Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Bros. Silicon Valley’s fraternity was full-throated in its support of Trump this election cycle, after quietly backing him in past years. Besides Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and others went all in, and may be rewarded in kind once the next administration is in place.

➘ BREAK THINGS: EOs. Joe Biden’s executive orders, including those setting up AI guardrails, are at risk under the new White House. That could include defunding the nascent AI Safety Institute and the US pulling out of global regulatory efforts on the technology.

Elon Musk is tech’s big winner in US election

THE SCENE

With Republican control of the White House, the Senate, and possibly the House, Elon Musk will likely be a key beneficiary of that sweeping victory. And the next four years could turn him into something much bigger than he is today, a government-backed industrial titan with few equivalents in American history.

Here are some of the ways his business endeavors could benefit from US policy under Donald Trump.

SpaceX: Musk’s rocket company is already the most important contractor for NASA — a relationship that is key for SpaceX’s success. When NASA orders a rocket from the company, it also gets to sell any extra payload space to private-sector customers.

It also allows SpaceX to continue to populate the low earth orbit with Starlink satellites that are quickly changing the way people around the world connect to the internet, including Ukrainians who have relied on them during the war against Russia.

A recent Wall Street Journal story that reported Musk’s ties to Vladimir Putin threatened SpaceX’s commercial ties to the US government, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson saying at a Semafor event that the allegations should be investigated. That is less likely to happen under Trump.

Under President Joe Biden, NASA also at times seemed like it was bending over backwards to work with SpaceX rivals like Boeing and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, which are light years behind SpaceX. NASA’s next administrator will likely look to favor Musk.

Tesla: Musk’s electric car company is facing a potential threat from cheaper Chinese rivals. Tariffs, Trump’s favorite economic policy, could make those Chinese competitors unaffordable in the US, sparing Tesla.

The other thing Trump could do to help Tesla is end US subsidies for EVs. Tesla has taken plenty of government money and that was crucial for its growth, but it doesn’t need them anymore. Tesla, once more of a luxury vehicle, is now a price-conscious choice for EV buyers. Ending subsidies would hurt Tesla’s competitors.

Tesla has also been at war with The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over the company’s use of driver assistance technology. It’s a safe bet that, at least for the next four years, regulators will not stand in Tesla’s way. The company still needs to get the technology right. If its robotaxis harm passengers or pedestrians, the project would be derailed. But a successful launch of autonomous cars would change the regulatory environment forever.

xAI: Musk wants to win the race to artificial general intelligence, something that will likely require massive industrial efforts. xAI’s data center in Memphis became the first to connect 100,000 graphics processors together. In the process, Musk drew the ire of environmental regulators by connecting gas generators to produce enough power for the complex.

Most AI companies are asking state and federal officials for more energy resources and they want taxpayer funds to help modernize the country’s energy grid. Now, xAI could get special treatment on that hunt.

The incoming Trump administration is also on friendlier terms with Gulf nations like the United Arab Emirates, which has been chomping at the bit to build AI data centers in its backyard.

Musk would need a green light from US regulators to build the most advanced AI models there, which will likely be easier in the next White House after reluctance from Biden officials worried about the region’s ties to China. The UAE has been pumping out nuclear power plants and would gladly subsidize the gargantuan energy bills associated with training and running frontier AI models.

Neuralink: Musk’s brain implant company has received FDA clearance to run tests on humans. So far, those tests have been successful, giving two disabled patients the ability to use computers and play videogames with their brains.

It’s possible the head of the FDA will be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Trump ally whose own brain was infested by a worm, leaving him with what he says was temporary memory loss.

Musk’s technology could one day be used to help people like Kennedy gain back brain function lost due to disease and injury. If Kennedy, an FDA critic, is at the helm, he could help speed up regulatory approvals for Neuralink.

It’s easy to see X as a kind of loss leader for the rest of Musk’s government-linked businesses, an investment in politics and in helping the new president. But X is also positioned to become — with Trump’s help — a central media platform, particularly for right-leaning American audiences who helped build Fox Corp. into a profitable juggernaut.

