Where Were Big Tech's CEOs on Tariffs?

WIRED

11-04-2025

Apr 11, 2025 10:00 AM Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech leaders refrained from making public statements while their companies collectively lost trillions. Their silence was both deafening and strategic. Jeff Bezos attends the 2025 Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted By Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on March 02, 2025 in Beverly Hills, California. Photograph: Getty Images
If you logged on to X or Bluesky this past week, you were likely swept up in the onslaught of posts about Trump's reciprocal tariffs and the plunging stock market. And, if you follow the tech industry as closely as I do, you probably also noticed who wasn't posting about the tariffs: many of the same tech founders and CEOs who flanked Trump on Inauguration Day in January. Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg have kept mum on the topic of tariffs (although both Pichai and Zuckerberg have continued posting about AI). Meanwhile, Elon Musk—well, we'll get to that.
This is an essay from the latest edition of Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter.
SIGN UP for Plaintext to read the whole thing, and tap Steven's unique insights and unmatched contacts for the long view on tech.
The silence was deafening, considering that the 'magnificent seven' collectively lost trillions of dollars in market value following Trump's tariff announcement last week. But there's a cold logic behind these tech leaders holding their tongues in public—particularly for those who sell hardware. The US has become a highly volatile nation where the whims of the president must be taken into consideration before using any political chip or making a public statement, especially in an environment where that statement could be irrelevant an hour later.
'The sand doesn't stop shifting long enough to make a cogent statement,' one top communications executive, who has worked closely with two Big Tech CEOs, tells me.
Tech CEOs aren't actually staying silent. They're simply lobbying behind the scenes on their own behalf. Niki Christoff, a Washington, DC, political strategist and former aide to Senator John McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign, says most of the strategizing around trade rules—and conversations with Trump's staff—are happening through back channels right now. 'There's a lot of personal dialing and trying to get deals done,' she claims.
During Trump's first term, Cook carefully cultivated a direct relationship with the president in order to lobby him on issues like trade and immigration. I have a hard time imagining Cook isn't using that direct line now. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, who did not attend the inauguration ceremony, reportedly went to a $1-million-a-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago last week. Shortly afterward, the White House walked back plans to implement export controls on some chips that Nvidia sells to China.
Private back channels allow each tech leader to lobby for specific tariff exemptions. The kind of exemptions that would benefit Nvidia, such as more lenient policies on semiconductor imports for GPUs, differ from what Apple might be angling for, considering the company's supply chain complexity and its reliance on China. 'Broadly opposing tariffs is not useful if business leaders can get exemptions on their own products,' Christoff points out.
At the same time tech CEOs are letting trade organizations, like Business Roundtable, which represents a number of big tech firms including Alphabet and Amazon, do some of their lobbying for them, sources tell WIRED. Business Roundtable CEO Joshua Bolten put out a statement urging the administration to 'swiftly reach agreements' with its trading partners and to implement 'reasonable exemptions.' The CEOs have also been able to hang back while bankers like JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon make public assertions about the lasting negative impact of tariffs on the economy, and while billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman keeps tweeting through it. (And really, what tech CEO wants to be part of a roundup story that also includes the market-cratering tweets of an anonymous X user named 'Walter Bloomberg'?)
There have been a few outliers. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he believes Amazon's vast network of third-party sellers might end up passing the cost of tariffs on to consumers. Last week Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sat alongside Bill Gates and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for an interview with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin, who asked about tariffs. Ballmer told Sorkin he 'took just enough economics in college to [know that] tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil' and that the 'disruption is very hard on people.'
Nadella was more circumspect and took Sorkin's probing as an opportunity to tout artificial intelligence. 'In the short term, I look at it and say, whatever happens, whatever readjustment happens, we are for the first time really supplying what is the essential, nondurable commodity called intelligence,' Nadella said. He went on to say that his second consideration right now is how much compute power the world will need in 25 to 50 years. 'I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we will adjust to it.'
If that doesn't work out, Nadella has a promising second career in dodgeball.
Among Trump's inauguration crowd, Musk is now the exception. He, too, has made direct appeals to Trump to drop the tariffs but has also loudly called Trump's top trade adviser Peter Navarro a 'moron' and 'dumber than a sack of bricks.' Musk later apologized, adding that the comparison 'was so unfair to bricks.' This was after Navarro called Musk a 'car assembler'—not a car manufacturer—whose business relies heavily on cheap parts sourced outside of the US. Musk has maintained that Tesla sells the 'most American-made cars.'
At least Trump's buddy-in-chief is willing to stick his neck out, even if the other CEOs aren't. Except, Musk's remarks on tariffs are so obviously self-serving. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that he doesn't care about the health of the average citizen's retirement account, considering how ruthlessly he's championing the firing of federal employees and the dismantling of government agencies. If Musk's not tiptoeing around the president's volatility, perhaps it's because he's a purveyor of his own unique brand of chaos.
Not that long ago, Big Tech leaders might have taken to the public square to issue statements about major social and political issues that affected their employees and the public at large. But these remarks were mostly performative, and we should never have pretended, or allowed ourselves to be convinced, otherwise. Behind the curtain, they were always working the gears of a brutally capitalistic machine. Now, for them, public silence is golden, and private lobbying is worth the world's stores in gold, especially when faced with an injuriously erratic president.