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The second Trump administration is seeing major PDA from corporate America, particularly tech CEOs.
That’s expected to be evident at Trump’s inauguration, when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk (natch) will reportedly sit on the dais during Monday’s ceremonies. Apple’s Tim Cook and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai will also reportedly be in attendance.
While America’s corporate overlords have always courted Washington to some extent — there’s an entire street named for it — there’s greater visibility around their presence this time around. Especially for those who publicly repudiated Trump in his first term.
Investors in the executives’ companies are left to suss out what, if anything, will come from the bosses’ courting. For most of them, the hope is probably nothing. For most of these CEOs, this looks like defense forged in the fiery lessons of the first Trump administration, when the president wielded Twitter like a cudgel against companies that had raised his ire, whipsawing shares.
In 2018, he complained that the US Postal Service was losing money on packages it delivered for Amazon. The prior year, he attacked then-Merck CEO Ken Frazier after the executive resigned from a presidential council following Trump’s comments about white nationalist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va.
But it wasn’t limited to when Trump was in office. Last fall, he targeted Deere at a campaign event, threatening 200% tariffs if the tractor maker moved some production to Mexico as planned. Last spring, he called Facebook “an enemy of the people” in an interview with CNBC.
So maybe CEOs figure that throwing a million or two at the inauguration, taking a quick trip down to Mar-a-Lago, or making a commemorative custom bottle of Diet Coke is a small price to pay to not be publicly called names at best and specifically tariffed at worst. Flattery may not make your stock go up, but it might prevent it from going down.
All this means for most investors, as veteran tech analyst Mark Mahaney told us, is that the defensive appeasement from Big Tech should make the Trump of it all irrelevant, allowing the market to stay focused on fundamentals and rates.
However, the defense might be a little different for other companies like Tesla, which intersects with the federal government in myriad ways, from SpaceX’s NASA contracts to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s investigation into Tesla’s self-driving features.
While Musk’s self-claimed status as “first buddy” also appears to have an ideological tinge, it could have the added convenience of protecting those contracts or making that investigation less of a priority.
Investors certainly seem to see it that way: Tesla’s shares are up more than 60% since the election.
And perhaps most notably, the CEO of TikTok will attend the inauguration with the others, providing a case study in what bending the knee to Trump can accomplish.
The wildly popular Chinese social media app was the target of a Trump executive order to ban it long before Congress did the same during President Biden’s tenure.
Now, as the Supreme Court weighs whether that law was constitutional, Trump has completely changed his tune. Some reports pinned the genesis of his flip on a meeting last year with Republican donor Jeff Yass, who owns a stake in TikTok’s parent company. Trump has said they didn’t discuss it.
It’s possible, of course, that Trump just enjoys the app as another venue for adulation. In any case, TikTok’s Shou Chew was one of the executives who made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago last year, and Trump is reportedly drafting an executive order blocking the ban, although it’s unclear if it will work.
Whether it will matter to the future of the nation is a different question, one that President Biden weighed in on as part of his farewell address: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America.”
Julie Hyman is the co-host of Market Domination on Yahoo Finance. You can find her on social media @juleshyman.
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