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WIRED
09-05-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Buy Now or Pay More Later? ‘Macroeconomic Uncertainty' Has Shoppers Anxious
May 9, 2025 10:00 AM President Trump's tariffs have started pushing prices higher. Tech giants and ecommerce strategists offer some clues on when to buy. Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Buying something before you absolutely need it isn't always affordable. But if there were ever a time to consider making an early investment, this would be it. President Donald Trump's tariffs are beginning to nudge prices higher on products from high-end strollers to cheap smartphone chargers. 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 Trump administration has suggested the tariffs are a negotiating tactic. Some could be eliminated as the US makes deals with other countries. That means US shoppers willing to wait out the current chaos could end up getting a better deal. I have been wondering what to do here myself. As a new dad, my family will need a new car seat early next year, and these plastic buckets, which generally must be bought new, don't come cheap—even under normal circumstances. For clues on how to navigate the dilemma of buying now or later, I have been collecting thoughts from experts in the online shopping industry. One of the first lessons I learned doing this research was that if I decided to buy in advance, I wouldn't be alone. 'To some extent, we've seen some heightened buying in certain categories that may indicate stocking up in advance of any potential tariff impact,' Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on an earnings call last week. eBay also said it saw signs of what could be prebuying, though it didn't specify which products people are stocking up on. On the other hand, there are hints that most consumers have been holding out for now. This time of year tends to be relatively quiet for sales of iPhones and other Apple products, and that's been true to date in 2025, CEO Tim Cook said on the company's earning call last week. Mastercard's earning comments also said that shoppers were spending the expected amount. And Etsy even saw a drop in the total value of merchandise sold as customers held back on gifts and trinkets. So if other consumers are a guide, I could go either way with my car seat purchase. What about prices? As the impact of tariffs started to hit last week, Amazon's Jassy said that prices on the platform hadn't surged 'appreciably' so far. He added that Amazon was 'maniacally focused' on keeping prices down. It helps that Amazon has a global network of competing suppliers and merchants. For example, if one seller raises prices, another may hold theirs steady to gain market share, Jassy said. 'Customers are going to have a better chance of finding variety on selection and on lower prices when they come here,' he added. Jassy didn't touch on illicit tactics, including tariff evasion, that could keep the prices of imported products artificially low. But several ecommerce strategists who help companies sell products on Amazon tell WIRED that factories and distributors in Asia are admitting to new attempts to skirt tariffs, including by underdeclaring the value of shipments to US customs officials. 'It's always been an unfair playing field, and now they are pushing the envelope even more,' says Dave Bryant, cofounder of EcomCrew. Amazon spokesperson Jessica Martin says sellers 'are required to follow all applicable laws and regulations when importing items for sale.' The government losing out on tariff revenue isn't great, but name a shopper that's going to fret at the trade-off of more affordable prices, Bryant says. He and other strategists agree with Jassy that competitive items—think household goods or generic party favors—are unlikely to skyrocket in price on Amazon. More boutique offerings, though, could grow more expensive because of tariffs. Some of those increases appear to be materializing. In mid-April, the average price of goods on Amazon was higher than the previous 90 days in nine out of 27 categories monitored by the price-tracking firm Keepa, according to a WIRED analysis. By this past Wednesday, the number of categories with higher prices shot up to 24. Industrial items, tools, and baby products experienced some of the biggest jumps, with average price increases of around 2.5 percent to 5 percent. More increases are coming later this month, including reportedly a bump of $20 or more for the Graco car seat that I have been eyeing. The big question is how much worse will those increases get. The steepest tariffs—those on Chinese imports—could more than double the price of affected products. Normally, Amazon restricts sellers that make drastic price hikes. But it has been allowing for increases of about 10 percent a week in certain cases, roughly five times more than the previous limit, according to Jason Boyce, CEO and founder of ecommerce strategy company Avenue7Media. That means significant surges could come in days and weeks, not months, adding pressure on consumers like me to make decisions sooner rather than later. Martin, the Amazon spokesperson, says prices have not changed outside of usual fluctuations and that the platform's pricing policy continues to apply. The last factor at play in the when-to-buy dilemma is the chance of a resolution. If you trust the vibes that some big tech platforms are publicly expressing, there is some optimism in the air about averting crisis-level prices Companies are buying online ads to market their products like it's 'mostly business as usual,' Reddit chief operating officer Jen Wong said on an earnings call last week. Typically, marketing budgets would be an early casualty for companies trying to cut expenses and keep their prices low. Wong's comments echoed those of executives from other leading online ad sellers, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta. The positive outlook has been encouraging to Wall Street—the US stock market is trending up as if tariff-fueled price hikes aren't going to dissuade all of us from shopping in the coming months. But Trump and the outcomes of negotiations between the US and its trading partners are unpredictable. 