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The West used to be a stable place once upon a time and not much would differ in the short run whenever there was a regime change. Now in America the Republican and Democratic parties are at such opposite poles, that shock waves start coming the moment a new President comes to power. That way Joe Biden and Donald Trump couldn’t be more contrasting.
Myriad changes
The previous administration seemed to be cracking down on crypto in favour of CBDC (central-bank digital currency), which is a fiat currency even though it is digital. The current administration has banned CBDC and is looking to make America the crypto capital of the world. The Trump meme coins ($Trump) launched just before inauguration crossed a market capitalization of $25 billion in no time.
The Biden regime looked to be heavily regulating AI in favour of a small number of players which the government could control. The Trump regime seems to be opening the AI tap and have as many startups as possible flourish in this field.
Silicon Valley had embraced the Democratic philosophy of DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) transforming companies and HR divisions based on that. Now under Trump, DEI looks set to die a slow and painful death as tech companies scale down or shut down these divisions.
When it comes to freedom of speech, the Democratic regime cracked down on social media sites with myriad investigative agencies being involved. Now there may be a pullback and X (Twitter) has indeed become a balance of Leftist and Rightist views. Facebook is toning down its content moderation. Of course the fate of TikTok continues to swing from one side to another.
There is finally a balance in Silicon Valley. From the inception till the Biden regime, tech companies heavily leaned Left in favour of the Democrats. In 2016, Peter Thiel was an isolated Silicon Valley billionaire who supported Trump. That didn’t change in 2020. It was not the story in 2024. Elon Musk became the most vocal voice in support of Trump buying Twitter and stopping it from being a Democratic mouthpiece. He campaigned for Trump and joined the administration with DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). Another sane voice is Netscape (the first global web browser) founder Marc Andreessen, general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, who is consulting with the Trump regime. Mark Zuckerburg is speaking more in favour of Trump.
The Trump administration has former PayPal COO David Sacks as the AI and Crypto czar. Sriram Krishnan is the Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. However they do have their work cut out with the release of the Chinese DeepSeek as suddenly the AI race, which America was leading, has hotted up.
Doug Burgum was President of Great Plains Software, acquired by Microsoft. He was Chairman of Atlassian and will be Secretary of the Interior.
In a way Tech America has taken a U-turn both in terms of changing support and policy. The next four years promise to be quite interesting.