Big Tech's bet on Trump hasn't yielded special favors
On Inauguration Day 2025, tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai secured front-row seats, their $1 million donations and Mar-a-Lago visits seemingly successful in endearing themselves to the President they had for years tried to censor.
Yet, months into his second term, the millions they spent on Trump — along with billions pledged by OpenAI, Apple, and Meta for US investment (Zuckerberg even bought a house in D.C. ) — hasn't won them any favors. Big Tech now faces relentless antitrust scrutiny, with a spate of recent reports suggesting their efforts to win over Trump have produced no real benefits.
Meta is facing a suit from the FTC over allegations the company's acquisitions have given it monopolistic power. Apple is contending with a suit from the DOJ over concerns it has created a monopoly in the smartphone market. Google is dealing with suits from the DOJ over concerns about monopolies in its ad tech and search businesses.
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4 Tech billionaires were given prime real estate at the Inauguration — but that hasn't translated to special treatment.
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'Zuckerberg pumped millions of dollars… and all he got was going to court,' one source with knowledge of Trump's thinking on tech said.
'They got nothing other than Inauguration seats,' the source added, noting that tech leaders opposed Trump's preferred antitrust nominees to FTC and DOJ Antitrust — Andrew Ferguson, Gail Slater, and Mark Meador — yet lost those battles. 'The Facebook lawsuit is still going forward and now there are rumors swirling of a potential lawsuit against Apple.'
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Steve Bannon, who I interviewed earlier this week, told me those coveted inauguration seats were about Trump flexing — not about owing Silicon Valley any favors.
'They were all sitting there thinking they own President Trump … it turned out President Trump started crushing them, whether in federal court or with other anti-trust, anti-trust efforts,' Bannon said.
While tech leaders have ramped up their visits to the White House in recent months, the aides who Trump works with day-in and day-out are nudging him to take on Big Tech after what they feel was years of mistreatment.
'He was ready to make peace until we reminded him of the hundreds of millions they spent trying to silence him and run him out of office,' one of Trump's tech advisors told me.
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4 Mark Zuckerberg went so far as to buy a house in Washington, D.C., to be close to the political action.
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Trump's team, sources told me, are now pushing for aggressive measures, including a potential consent decree as part of an FTC deal that could force Meta to pay restitution to conservative users and businesses harmed by content moderation that was ratcheted up dramatically during covid.
While Meta has made recent efforts to hire more right-leaning employees and conservative Joel Kaplan recently got a promotion to head of public policy, it's not enough, some say.
'You're not going to fix this with Bush Republicans,' the MAGA advisor said sharply.
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4 Tim Cook's efforts to win over Trump haven't won him any favors.
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Mike Davis, a conservative legal strategist, echoed this sentiment, telling me 'Meta spent $400 million chasing Trump out of office and subjected him to four years of unrelenting lawfare. If they want to regain trust, they need permanent solutions—restitution for censorship victims and mass hiring of Trump-aligned officials. It'll take years and concrete steps, not empty promises.'
Conservatives aren't just focused on past grievances; they're wary of future threats.
'Meta censored doctors and scientists during COVID, potentially costing lives,' another source told me. 'Now they're trying to steal every copyright for their AI while pretending to make amends … they think they can steal data just like China because they say they want to compete with China.'
And in the back of many conservative's minds is the recognition there may be just a small window to make the necessary changes.
This story is part of NYNext, an indispensable insider insight into the innovations, moonshots and political chess moves that matter most to NYC's power players (and those who aspire to be).
Bannon, whose 'War Room' program shapes the MAGA agenda, remains adamant: 'Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google—they all need to be broken up. Big Tech is the most dangerous force in the country… we have to go after them,' he said in our interview.
4 Sources said Big Tech's recent efforts to make up with the president don't erase their long history of going after Trump.
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'All the oligarchs are progressive Democrats … they became MAGA at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on the 5th of November when President Trump was declared the winner. That's when they all had this Damascene moment,' he added.
And Bannon believes the moment the political winds change, they'll go back to the left.
And it's not just Trump they have to worry about. Even Trump's likely successor, J.D. Vance, is reportedly more hawkish on antitrust issues.
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Vance has even praised Biden's aggressive FTC Chair Lina Khan who made it her mission to break up big tech.
For now, the tech titans' investments and gestures have bought them little more than a front-row view of their own reckoning.
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