The falling out between President Trump and Elon Musk is just the latest reminder that the relationship between the new White House and the titans of technology has turned out to be complicated.
The CEO of Tesla (TSLA) was among several big names from Silicon Valley awarded prime seats for the president’s Jan. 20 Capitol inauguration, alongside Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, Amazon (AMZN) chair Jeff Bezos, and Google (GOOG) CEO Sundar Pichai.
In the five months since, the president has either confronted all of their companies in court or applied pressure on those firms with his own words.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, center, seen behind US President Donald Trump and US Vice President JD Vance after the two were sworn into office at an inauguration ceremony in the rotunda of the United States Capitol on Jan. 20. (Photo by Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images) ·Pool via Getty Images
Musk and Trump made their break official last week in a series of social media posts that featured insults and threats hurled by both men.
The other executives and their companies had already been grappling with a tougher-than-expected stance on their industry.
Zuckerberg, for example, was not able to convince Trump to stop an antitrust trial against Meta from going forward this spring.
The president has since threatened Cook’s Apple with 25% duties on overseas-made iPhones and criticized the iPhone maker’s ramped-up production in India. Meanwhile, the company is defending against an antitrust lawsuit led by the Justice Department, filed during President Joe Biden’s administration.
Trump’s Justice Department has also pushed ahead with a Biden-era recommendation for a judge to break up Pichai’s Google empire.
Trump even called Bezos to complain about Amazon after it was reported that the online retail giant was considering displaying the cost of tariffs next to prices on its site. Trump said Bezos “solved the problem very quickly.”
Mark Zuckerberg, left, Jeff Bezos, middle, Sundar Pichai, second from right, and Elon Musk attend the Inauguration of Donald Trump in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 20 in Washington. (Photo by Julia Demaree Nikhinson – Pool/Getty Images) ·Pool via Getty Images
Yet Amazon still faces a lawsuit from Trump’s Federal Trade Commission that is due to start in February 2027.
The FTC, which brought the case during Biden’s term in office, told a judge in the spring that it needed to push the original October 2026 trial date due to Amazon’s litigation delays.
One of the biggest questions facing the tech world as Trump took office was how aggressive Trump’s antitrust enforcers would be following four years of a Biden administration marked by legal fights with many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names.
By sustaining many of these cases and probes against Big Tech, Trump has parted ways with traditional Republican-style enforcement, legal experts say.
“This isn’t the Bush administration,” Trump’s FTC chair Andrew Ferguson told a group of American CEOs this spring in Washington, D.C., referring to one of the weakest US antitrust enforcement periods in modern history.
Case Western Reserve University School of Law professor Anat Alon-Beck expects the Trump administration will continue to rein in Big Tech, especially given bipartisan support for the idea that Big Tech currently has too much power.
There have been some positive developments for the tech firms too. Big Tech has gained the benefit of a relaxed regulatory environment, especially in the industry of artificial intelligence, making fundraising and complying with securities laws easier.
In an executive order titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” the president rescinded Biden’s executive order on AI safety and directed federal agencies to remove regulatory obstacles to US global AI dominance.
“So they have to take what they can get from the current administration,” Alon-Beck said.
One tech giant that does have an early win from Trump is Microsoft. President Trump’s antitrust cops ended what had become an uphill government effort to unwind Microsoft’s (MSFT) $69 billion acquisition of video game maker Activision Blizzard that also began during the Biden administration.
One tech giant that does have an early win from Trump is Microsoft. Photo: REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer/File Photo ·REUTERS / Reuters
The decision came when the FTC voluntarily dropped a lawsuit that Biden’s FTC boss, Lina Khan, first filed against the tie-up in December 2022.
But Microsoft may not emerge unscathed, either.
Bloomberg has reported that Trump officials at the FTC are also broadening a probe into Microsoft and its relationship with AI upstart OpenAI (OPAI.PVT).
The probe was first launched by Khan, a key architect of a new movement seeking to expand the legal theories that can give rise to antitrust claims.
In June of last year, multiple news organizations reported that the probe also involved a DOJ investigation into chipmaker Nvidia’s (NVDA) competitive conduct. The probe was to address concerns over the company’s dominance in the market for microprocessors that power AI.
The Trump administration has not indicated it has dropped the investigation. And in April, Nvidia said in a regulatory filing that the president had kept in place Biden’s export restrictions on the company’s H20 AI chips to China.
As for Musk, Trump this past weekend said he had no desire to repair the relationship, which he said was over.
President Donald Trump, right, speaks during a news conference with Elon Musk in the Oval Office of the White House, on May 30. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
He warned there would be “serious consequences” if Musk financed candidates to run against Republicans who voted in favor of the president’s domestic policy bill.
But on Monday, Trump made some conciliatory comments about Musk and Tesla.
“I’d have no problem with it,” Trump said at a White House event on Monday when asked if he would be willing to speak with Musk. “I’d imagine he wants to speak with me.” He added, “I wish him well, very well actually.”
The Tesla CEO has also conceded that he regrets some of his social media posts about Trump, saying on Wednesday that they “went too far”.
Wedbush technology analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note on Monday that he doesn’t expect Trump and Musk to fully patch their soured relationship but would not be surprised if it improved in the months ahead.
At the end of the day, Ives wrote, “Trump needs Musk to stay close to the Republican party and Musk needs Trump for many reasons,” including a federal framework for autonomous vehicles.
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