2025: The Year Big Tech Bent the Knee to Trump

Over the past two decades, people have congregated online to celebrate and mourn the end of another year. Until recently, this ritual was conducted on platforms that presented themselves as broadly embodying liberal values. But Donald Trump’s return to office has changed all that. For many critics, 2025 is the year Big Tech fully bent the knee and began openly appeasing and collaborating with the radical right.

Luckily, there remains ample opportunity to turn the tide.

To understand the nature of Big Tech’s deference to the right, we need to review a little history. This will not only help us understand Silicon Valley’s recent right-wing shift away from liberal politics, but also why it may not last beyond the reign of Trump.

The first decade of the 2000s was marked by the rise of the commercial internet and the entrenched dominance of several Big Tech giants: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. While it may sound miraculous today, for most of the 2000s, these corporations were widely seen as “hip” champions of human rights and social justice. Google’s original motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” made sense for a company viewed as a progressive alternative to the usual evil corporations portrayed in series like “Mr. Robot.” Companies like Twitter were seen as enabling the revolution in the Middle East while Facebook was praised for connecting the masses.

For critics during this period, the “Big Tech is progressive” image masked the predatory exploitation of the tech sector dating back to IBM and Microsoft. Yet within a matter of years, this facade came toppling down. The 2013 Snowden leaks exposed how Big Tech partners with the U.S. government to spy on the entire world, down to our every online interaction. In 2016, it was revealed that Trump’s presidential team hired a British consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, to suck data out of Facebook and run targeted ads in support of his campaign. While heavily over-hyped — there is no good evidence the tactic propelled Trump to victory — the episode provided a convenient scapegoat for why liberals lost to Trump, prompting The Guardian to declare 2016 “the year Facebook became the bad guy.” The scope of distrust widened in 2017, deemed the year “the world turned on Silicon Valley,” thanks in large part to growing awareness about the monopoly power of tech giants.

In the following years, the right wing countered the left, arguing that Big Tech censors their voices and promotes liberal causes. A battle over how to hate Big Tech ensued, with its image mapped onto the mainstream liberal-progressive vs. extremist-right divide. This confused a lot of people: For two decades, Big Tech leaned to the “left” on issues of identity and liberal politics, so they were deemed “left” by mainstream voices, which generally ignore class war. But tech giants had always put profits over people. With the return of Trump, their allegiances to accumulation and power became apparent for all to see.

If 2017 was the year Americans turned against Big Tech, 2025 is the year it became Donald Trump’s plaything. The transition was quick: During Joe Biden’s tenure, the Democrats once again served Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, setting the stage for a resurgent Trump. In 2024, most tech capitalists spent more on Harris than Trump. On the right, Elon Musk tipped the donor scale to the right with his $260 million in donations to his preferred overlord in the White House.

Even before the election, tech executives were lining up to kiss the ring. In July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went full-on simp, calling Trump’s fist pump “badass” following the Pennsylvania assassination attempt. Amazon’s founder and executive chair, Jeff Bezos, once a critic of Trump, spiked an editorial endorsing Harris for president at his newspaper, The Washington Post. Apple CEO Tim Cook cozied up in hopes of assistance against European regulators. Musk went all in on MAGA. And those already in good standing, such as Palantir’s Peter Thiel and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, deepened their ties to Darth Trump.

After the election, several CEOs pumped millions into Trump’s inauguration, which famously spotted up-close seats for Zuckerberg, Bezos, Cook, Musk, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and its CEO, Sundar Pinchai. The spectacle repeated in September, when Trump hosted a dinner with leading tech CEOs, who lavished praise on their boss in the White House for his “pro-business” policies (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman) and “incredible leadership” (Bill Gates). Tech giants also contributed to Trump’s lavish $300 million White House ballroom.

What is new here is not Big Tech’s willingness to play ball with the right, which it navigated with success during the first Trump administration. Rather, it’s the willingness to openly embrace MAGA that has jarred the left.

During the first Trump administration, leading tech oligarchs publicly criticized Trump’s position on immigration and climate change. This time around, they are not only mute, but many of them are endorsing “anti-woke” politics. In January, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would sever ties with third-party fact-checkers (said to exhibit bias against the MAGA right), while Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, who once called himself “progressive,” described his company as “completely anti-woke.”

Even during Democratic administrations, Big Tech put profits over people and the planet. But the industry has completed a rightward shift that highlights three key points that should organize public understanding and action.

No. 1: Big Tech has become a force multiplier for an extremist administration. Trump’s deal with Palantir to build immigration software is poised to supercharge the Trump administration’s ability to implement mass deportations. The Department of Homeland Security has set up a task force to surveil the online activities of foreign students for “thought crimes” (such as opposing Israeli genocide) and target them for deportation. Students, staff and faculty at our universities are increasingly under surveillance, a phenomenon that increases conformity to authority and the status quo. This year, Trump negotiated American control over TikTok’s content moderation, giving billionaire backers like Ellison the capacity to shape the flow of information on the popular platform. Ellison, a Trump ally, and his son David are rapidly building a MAGA media empire that incorporates Paramount Global (which includes CBS, whose news operation is now run by pro-Israel extremist Bari Weiss) and, if they get their way, Warner Bros. Discovery (which includes HBO and CNN). 

