Evaluating Trump's First Moves on Tech

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

From Executive Orders on AI and cryptocurrency to "ending federal censorship," President Donald Trump had a busy first week in the White House. I discussed the week's news with Damon Beres, a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the technology section. Beres wrote a piece reflecting on Trump's inauguration titled "Billions of People in the Palm of Trump’s Hand."

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

On Monday, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States of America, his second term in office. In his first week on the job, he's issued a slew of presidential actions and executive orders, issued pardons and commuted the sentences of January 6th rioters, even the most violent among them, attempted to fire inspector generals across federal agencies, reversed diversity initiatives across the federal government, and started his promised crackdown on immigrants. He's also been very busy on technology policy, which is where we'll focus today. With AI and crypto czar David Sacks at his side, Trump signed executive orders to advance new policies to promote those technologies.

David Sacks:

This is an executive order on AI. We're basically announcing the administration's policy to make America the world capital in artificial intelligence and to dominate and to lead the world in AI.

Donald Trump:

Do you want to say your name, your full name and serial number?

David Sacks:

Yeah. David Sacks, AI and crypto czar.

Donald Trump:

David is one of the greatest in the world of AI. Most respected, probably there is. So that should take us to the forefront, right?

David Sacks:

Absolutely. We got to [inaudible 00:01:30].

Justin Hendrix:

The AI executive order calls for the administration to formulate a new plan to, "Sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security." And it calls on federal agencies to roll back the provisions of the October, 2023 Biden administration executive order on the safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence.

David Sacks:

Yeah, this is the crypto EO, we're going to be forming an internal working group to make America the world capital on crypto under your leadership.

Donald Trump:

Which is really going up, right?

David Sacks:

Absolutely.

Justin Hendrix:

During his campaign, President Trump made various promises about crypto. Just before he was sworn in, he launched his own mean coin apparently hoping to turn a profit off of his inauguration. As he signed the executive orders on AI and crypto, he sounded like an investor.

Donald Trump:

You find them exciting? They might not be exciting, but we're going to make a lot of money for the country.

Justin Hendrix:

These executive orders weren't the only actions that Trump took this week on tech. On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison appeared at the White House with Trump to announce the creation of a joint AI infrastructure project called the Stargate.

Donald Trump:

These world leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate, so put that name down in your books because I think you're going to hear a lot about it in the future. A new American company that will invest $500 billion at least in AI infrastructure in the United States and very quickly moving very rapidly, creating over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately.

Justin Hendrix:

Trump promised to use emergency declarations to help clear the way for construction of the data center's promise under the joint venture.

Donald Trump:

I'm going to help a lot through emergency declarations because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built, so they have to produce a lot of electricity and we'll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants if they want. Or they'll build at the plant, the AI plant, they'll build energy generation and that will be incredible, but it's technology and artificial intelligence all made in the USA. Beginning immediately, Stargate will be building the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI, and this will include the construction of colossal data centers. Very, very massive structures. I was in the real estate business. These are big beautiful buildings.

Justin Hendrix:

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, standing in the White House at a lectern emblazoned with the presidential seal, made even bigger promises.

Masayoshi Son:

I think AGI is coming very, very soon. And then after that, that's not the goal. After that, artificial super intelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind would never ever have thought that we could solve. Well, this is the beginning of our golden age.

Justin Hendrix:

To talk about what happened this week in more detail, I'm joined by The Atlantic's Damon Beres.

Damon Beres:

Damon Beres, and I am a senior editor at The Atlantic overseeing technology coverage.

Justin Hendrix:

It's been a busy week for anybody who covers American politics and also for folks who cover tech policy and politics. Take me back to Monday. You wrote this piece now titled Billions of People in the Palm of Trump's Hand with this extraordinary set of images, these centibillionaires seated in front of the incoming cabinet at Donald Trump's inauguration.

Damon Beres:

I was stunned, honestly, to see these men, all of them are men, lined up right behind the actual members of Trump's family. We had Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, we had Sundar Pichai of Google, we had Jeff Bezos, we had Elon Musk, and we had Tim Cook of Apple, all of them seated directly behind Trump's family right there on stage. And I think it was a very symbolically important moment. It demonstrated as I wrote this, "Bending the knee" to this administration from these men who have behaved for so long as though they're above the fray, as though they answer to no one. They've been through all these sort of ineffectual congressional hearings, whatever, and here they are in a position of capitulation to the new President and it was very striking to me.