'Obviously, none of us knows exactly where tariffs will settle or when,' Amazon's Jassy said in his comments last week. CEOs and their chief financial officers have taken to calling this reality 'macroeconomic uncertainty.' The phrase has been uttered on 222 companies' earnings calls already this year, up from 178 in all of last year, according to a WIRED review of transcripts from financial data company AlphaStreet. Some companies have been trying to create certainty when it comes to Trump and his trade policies since his first presidential term. Apple attempted to control its costs by shifting some of its manufacturing out of China, which has long been Trump's top target for tariffs. But this time around Trump has applied tariffs to every country imaginable, including an island inhabited solely by penguins. Exemptions remain another hope for companies and their customers. Last week, baby monitor maker Nanit led a rally in New York City urging for a tariffs reprieve for baby products. This week, Trump and his treasury secretary both said they were considering it, though Trump added that he preferred not to have too many exemptions. Nanit's Malaysia-made monitors—it abandoned China during Trump's first term— are subject to 10 percent tariffs at the moment. The levy could grow to 24 percent or more come July under the president's current plans. Nanit CEO, Anushka Salinas, says her goal is to avoid price increases as her company tries to grow its base of 1 million monthly users. It helps to have supportive investors who could step in with additional funding. The startup's subscription-based software, a business line that tends to have wider profit margins, also gives it some financial cushioning. But the higher the tariffs go, the more challenging it will become to avoid a price increase. Salinas personally made the call to buy a bed for her 4-year-old sooner than she would have otherwise. I made a similar choice. A car seat I don't need until next year is arriving tomorrow. Better $200 now than $500 later.
WIRED
25-04-2025
- Business
- WIRED
The Meta Trial Shows the Dangers of Selling Out
Apr 25, 2025 10:00 AM Several founders of hot startups took big payouts and let Mark Zuckerberg gobble up their companies—and came to regret it. Meta has a lot at stake in the current FTC lawsuit against it. In theory a negative verdict could result in a company breakup. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg once faced an even bigger existential threat. Back in 2006, his investors and even his employees were pressuring him to sell his two-year-old startup for a quick payoff. Facebook was still a college-based social network, and several companies were interested in buying it. The most serious offer came from Yahoo, which offered a stunning $1 billion. Zuckerberg, though, believed he could grow the company into something worth much more. The pressure was tremendous, and at one point he blinked, agreeing in principle to sell. But immediately after that, a dip in Yahoo stock led its leader at the time, Terry Semel, to ask for a price adjustment. Zuckerberg seized the opportunity to shut down negotiations; Facebook would remain in his hands. 'That was by far the most stressful time in my life,' Zuckerberg told me years later. So it's ironic to observe, through the testimony of this trial, how he treated two other sets of founders in very similar situations to him—but whom he successfully bought out. 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 nub of the current FTC trial seems to hinge on how US District Court judge James Boasberg will define Meta's market—whether it's limited to social media or, as Meta is arguing, the broader field of 'entertainment.' But much of the early testimony exhumed the details of Zuckerberg's successful pursuit of Instagram and WhatsApp—two companies that, according to the government, are now part of Meta's illegal monopolistic grip on social media. (The trial also invoked the case of Snap, which resisted Zuckerberg's $6 billion offer and had to deal with Facebook copying its products.) Legalities aside, the way these companies were upended by a Zuckerberg offer made the first few days of this case a dramatic and instructive study of acquisition dynamics between small and big business. Though almost all of these narratives have been covered at length over the years—I documented them pretty thoroughly in my own 2020 account Facebook: The Inside Story —it was striking to see the principals testifying under oath about what happened. Hey, my sources were pretty good, but I didn't get to swear them in! In their testimony, star witnesses Zuckerberg and Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom agreed on facts, but their interpretations were Mars and Venus. In 2012, Instagram was about to close a $500 million investment round, when suddenly the tiny company found itself in play, with Facebook in hot pursuit. In an email at the time, Facebook's CFO asked Zuckerberg if his goal was to 'neutralize a potential competitor.' The answer was affirmative. That was not the way he pitched it to Systrom and cofounder Mike Krieger. Zuckerberg promised the cofounders they would control Instagram and could grow it their way. They would have the best of both worlds—independence and Facebook's huge resources. Oh, and Facebook's $1 billion offer was double the valuation of the company in the funding round it was about to close. Everything worked great for a few years, but then Zuckerberg began denying resources to Instagram, which its cofounders had built into a juggernaut. Systrom testified that Zuckerberg seemed envious of Instagram's success and cultural currency, saying that his boss 'believed we were hurting Facebook's growth.' Zuckerberg's snubs ultimately drove Instagram's founders to leave in 2018. By that time, Instagram was arguably worth perhaps 100 times Zuckerberg's purchase price. Systrom and Krieger's spoils, though considerable, did not reflect the fantastic value they had built for Facebook. The founders of WhatsApp did reap a stratospheric buyout, because in 2014 Zuckerberg threw $19 billion to acquire their then tiny operation. But, as told through testimony of some of its executives and funders, the acquisition hinged on promises that cofounders Brian Acton and Jan Koum would retain control. The WhatsApp cofounders hated advertising and were adamant that no ads should ever appear on their service. But documents introduced in the trial indicated that Facebook was basing its valuation on the premise that WhatsApp would be monetized, apparently with those despised ads. The founders left in 2018, when it became clear that Zuckerberg was calling the shots. 