Tech companies will have it easy under Trump. Just like they did under Biden

Despite its incessant whining, our technology sector has had it easy under Joe Biden and will have it even easier under Donald Trump. The president-elect is backed by a swath of Silicon Valley billionaires, likely to enjoy full control of Congress, and eager to usher in a wave of deregulation that we’ve likely not seen for decades. Many of the worst developments coming down the pipeline have been building for years now, in part because the Biden administration helped build the coming nightmare or left the pieces lying about for Trump to capitalize on. That’s going to make a few people in quite a few sectors very, very rich.

Here are a few people and industries to consider:

Crypto

After FTX, regulators spent the following years trying to force crypto firms to follow the law and stop committing fraud. That approach, however, was more about compliance or “regulation by enforcement” than setting up any comprehensive framework. Critics and industry advocates have grumbled about this laissez-faire approach, long embraced by SEC chair Gary Gensler in his years at other regulatory agencies, though for different reasons. Critics have been concerned that this will eventually normalize digital assets and the fraudulent fortunes built with them, while crypto firms have complained they lack clear guidance and are victims of a witch hunt. And yet, these concerns were ignored as it seemed the government was getting results: Gensler’s SEC had forced crypto firms to abandon products, pay billions in fines, and (in some cases) change business practices. With the election of Trump, this approach will have proven to be for naught: the incoming administration will not only roll back existing regulations and enforcement actions, but is in the unique position to fill this regulatory vacuum with whatever the industry wants.

Trump, who launched his own crypto venture a few months ago, has already pledged to not only fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler (whose term ends in 2026) but make America the “crypto capital of the planet.” A key Trump billionaire backer—Howard Lutnick—serves as co-chair of the Trump transition team and is the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald. Lutnick’s financial services firm manages a great deal of assets for Tether, the issuer of the largest stablecoin (USDT) including over $100 billion in U.S. Treasuries that it claims surely exist. Shortly after Trump’s victory, Bitcoin surged but that rally was outpaced by tokens labeled unregistered securities by the SEC.

To take just one example. Pro-crypto appointments to major financial regulators (the SEC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), along with pressure from financial firms eager to enter the lucrative business of holding other people’s cryptocurrency will open the way for banks and other financial institutions to put crypto on their balance sheet—and to make it easier to access for millions of people who’ve never touched crypto before (only 17 percent of Americans have ever touched crypto).

Even if Trump had lost, crypto likely still would’ve made out like bandits. The industry’s lobbying machine has successfully invented the notion of a “crypto voter” and spent eye-watering sums of cash on candidates who are unwilling to defend that imaginary constituency. Three crypto-funded super PACs, led by the organization Fairshake, spent over $130 million on congressional races nationwide: votes are still being counted but thus far they’ve backed the right horse in 43 out of 58 of those races. In the final stretch of her campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris offered vague support for cryptocurrency regulations as part of an “opportunity agenda.”

That aside, when it comes to Trump the future looks bright for crypto’s biggest boosters. What happens when you combine a crypto rally, the rollback of enforcement that picked up after industry-wide fraud nearly destroyed the sector, sweeping victories for crypto lobbying, and a regulatory credo aimed at foisting crypto onto millions and millions of new customers? You get pro-crypto legislation, of course, but you almost certainly get another speculative frenzy that will lead to yet another bubble, another wave of creatively exploitative ventures, and billions more stolen from the public.

Elon Musk

The world’s richest man would’ve been fine regardless of who took the Oval Office. As Politico puts it, Musk is “the single biggest beneficiary of U.S. government contracts” and as such has built close government ties across both the Trump and Biden administrations. As of 2023, two of his companies—Tesla and SpaceX—have received more than $15 billion in federal contracts. SpaceX made itself indispensable to the federal government thanks to Musk’s privatization of NASA, but it’s the Starlink network of mobile Internet terminals and satellites (two-thirds of all commercial satellites orbiting Earth) that have pulled Musk and the US government even closer. Starlink terminals were used to provide coverage for the U.S.-backed Ukrainian forces yet were controlled solely by Musk, forcing the Pentagon to treat him as “more than just a vendor like Boeing, Lockheed, or other defense-industry behemoths.” As one Pentagon official put it: “We are living off his good graces. That sucks.”

So if Musk has already made the federal government dependent on his services, profits from lucrative government contracts, and has had a taste of geopolitical power, what would be different under Trump?

To put it into perspective, look at the first Trump term. In 2016, Trump’s loudest billionaire supporter was Peter Thiel. Though Silicon Valley has long been a safe space for reactionaries like Thiel, his public embrace of Trump was ill-received at the time. As a Silicon Valley investor, Thiel co-founded the surveillance firm Palantir, digital payments company PayPal (with Musk), and invested in countless others—such as Facebook, where he turned an initial $500,000 investment into $1 billion. His paltry $1.25 million donation to Trump’s 2016 campaign would prove to be even more profitable.

At the time, Thiel’s employees referred to him as “the shadow president” because of the influence he enjoyed over staffing the Trump administration, vetting candidates, and elevating his acolytes to fill key positions in the federal government. Thiel’s Palantir was given billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government; Thiel began exert a larger influence on the GOP, fielding more acolytes as candidates for political office and proliferating his reactionary beliefs; Trump’s Vice President, Senator JD Vance, is a Thiel acolyte and already being talked about as the heir apparent of Trump’s MAGA.