Justin Hendrix:

Your piece includes this extraordinary photo catching them all in a candid moment.

Damon Beres:

I love that photo. You have Elon Musk giving a double thumbs up. You have big smiles from everyone, which I think captures the mood of the moment. I think that these CEOs probably feel as though they have quite a lot to gain from cozying up to Trump. All of these companies have been under antitrust scrutiny of one sort or another. Trump in the past has said quite a lot about Meta, for example, and the ways in which Meta has suppressed right-wing viewpoints. He said at one point that he would throw Mark Zuckerberg in prison because of the sort of ways that he believes Meta to have controlled speech and suppressed Republican views and participated in this sort of conspiracy of government suppression of speech on Facebook during the COVID pandemic.

And so I think all of these men feel as though they have something to gain by cozying up to Trump, by demonstrating their fealty, for lack of a better way of putting it. Mark Zuckerberg, obviously, earlier this month, reoriented Meta's entire business, its sort of entire political premise around the idea that there would be more free speech on Meta, there would be less content moderation, they would get rid of fact-checkers in the United States, in essence bowing to this right-wing viewpoint. And so here he is on stage with Trump, and obviously, everyone is entitled to their political beliefs. I'm not sitting here saying that these men shouldn't have voted or supported whatever candidate I suppose they might have wanted to.

At the same time, there is something really remarkable and worth paying attention to happening here. All these guys gave ... Well, either these men individually or their companies gave a million dollars each to Trump's inauguration fund and now they're falling in line behind a president who many are rightfully concerned has these authoritarian tendencies. And there's cause for concern simply on that basis when you consider what is going to happen the next time there is a controversy about getting into an encrypted iPhone and maybe this time around it's not necessarily a terrorist in the way that maybe it had been in the past. But maybe the notion of a political enemy of the state will have changed. And who knows? I mean, not to sort of spin things out here, but the point is that these companies are extraordinarily powerful and it really felt necessary to zoom in on that snapshot of these guys on stage and memorialize it because I think this is a moment where things are going to shift.

And I think that lots of people have been interested in hearing again these sort of antitrust cases against these companies for a long time. A lot of people do believe that they represent monopoly power in various ways, that they do have a lot of control over the ways that people behave or not behave, live and conduct business and experience culture and entertainment and all these things. And I wonder now if we will see some kind of shift there, whether those cases go away. Maybe that's not likely, but maybe some kind of sweetheart deal is struck. Lina Khan has expressed some concern about that recently, and it's possible that not only will these tech powers further calcify in the Trump administration, but they may also shift politically to be more aligned with Trump. And all of that possibility is contained in this photograph and contained in that moment on Monday.

Justin Hendrix:

We haven't talked yet about Elon Musk, but of course he probably put the most money in the pot when it came to wanting Donald Trump to get elected, and at least at present appears to be reaping the biggest rewards directly in terms of his influence over politics, his installment into this capacity running the Department of Government Efficiency. I understand he's apparently going to keep an office in the White House complex according to some reports. What did we learn this week about Doge? There was an executive order essentially establishing Doge by implanting it in the US digital service that seems to have both made Doge official, made it real and also kind of clipped its ambitions a little bit. Is that your read?

Damon Beres:

So this week exactly as you said, this executive order put a little bit more definition to Doge, which until now has kind just been this notion that Elon Musk and that Vivek Ramaswamy were going to cut the fat in government and that sort of thing. As it turns out in the language of this executive order, it seems like the organization, at least again as articulated here, is meant to be more focused on IT, like technology, making government technology efficient and productive I think is what it says. In the meantime, there have been reports about Ramaswamy actually being out of this organization. So the ambition here as articulated in the executive order feels extremely different from the way that Musk and others have been talking about this thing.

At the same time, I think that there are still these concerns that actually we still don't really know what this thing is intended to be or what kind of power Elon Musk ultimately is going to have within the context of government, especially as you say, because of these reports that he's going to have an office in the White House or around the White House. And just because such a thing is said in the context of an EO, I don't know that that actually ends up being what happens in practice. So I think it's worth paying close attention to this and not just sort of saying, "Oh, okay, well the EO says it's going to be IT. I guess everything's fine." This is still, I think, very extraordinary and unusual, and we still have Elon Musk very close to Trump, very politically involved, and I don't think any of that changes just because of the executive order.