'I espoused a certain set of principles, even publicly, to my users, and I said, Look, we are not gonna sell your data, we are not going to sell you ad s, and I turned around and sold my company,' cofounder Brian Acton told me. His penance for this 'crime,' he told me, was spending $50 million to create the Signal Foundation. Though these founders were pressured to sell, there weren't literal guns to their heads—and they did cash out in exchange for pursuing their dreams. So we shouldn't feel too sorry for them. But lately people in Silicon Valley have been chattering about startup guru Paul Graham's 'Founder Mode' theory, which assumes that the person most responsible for creating a company is the best one to run it—and that the world itself benefits from such people. Zuckerberg, of course, is an iconic founder. But the trial is revealing a narrative beyond the FTC's legal argument about anticompetitive acquisitions: Zuckerberg's penchant for snuffing out founders to advance his own goals. Of course, sometimes founders are well advised to take the money and run. Consider the case of Clubhouse, the audio-based social networking product that exploded during the pandemic. Its founders, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, fended off multiple suitors, including a rumored $4 billion offer from Twitter. But after the pandemic—and some poor strategic choices—the service deflated like a punctured balloon. In 2023 it laid off half of its staff. On the other hand, it's still around, and at least in one of its recent town halls, Davison still seemed to be having fun. One question that Mark Zuckerberg did not have to answer during his testimony was how he viewed his own transition from prey to predator. But I did pose that question to him during my book research. We were discussing the mental anguish he suffered during the 2006 crisis. Zuckerberg told me that he often advises young founders not to give in to pressure. This advice, of course, was not offered to those running companies he wanted to buy. So I asked him directly—given his lesson from the Yahoo experience, did Systrom and Krieger make a mistake by selling to him? There was a long pause, not an uncommon phenomenon when Zuckerberg considers a question where a candid answer might put him in a damning position. Finally he gave a response that dodged the issue, saying that Instagram could never have reached its heights without Facebook's support. He said pretty much the same thing in court this month. On a legal basis, Meta will not be judged on how he bought off the dreams of founders, but whether he gamed the marketplace through his purchases. No judge will rule on the calculus of selling off a dream. In Kevin Systrom's testimony, he opined that Zuckerberg denied resources to Instagram in part out of jealousy. The photo-sharing app, which he didn't invent, was growing faster than Facebook's blue app, a Mark Zuckerberg Production. When reporting Facebook: The Inside Story, I became familiar with this tension and put it to Zuckerberg: Was he in fact jealous of the Instagram team? 'Jealous…' he repeated. Yes, I said. And that you would prefer growth of Facebook's Blue app to Instagram's? He said no, and explained to me how he thought about it. Early on … it made sense to leave the founders alone and let them build their best products. 'That was incredibly successful,' he says. 'And it made sense for the first five years. But now we're at the point where all the products are big and important. I don't want to build just multiple versions of the same product. We should have a more coherent and integrated product strategy.' And if that meant losing founders, so be it. 'I can understand if you're an entrepreneur who built one of those things and had awesome success, you'd wake up and say, 'Okay, I'm proud of what I did, but this isn't for me going forward.' That's how I see it, and we're going in the right direction.' Those close to Kevin Systrom, though, believe that had Zuckerberg not asserted control, he would have remained at Instagram for 20 more years. Jim asks, 'What was it like interviewing some of the pioneers of modern-day computing for Hackers ?' Thanks for the question, Jim. You are asking me to access the feelings I had over 40 years ago when I was talking first-hand to people who are now legends. But in the circles I traveled they were virtually unknown, even computer science pioneers like Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy. And to my knowledge no reporter had documented the world of MIT hackers, who pretty much invented computer culture. I do recall as the interviews accumulated, I came to realize that the story I was telling was significant and would have continuing relevance. Also, some of them outright stretched my mind. These people were so interesting that after the book was published I kept talking to computer folk. I still am. Submit your questions in the comments below, or send an email to mail@ Write ASK LEVY in the subject line. End Times Chronicle The Trump Administration pulls the plug on "environmental justice.' Happy Earth Day! Last but Not Least Who is DOGE? The US government isn't saying. Whoever DOGE is, it has access to a LOT of health agencies. Google's more secure messaging system could make scams more likely. Gen Z'ers are using an app that's Airbnb for the old clothes in their closets. Don't miss future subscriber-only editions of this column. Subscribe to WIRED (50% off for Plaintext readers) today.