X also turned out to be the more accurate depiction of reality. Under Musk’s stewardship, X has relaxed content moderation standards and allowed some unsavory characters back on to the platform. There are obvious downsides to that strategy, but the lack of censorship also gives us a more accurate representation of the world as it actually is.

Costs are also down, and at least some advertisers who fled the crudeness and racial provocation may make their way back to the platform. Musk’s xAI benefits from data on X and can use it as a sales channel for AI chatbots and services. All of that corporate synergy and political relevance may restore X as a business in its own right.

The left has been fleeing X, preferring other platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky or Threads. But those platforms are starting to look like out-of-touch, urban bubbles of social media.

Musk wasn’t tech’s only winner from the US elections. TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, may finally get a bit of a reprieve from Washington pressure under a Trump administration. The president-elect did an about face this summer and joined the video platform, and also questioned congressional efforts to ban it — a move he first made during his last time in the White House.

Trump’s reversal could help TikTok, which is now fighting in the courts against legislation signed by Biden that forces ByteDance to divest the US operations of the app or risk being banned. Critics say it poses a national security risk because of its Chinese ownership, which the platform has pushed back against.

The crypto industry is also poised to get a Washington break. The next chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has clashed with Coinbase and others under Biden, will likely go soft on digital-asset companies and approve more related products.

They will also have more support in Congress, including from incoming freshman Senator Bernie Moreno, who won against industry critic and Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Bitcoin hit a record high above $75,000 Tuesday night as Trump’s victory became apparent.

Tim Cook can brush off his political skills. The Apple CEO, who supports left-leaning causes, deftly handled Trump the last time he was president amid his trade war with China. While thousands of Chinese imports were subject to tariffs, Apple got exceptions for the iPhone, the iPad, and later, the Apple Watch.

Apple has also had some success diversifying its supply chain over the last four years.

It’s a different story on the other side of the Atlantic. Bloomberg reported the iPhone maker will be the first company to face a fine under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which targets big tech companies that are dubbed as “gatekeepers.” For Apple, its App Store is once again in the crosshairs, after being hit with a $2 billion fine in March for allegedly violating the EU’s competition rules.

The most recent penalty under the DMA could come before European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager leaves her post this month, which would be a fitting end to her tenure as a thorn in Big Tech’s side.

Aaru, the AI polling company I wrote about in September, shared some of its predictions ahead of yesterday’s election. Aaru polls “AI agents” derived from census data instead of real people. Essentially, it creates characters and feeds them a news diet based on their demographic and then asks them how they’ll vote.

It’s a fascinating idea. But like surveys of real people, Aaru got most of its predictions wrong. I asked one of its founders, Cameron Fink, for his thoughts. Besides his response below, he also pointed out that his prediction of Nebraska was almost perfect.

If you’re going to pay for polling data that gets the wrong result, you might as well use AI and save money. While surveying real people seems to be getting less accurate over time, the question is whether AI polling will improve.

While Trump could supercharge certain AI players like xAI, and possibly punish others, the UK is still struggling to come up with its own innovation policies. Some entrepreneurs and public officials there argued Britain needs a major overhaul of its economy, like modernizing Britain’s ailing rail network, to take advantage of technological advances, Semafor’s Mizy Clifton reported from London.

That was the big takeaway from a recent private gathering of Labour party activists and industry experts. One of the biggest barriers, panelists agreed, is the lack of a culture of entrepreneurship, particularly on university campuses beyond the Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge, and London.

“We might not necessarily like the politics or the personalities of all the great examples of entrepreneurs, and nor should we engage with them uncritically, but these figures are already planting the seeds of future businesses in the minds of millions of people,” said Labour MP and Chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee Chi Onwurah.

Donald Trump’s reelection as US president sets up a high-stakes test of whether the energy transition will grind to a halt, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell wrote.

The next four years will likely see the locus of climate action in the US revert to state and local governments, and to business leaders who remain under tremendous pressure.