Justin Hendrix:

I think there's this weird sub-current on Bluesky where I spend a lot of time these days where folks want to kind of downplay or suggest that perhaps Doge won't be fully empowered or have legal authority or there'll be lots of roadblocks. I'm sure that's true in many ways. There's already litigation. There'll be various obstacles to executing the type of change that Elon Musk originally promised. I've seen an article in The Times today suggesting that perhaps 2 trillion goal they set out with, of course, they might want to walk that back a little bit. That would be an extraordinary sum, a third of the federal budget. Very difficult to imagine how they'd get there, but I feel like there's also so many things yet to be seen.

I mean, one of the reports that I recall came from Kevin Breuninger at CNBC back in November, this report that Marjorie Taylor Greene had been tapped to work with Doge, maybe a select subcommittee that would essentially work in tandem with Musk. So we'll see. It might be that Musk doesn't just have what's available to him in terms of power in the executive branch. He's also got a congressional subcommittee with subpoena power on speed dial.

Damon Beres:

I don't have any sort of new reporting along those lines or anything like that, but I do think that probably one way of experiencing the executive order is simply granting legitimacy to this idea and more builds from here. And exactly to your point, I mean Elon Musk already has a tremendous amount of influence over Republicans, over people who are loyal to Trump. Obviously he is very much in this game, but I think any step that further legitimizes him and his power within the context of an official government system is worth paying attention to for exactly that reason. And that's what this seems to do, even if the actual language of the is somewhat more narrow than the way it had been spoken of previously.

Justin Hendrix:

We have to talk about Stargate.

Damon Beres:

I love it. It makes me think of Star Wars like the missile defense system or whatever. It's like, yeah, the sci-fi is back. So this is very interesting. Once again, you have tech guys next to Donald Trump. The thing that's interesting about Stargate, I mean a lot is interesting here. It's not a federal program. This is a private enterprise. Worth stating that very clearly, I think that you have Trump essentially celebrating this huge deal between, well, many different companies, but most notably Oracle, Softbank and OpenAI. And the intention of this thing is to be this massive infrastructure build out for generative AI technology in the United States. And what's very striking to me about this is the extent to which it seems that Trump really kind of needs these tech guys rather than the other way around in certain respects.

Sam Altman has spoken of wanting this level of infrastructural build out, and he has spoken of doing it elsewhere in the world, not in the United States, and by essentially showing his proximity to this deal and making it happen here, I think Trump gets to play this as sort of an America First sort of victory, like a victory for his agenda. But the reality is that these technology companies have positioned themselves to really be calling the shots to a certain extent, it feels like. There has been so much written and talked about over the past couple of years about the extent to which these companies have wormed their way into policy conversations. The phrase regulatory capture comes up a lot.

This is a massive expenditure on technology and a technology that has a gigantic environmental footprint and a technology that so far has a lot of promise, but actually not a whole lot to show in terms of how it actually makes the everyday lives of Americans any better. And yet what Stargate is poised to do is have a $500 billion investment over the next few years for this build out. It's pretty crazy. There's a lot to say about it, but fundamentally it is a massive, massive technological build out that to me emphasizes the power of these AI companies at this moment, more so than it says anything flattering about the Trump administration or the ability for the government to attract this deal.

Justin Hendrix:

I did see a good amount of confusion I think among people about whether this was some kind of US government joint venture, about where that 100 billion was coming from. But of course, we know from The Post today that not only is that a hundred billion coming from the private sector, particularly SoftBank and its partners, but most of that money was already committed before Trump was president. It's not all new funding and the sort of promise to make it as much as 500 billion is ... Well, we'll see over the next four years. Masayoshi Son says, "We're going to do this within your term Mr. President, right in the time that you have in front of you."

Damon Beres:

Right. I mean, I think it just shows that these guys have a playbook for dealing with Trump right now. I mean, it's very savvy, I suppose. The mystery of Trump is sort of solved. I think people know how to talk to him and know how to treat him exactly as you were suggesting. The reality is that days before the end of Joe Biden's term, he signed an executive order that was specifically about advancing United States leadership and "artificial intelligence infrastructure." And that executive order would have itself opened up federal land for data center construction. And it's funny, Trump obviously has done a lot to criticize his predecessor and he has repealed this and that, that Joe Biden put into motion. But the reporter asked him about whether he would rescind this specific executive order and he said, "No, I wouldn't do that. That sounds to me like something I would like."