Trump is also pushing to control the content of artificial intelligence models. In July, he issued an executive order, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government”, that would prevent the government from procuring “models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.” This month, he issued an executive order banning state-based AI laws that conflict with federal policy, setting the stage for the administration to impose its vision of AI on the tech ecosystem.

No. 2: The centrality of Big Tech to society is unprecedented, and it can no longer be treated as just another sector of the economy. As much as 92% of gross domestic product growth in the first half of 2025 came from AI and other tech-related spending, leaving just 0.1% growth outside of the tech sector (which would’ve been higher absent the AI boom). As of September, the “Ten Titans” of tech made up almost 40% of the S&P 500. Big Tech and AI are on everyone’s tongue, from young teens to the tech-unsavvy baby boomers. Because Big Tech chose to ally with the Trump administration, everyone is feeling it.

No. 3: Kissing the ring of Trump challenges the popular notion that corporations simply run the show. Trump flipped the script, making sure everyone understands he’s the boss. When the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, publicly criticized Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” in July, Trump threatened to cancel government contracts with Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and deport him. Although their relationship remains “fragile,” Musk responded by deleting some disparaging social media posts (e.g., suggesting Trump’s name was in the Epstein files) and issued a public statement of “regret” that his tweets “went too far.”

Back in January, Meta agreed to pay Trump $25 million for suspending his social media accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, riots. In August, Trump exempted Apple from a 100% semiconductor tariff after it announced a new $100 billion commitment to manufacturing in America, bringing its U.S. investment total to $600 billion over the next four years. Trump has also forced deals on tech giants like Nvidia and AMD, which agreed to pay the government 15% of their revenue from select chip sales to China. The Trump administration also obtained a 10% stake in the floundering chip giant Intel after calling for its CEO to resign.

Billionaire tech bros like Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, Sundar Pinchai and Satya Nadella come across as relatively nice nerds. They can feign concern for human rights even as they ruthlessly pursue market domination and wealth. Trump, by contrast, portrays himself as a brute: He says immigrants “are not humans, they’re animals,” calls African countries “shithole countries,” likens Somali immigrants to “garbage,” rambles on without a care, and so on. Musk aside, it’s hard to imagine many Silicon Valley leaders making such vile remarks.

It’s unlikely that tech giants prefer an unpredictable, vile authoritarian with a big ego and personal vendettas wielding power in the White House. Many of Trump’s policies are also antagonistic to Big Tech: He has slashed funding for scientific research and government science agencies, slapped $100,000 fees on foreign holders of H-1B visas (who comprise part of the skilled labor pool for tech), discouraged foreign researchers to join academia while pushing skilled Americans researchers to leave and is mindlessly politicizing timelines and expectations on entire fields of research through his “Genesis Mission” AI initiative. Democrats, by contrast, offer Silicon Valley predictability, stability, responsible statecraft and a humanitarian public image that arguably defangs the left.

It’s also true that Big Tech is not fully under the thumb of Trump. They do not capitulate to his every demand, and they are leaving enough wiggle room to pivot back to the Democrats.

Where does this leave us? Are we better off with a more openly right-wing Silicon Valley that takes the “mask off” than a successful “liberal” one that pushes fake humanitarianism?

To this, I think there are two important responses. First, shifts to the right do not help anyone. Remember when some people said, “Let’s hope Trump gets elected so that the people will wake up and oppose the system”? That didn’t work out. The same is true for Big Tech: Attacks on diversity, government support for right-wing censorship and media mergers, setting new and regressive legal precedents in the courts and the like not only hurt people in the short run, they institutionalize right-wing inertia into the future. We should oppose such moves at all costs.

Second, we should all recognize that Trump’s power is tenuous, and push the fight against Big Tech from the left. This includes weak liberal reforms. If we fail to challenge the norms of the past several decades, Democrats will come to the table and offer more of the same: a more pure capitalism (antitrust), mild regulations (AI safety measures, privacy laws) and some extra litigation. The digital ecosystem will still be a private, for-profit enterprise run by rich American billionaires.

But there is a more principled movement against Big Tech, capitalism and U.S. imperialism simmering under the surface. You can see it with the working-class rejection of Trump and the billionaire class. You can see it on social media, where anti-capitalist, anti-Big Tech videos are going viral.

Our task is to oppose the bipartisan, business-as-usual approach to Big Tech and generate a new vision for the digital economy. This could be something like a Digital Tech Deal that would democratize the means of computation and knowledge for all of humanity, in harmony with the planet. It will not be easy to materialize, but it’s absolutely essential.