WIRED
18-04-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Meta's Monopoly Made It a Fair-Weather Friend
Apr 18, 2025 10:00 AM As the FTC trial has shown, a lack of competition allowed the company to shift its focus away from users—and toward its bottom line. Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph:This week, Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in an antitrust trial that could result in the breakup of Meta's social networking empire. It might be years before the nearly 3 billion users of the company's flagship app Facebook—known internally as the Blue app—learn the fate of the service they still use, despite the constant obituaries. (For the record, two years ago, Tom Alison, who heads the service, issued a statement affirming 'Facebook is not dead nor dying.') But with all the hubbub surrounding the trial, Facebook users might have missed the most significant news about Blue in years. On March 27, 2025, the 21-year-old company quietly announced a new feature on its mobile app: an option that would give users the novel experience of seeing their friends' content on Facebook . Finally, there was an alternative to a news feed overwhelmed with garbage, gossip, and influencer videos that people don't necessarily ask for but can't resist clicking on and then feeling bad about. By locating and selecting the Friends tab, your feed will populate exclusively with posts from people you know in real life and that you have chosen to connect with. You might even call it a social app. Imagine! 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 company's explanation is telling. 'Over the years, Facebook evolved to meet changing needs...' read the press release, 'but the magic of friends has fallen away.' I marvel at the passive voice. Meta's valuation is over a trillion. It has connected nearly half of humanity—all because of the power of people wanting to keep up with friends and family. And somehow, the company's core purpose of connecting friends just … fell away? Did the thousands of engineers, designers, marketers, and managers working on Facebook just wake one day and say, 'Hey, has anyone seen the stuff that's the very reason we are a company ?' No, this didn't just happen. Consider that, in that 2023 press release about Facebook not being dead, Alison listed the priorities for the app that year, including 'artificial intelligence, messaging, creators and monetization.' Not a word about boosting friend content, even though Meta executives knew that people wanted to see just that. It came out in court that for years Zuckerberg has been aware that his users crave hearing more from their friends. A Meta survey in 2020 found that 61 percent of users wanted more friend posts, and 66 percent wanted to see a wider diversity of posts among their friends. A year later, another survey reported that three out of the top four 'pain points' on Facebook were due to what the Federal Trade Commission called 'reduced investment in friends and family sharing.' Here's one explanation for this. Content from influencers, political activists, and faux news organizations is more profitable and keeps people on the service longer. Misinformation from a stranger is worth more to Meta than family updates and travel photos from friends. Those don't usually go viral. That's why, when Alison wrote about AI, he didn't mean using it to find what your friends are saying but to connect you with creators who are posting to boost their own wallets, with the help of Facebook monetization. On the stand, Zuckerberg offered a different explanation for the change: People began sharing on messaging apps instead of social platforms. But could it be that the reason that they stopped sharing on Facebook was that all those toxic posts from strangers made the platform unpleasant? Zuckerberg was slippery when it came to admitting that he bought Instagram and WhatsApp to eliminate competition—a key issue in the trial. But he was frank in acknowledging that the mission of the company has veered dramatically from the original feel-good crusade to connect humans. It's now as much an entertainment company as a social network, he says. A chart shared by Meta showed that entertainment had overwhelmed social content. In 2025, Facebook users spent only 17 percent of their time looking at content shared from friends. That's