Big Tech is kissing the ring of President Donald Trump after having a contentious relationship with him in his first term.
That schmoozing was on display at Trump’s inauguration as the likes of Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google (GOOG) CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook snatched better seats at the event than incoming cabinet members.
“I do think that in a lot of these cases, these are companies that had something that they had to fix. They had problems and potential risk that was out there. And I think they were kind of coming and saying, listen, we’re willing to talk to you. We’re willing to engage and at some level,” Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince told Yahoo Finance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The tech veteran didn’t attend the inauguration but added there has been “kind of the war on tech” that hobbled the industry.
“The tech industry is very much like one of the US battleships. It is an incredibly powerful force for the United States, around the rest of the world,” he said. “I think if we actually start investing in tech, and not just the big companies, but startups, little tech, all of the different organizations that are out there, that’s a huge advantage that the US has.”
Cybersecurity stocks have performed relatively well since Donald Trump’s election win in early November.
Cloudflare has outperformed its peer group, rising about 28% since Election Day. Fortinet (FTNT) is up 18%. ZScaler (ZS) is up 3%, while Palo Alto Networks (PANW) has shed 3%.
The optimism could be traced to several factors.
For one, investment pros say Trump will be friendly to the cybersecurity business model. Recall that in September 2018, Trump signed off on the National Cyber Strategy. The doctrine aimed to encourage government and private investment in cybersecurity infrastructure. It also sought to bolster domestic innovation in the sector.
Second, a mega trend such as AI and potentially looser regulations around dealmaking under Trump may spur profits and valuations on the cybersecurity stocks.
“We believe the cyber security sector will have a robust 2025 and should be one of the strongest sub-sector with our view cyber security could be up 30%+ over the next year led by accelerated cloud and AI growth along with M&A we expect to be very active in this tech area,” Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives said.
And three, a more digital-first world is simply getting riskier by the day, pointed out the World Economic Forum in its 2025 global cybersecurity outlook report. With that comes the need to bolster cybersecurity tools at companies and governments.
