It is half past six in the morning on November 6th. Although Republican Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections has not yet been certified, Elon Musk He is already savoring the triumph of his candidate and even sees himself in the White House. Specifically, in the Oval Office, where he is with a sink in his arms, just like when he crossed the doors of the offices of the defunct Twitter in 2022 after becoming its owner. “Let this (the image) enter your mind,” said the tycoon in a publication made on his X account accompanied by a doctored photograph in which he is at the epicenter of American power.
There is no doubt that Musk, owner of X, SpaceX or Tesla, will be one of the great beneficiaries of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. Unlike the rest of the big Silicon Valley executives, who avoided making comments favorable to the Republican until he won the elections, Musk was always clear about who his candidate was. He donated more than $100 million to the campaign, shared thousands of messages on X praising the candidate and accompanied him during his rally in Butler (Pennsylvania) a month ago.
Choose the regulator
«Musk bet everything on the winning horse and it turned out well. As an economic and media reference, it will give a boost and it is also expected that X and its companies will benefit,” explains ABC Ferran Lalueza, professor of Communication at the Open University of Catalonia and expert in social networks.
The South African is already noticing the effects of Trump’s victory. Tesla shares experienced a 14% rise after the election results were known, and in a few months it is expected to enter the government. The future president already stated that he intended to place him at the head of a new commission intended to audit the spending of federal officials. And the tycoon is for the job. For now, last Wednesday he participated in a meeting between the American leader and Volodimir Zelensky, president of Ukraine.
And the thing will not stop there. According to ‘The New York Times’, Musk could soon reach the “enviable” position of choosing the people in charge of regulating his companies and firing those who get in his way. One of the first to fall will presumably be Lina Khan, director of the Federal Trade Commission and in charge of controlling big technology companies in recent years. Musk himself already warned about this a few days ago.
Fernando Checa, director of the master’s degree in Social Networks at the International University of La Rioja, believes that, thanks to Trump’s victory, the internet giants will operate more freely after four years feeling increasingly closer to the encouragement of regulators. «Many movements to control companies are going to be stopped with Trump. The fact that Elon Musk comes to power will cause the sectors in which he is present to be strengthened. For large companies it is good news.
And among the potential beneficiaries, in addition to Apple and Amazon, which were being monitored for alleged monopoly, is also the Chinese company TikTok. The viral video ‘app’ of Chinese origin is trying to stop in court a bill, approved last spring, that could lead to its ban in the United States next January. Be that as it may, the newly elected president, who during his first term also tried to end the application, is now categorically opposed to this outcome. Partly because the young people who now use it day in and day out would also “go crazy” and also because “competition is needed” for Facebook and Instagram, two social networks that, it is known, are not to the leader’s taste; and the same thing happens with its owner, Mark Zuckerberg. In September Trump accused the CEO of Meta of conspiring against his candidacy in the 2020 elections, in which he lost against Democrat Joe Biden. The Republican even threatened to “lock him in jail for the rest of his life” if the (alleged) play was repeated in the 2024 elections.
American media point out that if TikTok loses its appeal, Trump could simply refuse to apply the ban or look for another mechanism to guarantee the survival of the app.
AI without brakes
If the president-elect is not a great friend of Meta, he is not especially a friend of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. A little over a month ago, the leader accused the search engine of promoting negative content about him. Be that as it may, he has also been against the possible division of the company, which is currently facing two antitrust cases in the country for its control of the internet search and advertising business.
Trump is also not expected to follow in the footsteps of the European Union and decide to promote tough regulation to prevent the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI); something that will potentially benefit Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT. The future president has already announced that he plans to end the executive order signed by Biden last year to control these technologies. Companies, therefore, will have more leeway to establish the security measures that they believe are necessary for their algorithms. At least in principle.
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