which had already received $2.2 billion in federal grants through the legislation, with another $5.7 billion scheduled—likely perked up their ears. Now, five months later, Intel has turned that subsidy into a U.S. government stake in the company. On August 22, Trump and Intel announced that the federal government would acquire a 10 percent stake in the company in exchange for $8.9 billion in federal grants. The $5.7 billion in federal grants remaining from the CHIPS and Science Act would go toward the government’s 10 percent investment, along with an additional $3.2 billion from the government.
While the government may be using funds allocated from Congress to acquire a stake in Intel, that’s never what the legislation’s authors had in mind. “There are clear concerns about precedent here,” Republican Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, a CHIPS and Science Act author, said on Wednesday. “For those of us who voted for the legislation, I don’t know of anyone who thought this was allowed under the law,” he added.
“What Trump is doing is using [the CHIPS Act] as a touch point to shift—not just from subsidies, which were already bad enough—but to ownership stakes in tech companies,” Clyde Wayne Crews, a fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told TMD. Designating the government as an official shareholder alters its political incentives. “If you’re a competitor and you have a regulatory issue before the federal government, or you have a merger that you want to get approved, whose interests is the federal government going to have at heart?” Crews asked. The government will not receive any Intel board seats, nor be represented by any leadership position within the company, but being financially tied to the administration inherently gives the company access and incentives that its competitors lack. And it mightn’t change Intel’s fortunes anyway.
“It’s another case of picking winners and losers, and that’s really worrisome in an economy as dynamic as the American economy, because it further helps one company out over another,” Ginn explained. “Anytime you try to prop up one business over another, you’re going to have unintended consequences, and usually that means more failures.”
And the Trump administration may be looking to add more than just Intel shares to its portfolio. “There’s a lot of talking that needs to be had about how do we finance our munitions acquisitions,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC Wednesday. “Lockheed Martin makes 97 percent of their revenue from the U.S. government. They are basically an arm of the U.S. government.”
All these moves blur the lines between private enterprise and the government. “You’ve got to have a separation of state and tech,” Crews said. “And more broadly than that, you’ve got to have a separation of state and economics. In order to do that, you’ve got to have people in the administration and in Congress who can articulate the role of private property rights in wealth creation, and even defense readiness.”