not because they prefer to read stuff from influencers and anger-boosters—remember, Meta's own surveys show that users are dying to see stuff from people they know. Yet Zuckerberg matter-of-factly noted that when it comes to friend content, 'That part of what we do hasn't really grown.' Again, the passive voice! Given the hunger people have to see friend posts, one might expect that the skills of Meta's talented workforce would be employed to maximize the value of human connections. For many years, it was. In the early 2010s, I was frequently called to Mark Zuckerberg's conference room, dubbed the Aquarium, to see some interesting project meant to increase the value of the social network. Some of those projects didn't work out—remember graph search?—but they were honest attempts at fulfilling the company mission. As the decade progressed, the social aspect of Facebook became less of a priority for Zuckerberg, and his passion shifted to virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Here's the link to the antitrust case: Meta was able to shift to entertainment because it had locked in billions of customers who originally joined the platform to be in touch with their friends. Without worrying about competition, Meta could then turn the focus toward content from strangers. When Meta copies a feature like Reels from a rival like TikTok, its built-in audience will consume it, even if the originals do it better. The company was able to get 300 million users on Threads not because its Twitter clone was particularly great but because it could easily shift its Instagram audience to the new service. Its biggest innovations on its social apps in recent years aren't directed at improving the experience for users but at delivering content from strangers that compels you to click or becoming more efficient in serving personalized ads. Meta's gold standard is not a post about your cousin having a baby but some viral dispatch from an influencer or pundit, whether or not it makes you feel bad about yourself or appeals to some prurient instinct. In another world I might be able to move my social network to another app that focuses more on preserving 'the magic of friends.' But not in this world. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the outcome of this trial will be. But I did write a book about Facebook and spent considerable time on how and why the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp. It was clear from my reporting—and internal emails now confirm—that in 2012, Zuckerberg thought Instagram was a competitive threat, and he forced the issue by offering to buy it for $1 billion when the company was worth only half that. I can sympathize with Meta's argument that it may be unfair to roll back a merger that the government originally approved—but I found out that at the time, one of the five FTC commissioners wanted to pause the deal and take its investigation to the next stage. He was unable to convince the others, and the deal went through. The WhatsApp founders just plain didn't want to sell their company. But Zuckerberg's spyware operation determined that WhatApp's growth was a threat, and his offers kept getting larger until they reached the absurd amount of $19 billion for a tiny company with miniscule revenue. 'Mark Zuckerberg checkmated us,' cofounder Brian Acton told me. 'When a guy shows up with a suitcase of money, you have to say yes; you have to make the rational choice.' (Acton came to regret the move. 'That is my crime,' he told me.) When a company dared not sell to Zuckerberg he would make good on threats to openly copy its product. While wooing Snap's Evan Spiegel, Zuckerberg mentioned he was thinking of doing a similar project named Poke. Snap refused the offer and Zuckerberg soon emailed Spiegel a message: 'I hope you enjoy Poke.' (Facebook's clone flopped.) I'll leave the remedy for all this to Judge James Boasberg—or Donald Trump, who may pull the plug on the whole operation if he feels like it. (It's good to be king.) In the interim, I've been using the Friends tab, and my feed is much better. The only problem is that so few of my 2,000 friends post on Facebook. They're seeking magic elsewhere.
WIRED
11-04-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Where Were Big Tech's CEOs on Tariffs?
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.