Where Thiel hedged his bet, Musk went all in and spent nearly $130 million on Trump’s campaign. On a superficial level, that investment has already paid out: Tesla shares have skyrocketed since Trump’s victory and Musk’s personal wealth grew by $20 billion. But as Jacob Silverman writes for The Nation, Musk’s ambitions may resemble Thiel’s: shadow rule. Even bigger than controlling who gets what job, Musk hopes to control what jobs there are to begin with. Trump and Musk have floated the idea of Musk as the “secretary of cost-cutting” at a newly minted “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE, for those keeping track) and to aim for $2 trillion in cuts. If the job materializes, it would supposedly give Musk “carte blanche to ax federal programs, close departments and remake the administrative state according to the persecution fantasies he harbors about ‘the woke mind virus.'”

Silverman points out that an easy target would be trans healthcare, but there could be other immediate marks for Musk as well: regulatory agencies whose oversight he could do without, and any number of real or perceived roadblocks (such as competitors for markets or subsidies). The latter wouldn’t be too hard to attack, given Trump’s propensity to target “perceived enemies” he thinks are “defying him in various ways.”

Some antimonopolists have sung the praises of Thiel acolytes like Vance, claiming they’re interested in revitalizing antitrust law to fight monopolies and promote market competition. If Musk gets his shadow rule, it’s hard to imagine Vance will be able to convince Trump to do something like keep Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission—especially given the line of billionaires who’ve been on their hands and knees begging for her firing. The same will go for the fate of various antitrust DOJ and FTC cases that are in progress or have been ruled on recently.

Google is staring down an antitrust lawsuit against its advertising monopoly and another against its search monopoly (this case was started by Trump), the latter of which was ruled illegal and has Biden’s DOJ mulling whether to break up Google. But Trump is expected not to continue those antitrust efforts. Facebook is currently engaged in an FTC lawsuit that could result in structural separation, breaking off Instagram and WhatsApp from the sprawling social media empire. The DOJ is suing Apple for monopolizing the smartphone market. The FTC, along with 18 states, is suing Amazon for using its monopoly to “inflate prices on and off its platform, overcharge sellers and stifle competition.” Trump has openly threatened each of these companies and their executives, but with Musk in his ear will likely smother these legal challenges as part of the coming deregulatory crusade.

Palantir and Anduril

Palantir has become the surveillance company over the past decade, inking contracts with a wide array of corporate, government, and military clients—across both the Trump and Biden administrations.

Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) was empowered to terrorize migrants and separate families by Palantir products, specifically its Investigative Case Management (ICM) and FALCON tools. The former was used to map out family relations, the latter by agents leading massive workplace raids—like the August 2019 raid that arrested 700 people on the first day of school. Under Trump, Palantir not only secured multiple deals with America’s military (e.g. US Army, the Navy, the Air Force, Space Force) but created coronavirus surveillance systems utilized by the Department of Veteran Affairs, Center for Disease Control, Health and Human Services, and continued to target government work from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration.

When the surveillance firm filed to go public in 2020 (months before Biden’s victory), a great deal of ink was spilled about the danger of this company’s business model and its growing enmeshment with police departments, military forces, public health authorities, and civilian agencies. How did Biden move forward? By greenlighting new contracts but also renewing old ones—such as a five-year renewal of ICE’s contract for Palantir’s ICM software lasting from 2022 to 2027. ICE viewed ICM as “mission critical” to Trump’s deportation machine, yet under Biden relatively little was done to dismantle it.

With the deportation machine that Biden left intact, Trump will be in an even better position to fulfill his latest promise: more ICE agents and raids, mass deportations (upwards of a million a year), and giant camps to detain migrants in. On this task, another Thiel-backed venture which thrived under the Biden administration can help: Anduril Industries, founded by Palmer Luckey. It makes sense that Luckey has nabbed contracts with the Pentagon given Anduril is a weapons manufacturer, but you might be surprised that the company is also providing its products to US Customs and Border Patrol in the form of “autonomous surveillance towers” thanks to Biden’s demand for “high-tech capacity” at the border. Luckey’s been keen to cash in on the lucrative contracts available at the border for a while now—Thiel has been an influence here, cultivating a techno-nationalism among his acolytes that encourages close collaboration with US military and government clients for the sake of Western civilization. A Trump administration will see an intensification of the role Anduril already tries to play in the Biden admin: terrorizing migrants at the border, surveilling indigenous reservations, and manufacturing weapons for the military.

Or as Luckey puts it: “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”

Beyond the technology and bloodlust and greed, what will allow firms like Anduril and Palantir, sectors like crypto, and billionaires like Elon Musk to thrive even more under Trump will be their ability to take advantage of what helped get us here: the Democratic Party’s attempts to mimic the GOP and placate those very companies and industries and billionaires. Democrats and Republicans have enriched Elon Musk, bolstered crypto’s legitimacy, and pushed for immigration authorities to secure high-tech arsenals. Trump will simply take each of those compacts to their logical conclusion. Talk of immigration has quickly morphed into deportations and camps, data analytics and bureaucracy reform into pervasive surveillance and accelerated privatization along with deregulation, and security theater has become a rationale for terrorizing communities.

All of this was happening, in some form, under Biden—it will get much worse under Trump, and it will certainly continue under whatever Democrat follows as it did when Biden succeeded Trump.