So the point is that this entire framework, this build out, this sort of the way in which the government is, I don't know, playing nice, at least with the AI industry. It's not a Trump thing. Trump did some of this in his first term, but the Biden administration very much has continued in the same vein so much of what has happened with generative AI. I mean the entirety of the sort of generative AI boom happened within the Biden administration, but all of this stuff has been in the works for a long time. So even just the framing of this as a Trump thing is actually kind of faulty.

Justin Hendrix:

You mentioned the Trump administration has gone ahead and rescinded Joe Biden's October 30th, 2023 executive order on AI. Of course, this was much heralded at the time, the kind of most significant step by the US federal government to address AI safety concerns, concerns about bias, concerns about possible misuse in a variety of different ways, including by the government itself. Almost seems like they're sort of dancing on the grave of Biden's executive order a little bit. This order to rescind, it came quickly. And then another executive order essentially instructing federal agencies not only to identify any policies that have been put into place under the Biden order, but to root them out, to understand how they had been implemented and to try to reverse every last little bit of policy and any effect that occurred under the Biden executive order.

Damon Beres:

This situation is very confusing to me, just to be honest about that. We published an article at The Atlantic just before the election, maybe you could put it in your show notes or something. But it was essentially about how the Biden administration in its AI policy had basically built on policies that were set in the first Trump administration and how in fact there was quite a lot of continuity between the two. And a lot of that article is dealing with this question of like, is he actually going to pull this executive order when he gets into office? And here we are. I think there's a lot of confusion about what this might all mean in practice. I think certainly there's a little bit of confusion about what comes next from Trump in terms of his own AI policy. I do think that fundamentally, dispositionally, it seems as though Trump wants to reduce the guardrails, pull out all the stops. He wants this sort of build, build, build, we're racing against China thing to come into effect.

The thing that probably is ... I mean one of the aspects that I know had been irksome to Trump and some of his allies was exactly as you said, there was this language around bias language that within the Biden executive order might be viewed as woke or whatever. And I think that perhaps maybe that was of issue. The sad reality is of all the things that are kind of concrete about AI more broadly, not just generative AI, but AI, we actually know quite a lot about the reality that they do perpetuate bias and that there are these issues in these systems. And so it was like, oh, well, that was something that the Biden administration kind of got right. And of course that would be a thing that is targeted by the Trump administration. So it's a bit of a mess. It's a very interesting move again, considering the sort of continuity that had existed between these administrations. So we'll see. But I think it's certainly the case that we're in this sort of no holds barred like build moment in any case.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, if you're Marc Andreessen or one of these other Silicon Valley characters who got behind Trump because he wanted to see him essentially clear the path for investments in artificial intelligence and crypto, you're certainly getting what you paid for. And this is the GOP platform. Get rid of that Biden order. It hinders AI innovation. It imposes radical left-wing ideas on its development. So not a surprise. There's also an executive order setting up a president's council of advisors on science and technology. Also, this order on restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship. This one could have some teeth.

Damon Beres:

Yes, this is interesting to me in the context actually, some of what we were talking about with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta earlier in the show, this idea that the government has exerted pressure on platforms to police speech. Probably, again, the most famous example would be the Biden administration, the height of the COVID pandemic and trying to clamp down on misinformation, et cetera. There's a lot that's complicated here. I think that actually, dispositionally my point of view is sort of, yeah, just taken at the basic level, I suppose it doesn't seem right that the government should be interfering in what people can and can't say on social media platforms. That seems wrong. What about our First Amendment rights, et cetera? And then you remember, well, people actually kind of can say whatever they want to say on social media platforms. Then you remember, oh, they're private companies and they have a ton of unregulated power in terms of how we communicate with one another. And you don't really have a First Amendment to publish whatever you want on Facebook. They are allowed to moderate speech on their platform.

And so right, with this executive order, I think that Trump is giving these platforms permission to step back from content moderation. Meta's already said it's doing that. Obviously X is already doing that under Elon Musk. A lot of people are concerned about the idea that misinformation is going to flow sort of unencumbered now that the sort of worm is turning on content moderation, including in the context of this executive order. Obviously content moderation and "controlling speech" on these platforms is often put to the purpose of removing hate speech and child porn and things like that. So it's not like content moderation doesn't exist for a good reason. So it's going to be very interesting to see what the ultimate impact of this order is. An executive order is just an executive order. How is this going to be codified into law, et cetera? I don't know. But the fact of the matter is, I think that it very clearly demonstrates a shift in the culture away from moderation, away from platform responsibility and probably sends us back to something a little bit more like a Wild West era of the internet.