WIRED
04-04-2025
- Business
- WIRED
President Trump's War on ‘Information Silos' Is Bad News for Your Personal Data
Apr 4, 2025 10:00 AM Donald Trump's March 20 executive order aims to eliminate data silos. It could undermine privacy in the process. US President Donald Trump signs an executive order during a US ambassadors meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, March 25, 2025. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph:Dizzied by an accumulated pileup of busted norms, you might have missed a presidential executive order issued on March 20. It's called, 'Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.' It basically gives the federal government the authority to consolidate all the unclassified materials from different government databases. Compared to eviscerating life-sustaining agencies in the name of fighting waste and fraud, it might seem like a relatively minor action. In any case, the order was overshadowed by Signalgate. But it's worth a look. 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. At first glance, the order seems reasonable. Both noun and verb, the very word silo evokes waste. Isolating information in silos squanders the benefits of pooled data. When you silo knowledge, there's a danger that decisions will be made with incomplete information. Sometimes expensive projects are needlessly duplicated, as teams are unaware that the same work is being done elsewhere in the enterprise. Business school lecturers feast on tales where corporate silos have led to disaster. If only the right hand knew what the left was doing! More to the point, if you are going to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, there's a clear benefit to smashing silos. For instance, what if a real estate company told lenders and insurers that a property was worth a certain amount, but reported what were 'clearly…fraudulent valuations,' according to a New York Supreme Court judge. If investigative reporters and prosecutors could pry those figures out of the silos, they might expose such skulduggery, even if the perpetrator wound up escaping consequences. But before we declare war on silos, hold on. When it comes to sensitive personal data, especially data that's held by the government, silos serve a purpose. One obvious reason: privacy. Certain kinds of information, like medical files and tax returns, are justifiably regarded as sacrosanct—too private to merge with other records. The law provides special protections that limit who can access that information. But this order could force agencies to hand it over to any federal official the president chooses. Then there's the Big Brother argument—privacy experts are justifiably concerned that the government could consolidate all the information about someone in a detailed dossier, which would itself be a privacy violation. 'A foundational premise of privacy protection for any level of government is that data can only be collected for a specific, lawful, identifiable purpose and then used only for that lawful purpose, not treated as essentially a piggy bank of data that the federal government can come back to whenever it wants,' says John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. There are practical reasons for silos as well. Fulfilling its mission to extract tax revenue from all sources subject to taxes, the IRS provides a payment option for incomes derived from, well, crookery. The information is siloed from other government sources like the Department of Justice, which might love to go on fishing expeditions to guess who is raking in bucks without revealing where the loot came from. Likewise, those not in the country legally commonly pay their taxes, funneling billions of dollars to the feds, even though many of those immigrants can't access services or collect social security. If the silo were busted open, forget about collecting those taxes. Another example: the census. By law, that information is siloed, because if it were not, people would be reluctant to cooperate and the whole effort might be compromised. (While tax and medical data is considered confidential, the order encourages agency heads to reexamine information access regulations.) Want another reason? Spilling data out of silos and consolidating it into a centralized database provides an irresistible honeypot for hackers, thieves, and enemy states. The federal government doesn't have a great record of protecting sensitive information of late. Trump's order does state that consolidation must be 'consistent with applicable law.' On its face, the order seems at odds with the 1974 Privacy Act, which specifically limits what it calls 'computer matching.' But the order also says that it supersedes any 'regulation subject to direct Presidential rulemaking authority.' This president considers that a very broad category. Also, as evidenced by multiple court rulings, Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been less than meticulous in respecting current law. In more than one example, current agency officials have cited legal barriers to block DOGE's access to information. As a result, they were placed on leave, replaced by those who were willing to fling open the silos. In addition, on March 25, Trump issued another executive order that dictated that the Treasury Department should have access to other government databases. As legal justification, it cited an obscure passage in the 1974 law that allowed federal computer matching in limited circumstances. Perhaps this loophole will be broadened to justify the massive consolidation envisioned in the silo executive order next. Oh, and the March 20 order also gives the federal government 'unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding, including, as appropriate, data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases.' That seems to mean that not only will the silos between federal and state data be compromised, but the government could get access to some information in private hands too. While DOGE wasn't mentioned in the March 20 executive order, getting access to personal information has been an obsession of the so-called agency since day one. The order that repurposed USDS and established DOGE mandated that all agency heads 'ensure USDS has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.' The question was whether this need arose from a desire for genuine reform or something darker. Apparently US district judge Ellen Lipton Hollander holds the latter view. On the same day that the president signed the executive order on silos, she signed a temporary restraining order on DOGE's attempt to get access to identifiable social security records. 'The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,' she wrote in her decision, concluding that DOGE was intruding into the personal affairs of millions of Americans without justification. Note that her order involved just a single agency—a mere fishing pole compared to the commercial seafood operation that could happen if social security records were consolidated with IRS data, unemployment information, military, VA, and countless others. I'm not condemning efficiency when it comes to government operations, and I certainly don't condone fraud and waste. Of course, the US government should do better. But DOGE isn't operating as if efficiency were job one, even though its actual title contains the word. In covering tech companies, I often hear boasts that the process of upgrading an existing product was like 'rebuilding a plane in mid-air.' But when the vehicle in question is carrying live passengers, every move must be done with extreme caution, because a mistake means catastrophe. Both President Trump and DOGE seem happy to fly the plane into a mountain, figuring they can pick up the pieces later. Compared to some of the administration's actions involving pandemic responses, nuclear safety, and social security support, the March 20 executive order on information silos might seem like small beer. But if this order is followed aggressively, we could lose the accuracy of our databases, a good bit of our revenues, and above all, much of our privacy. We're going to miss those silos.
