Donald Trump was sworn-in as the 47th president of the United State of America on 20 January, and the President elect’s inauguration seemed more like a scene out of a tech-billionaire get-together than a ceremony to hand over reins of the States to its new president. The tech bros of Silicon Valley were not just present at the ceremony but had better seats than Trump’s own cabinet picks.
It was no surprise that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and more recently X (formerly Twitter) was in attendance and had a front row seat to the ceremony, given how strongly he campaigned for the now POTUS. But what was surprising was that he was not the only one. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta; Jeff Bezos former CEO of Amazon; Tim Cook, CEO of Apple; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI’ Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google; Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, and many other tech leaders were at the ceremony as well.
So how did the swearing-in of Donald Trump as the President turn into a tech billionaires’ meet-up?
Well, we call it the Elon Musk Effect.
To understand it, we need to take a quick look at Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign. After he claimed on X that he will not be donating to either of the presidential candidates, Elon Musk not only spent a sum of nearly $277 million to support Trump and other Republicans but also campaigned aggressively for Trump, attending rallies and even hosting solo events.
Musk was even accused of using X to push far-right agendas as many researchers noted that the platform was suddenly becoming a mouthpiece for the right wing. In his defence, at an event in Pennsylvania, just a little over a month before the Presidential elections, Musk stated that X was politically neutral and remained a level playing field for both sides.
Fast forward, Donald Trump gets elected as POTUS and it is quite evident that Musk had a huge role to play. With Musk getting to be the ‘Voice of Tech’ in the newly elected President’s ear, it wasn’t long before all of the tech bros of Silicon Valley jumped at the opportunity to have a seat at the Trump table.
Trump’s Inaugural committee raised a massive sum of USD 170 million to host a series of events around his swearing in ceremony (which incidentally, is funded by taxpayers). A large chunk of this sum came from a number of tech CEOs. Zuckerberg, Cook, Altman, Bezos, Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, Google, and Microsoft all donated $1 Million each to President elect’s inaugural fund. Soon it seemed like a very exclusive tech billionaires’ club was forming at the top with Trump at the centre of it.
This coming together of tech giants often seen as rivals was so obvious that outgoing President Joe Biden not only mentioned it in his farewell speech, but even warned against it, saying:
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom,”.
He also expressed his concern over “the rise of tech-industrial complex” and how Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation which is enabling the abuse of power.
The Musk effect was not limited to donations and campaigns. Recently, in an interview with Joe Rogan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, not only openly addressed issues Meta faced during Biden’s presidency term but expressed optimism at the election of the new President.
Zuckerberg also talked about how Meta subsidiaries, Facebook, Threads and Instagram will let go of their third party fact checking program and replace it with a community driven system, which is surprise, surprise, very similar to what happened on X under Musk’s watch. Much like Elon Musk’s X, the members of the community would be able to flag posts as true or false along with adding context to it. Zuckerberg claims this move will promote free speech on these social media platforms and will remove bias (if any) that can be part of fact checking programs.
Apart from ditching its fact checking programs, Zuckerberg also mentioned how Meta companies will loosen their content moderation policy, essentially letting users criticise immigrants, transgenders or non-binary people even more strongly. To round it all off, Zuckerberg also stressed how corporate culture needed more “masculine energy.”
All of this aligns largely with the voice of the far right, and the values on which Trump campaigned and regained the presidency. They also are in sync with ideologies Musk has been vocalising for some time now. Apart from the public praises and policy changes, Zuckerberg even added Dana White, former UFC Chief Executive and a very close ally of President Donald Trump, to Meta’s board. After the release of the Zuckerberg interview, in which he also criticised companies like Apple, many felt that the Meta CEO was simply letting years of pent up feelings go and becoming very, you guessed it, Musk-like.
Even before the election, the Washington Post, after more than 30 years, decided that the editorial board will not be endorsing a presidential candidate. It was a decision that shocked a number of people, and was an open invitation to widespread criticism from both right and left wing journalists, many of them Pulitzer Prize winners. Many were also quick to point out that the publication after all, was owned by Amazon Chairman, Jeff Bezos, who had acquired it in 2013, although Bezos himself defended the Post’s decision as “right” and “principled.”
The fear of missing out amongst the billionaire tech bros (yes, they seem to have FOMO too), seems to have united them and has landed them in a club of sorts. A club of the elite. And while Trump is the elected president of the United States, Musk seems to be the president of this new club, trying to sway many of its members to follow in his right-wing, Trump-friendly footsteps. Many of them still seem to be apprehensive, while others are openly enthusiastic.
The question that now remains is whether the Elon Musk Effect will wear off soon or are we going to see the new tech club, and subsequently the tech world itself, get consumed by it completely?
Asked by reporters outside the White House about the controversy, Trump said he has had a “good call” with Jeff Bezos and that he was “very nice”. (Image: Reuters) 
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