Justin Hendrix:

We may see more news out of this in the future. The attorney general is essentially instructed to go investigate what the government has done over the last four years with regard to disinformation. Presumably that could go deep into all manner of research. You could go into questions around how various federal agencies communicated with the platforms. Seems like they're hunting for evidence that they couldn't find in Murthy v. Missouri. They're kind looking for that smoking gun that will prove out what ultimately amounted to a little more than a conspiracy theory in the case that ended up before the Supreme Court.

Damon Beres:

Right. So it makes me think of that. It also just makes me think of the Twitter files except brought to you by the US presidency, which is interesting to think about.

Justin Hendrix:

Lastly, I just want to pause again and maybe where we started, on the personalities. It's been interesting to see these guys not all getting along, these billionaires. Seems like Elon Musk was very much put off by Sam Altman in the White House. There was a little bit of drama after the Stargate announcement, and then today kind of seeing a little bit of fuss from Marc Andreessen as well on Altman. Altman out there talking about how advancing AI might require changes to the social contract. He said apparently, "The entire structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration." I suppose folks like Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk really don't want Sam Altman to have much to do with that debate.

Damon Beres:

I think that's right. Elon Musk certainly does not like Sam Altman very much. Donald Trump himself had a really, I thought kind of funny quote about this today. Did you see that? This came up again? So the after the Stargate thing, Elon Musk was tweeting, "They don't actually have the money for this." Basically throwing shade to ... He is specifically talking about SoftBank, I think. But basically that the project wouldn't have the money for its ambition essentially. And Trump, I guess, was commenting on this today, and he just said, "He hates one of the people. Elon Musk doesn't like Sam Altman." It was one of those candid moments that only President Trump can provide. But yeah, I mean these guys are all huge egos, huge personalities. I think that there's a lot of role play happening in terms of this idea that they're inventing this technology that's going to bring us into the Star Trek universe or something. And I don't know that any of that is seen in reality.

So all of this kind of just feels to me like boys arguing in a sandbox over their make believe game a little bit. I mean, I shouldn't say that. These are guys with a tremendous amount of power and influence, and they're building real things with real money and real technology, et cetera. But I do think that the actual real world impact and influence of this technology is still very much to be seen. And so the rhetoric, I think is a little bit ahead of where the actual technology is.

But then at the same time, these are men who are all jockeying to be as close to the most powerful person in the world, the President, as they possibly can be. And all of them are after all quite close. So as easy as it is to joke around and criticize or to be skeptical about this project and the technology and the companies that these people represent, at the end of the day, it is actually extremely consequential, which one of these guys ends up demonstrating the most influence, which one of them ends up pulling ahead in terms of who Trump is listening to, in terms of who actually is tapping into the most infrastructural power in the United States, et cetera. So in many ways it's all quite ridiculous, and then in other ways, extremely serious and consequential of course.

Justin Hendrix:

I guess the metaphor that comes into my mind looking at this weekend, it's not just Stargate, this hundred billion investment, but also Meta announcing it will increase its spending up to 65 billion in capital investment, much of it on data centers. You've got Elon Musk making all his various investments. You've got folks like Andreessen, other investors, et cetera, ready to go all in. I almost get this visual in my head, all these guys up late around the poker table, and everybody just decides to push their chips into the center of the table on the last hand. I don't know. It's, "Let's burn all the coal. Let's burn all the oil, the natural gas out of the ground. Let's build the data centers. Let's pump them full of energy and see if we can get to AGI fast enough to come up with a solution before we boil the planet. But hey, that doesn't matter too much because we're headed to Mars."

Damon Beres:

Right. I love that poker metaphor. That feels right to me. This is the moment. This is where the competition feels open. This is where it feels like they can, again, jockey for power, where they can get that attention at the start of the Trump administration and really kind of build in their influence right now. It's a very pivotal moment, I suppose, for these people and their investments. I don't like the sort of finality that your language implies, like, oh, what if they go bust? And what if the planet goes bust? But it does have that feeling. Absolutely.

Justin Hendrix:

Lots to cover over the next four years. Damon, I hope you'll come back and we'll see where these various announcements and ventures and orders all take us.

Damon Beres:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me today.