When President Donald Trump was flanked at his inauguration by tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai, with the CEOs of Apple and TikTok nearby, he was surrounded not just by a handful of the wealthiest men on the planet — but by executives who oversee platforms that, in some combination, virtually all Americans engage with.

For a president whose rise, fall and comeback are all intertwined with his innate ability to capture attention online and on TV, those executives hold the keys to algorithmic and policy tweaks that could depress or further enhance his political — and financial — standing. In turn, Trump could influence policy in emerging technologies in ways favorable or unfavorable to the executives and their companies, via his actions on domestic regulations and pressure on foreign governments to follow suit.

The dynamic — which flows downstream from a rightward shift in Silicon Valley after the Covid pandemic — has the chance to reshape what was long an adversarial relationship between Trump-era conservatives and big tech companies, which has been marked by years of disdain over content moderation practices and threats to strip legal protections. 

Conservatives see a chance to advance their tech priorities on a host of fronts where they may not have seen possibilities before. But they say they still harbor skepticism of the platforms that recent policy shifts and photo-ops have not softened. For example, Steve Bannon, the influential former top White House aide under Trump, has continued to rail against the tech leaders and their agenda even as they become cozier with Trump.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said: “One of the reasons you see these guys now changing their tone on President Trump in particular is that they know how to read an election return. These guys are businesspeople. The attention economy is their business, and these are their consumers. And I think they can look at election returns and realize, ‘Oh, gee, huh, this is where a majority of the public is.’”

Hawley, who has challenged tech companies on antitrust grounds and data policy, among other areas, in the Senate, said their shift does not mean the right “should trust them and think: ‘Oh, well, this is great. These guys have our best interest at heart. They have the best interest of the country at heart.’

“No, I don’t think so for a second,” he added. “I’m deeply concerned about their monopolistic power. That hasn’t changed at all, their ability to turn right back on the control of news and information, their control over our personal data — none of that has changed. … I think it’s a good thing that through the election and through Trump’s influence, they have changed their approach, currently, to political speech.

“Do I trust them to keep doing that? No, absolutely not,” he continued. “And I think that we should put the country in a position through antitrust legislation where they do not have the power to use their monopoly to squelch information, to control the flow of news, to use people’s personal information without their consent.”

Democrats and liberal allies, meanwhile, are both trying to figure out how to swing the momentum in tech back toward them and expressing concern about what the new Trump-tech alliance could mean for everything from control of information online to wealth inequality and the nuts-and-bolts functions of government itself.

“I convened tech leaders over a year ago to discuss the rightward swing in Silicon Valley and the impact it would have,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., whose district includes a slice of Silicon Valley, said in a statement. “For Democrats to win these leaders back, it is critical for us to prove we are the party of the future, of innovation, and of entrepreneurship. If we fail too, we miss an opportunity to harness tech for our vision and make incredible advancements in personalized medicine, efficient energy use, and building wealth in communities that have been left behind.”

‘They’re not going to get anything from me’

For now, Republicans believe the relationship is to a large extent one-way: The tech companies are acquiescing to Trump without his having to give much of anything in return. 

Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said last week it would pay a $25 million settlement in a four-year-old lawsuit Trump filed over its move to suspend his accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. 

Other recent moves by Meta included adding Republicans and Trump allies to its board and policy team and ending a fact-checking program and replacing it with a community-driven system similar to the one Musk has promoted at X. And Zuckerberg has repeatedly praised Trump since the 2024 election, even though Trump not long ago threatened him with a potential prison sentence.

The company, however, has pushed back against claims that it is boosting Trump in its algorithms.

Bezos’ Amazon has announced it will release a Melania Trump documentary through its Amazon Prime platform, while Bezos himself has spoken optimistically about Trump’s potential anti-regulatory agenda in a new term.

Jeff Hauser, founder of the progressive Revolving Door Project, said the lesson tech executives learned from their counterpart Musk this election cycle was “that there is no greater form of political influence than owning an attention-controlling platform.”

“Musk’s 250-plus-million-dollar expenditure in the election maybe mattered on the margins, but his manipulation of the Twitter algorithm has probably permanently changed American politics in just a couple of years,” Hauser said. “And I think that Mark Zuckerberg and others recognize that they have a similar capacity.” 

Hauser said he believes what the tech leaders want, more than anything directly relevant to their social media platforms, is favorable artificial intelligence policies.

“They’re gambling on the possibility that this is an economic and economy-defining moment for AI, and they know that the executive branch has a huge role to play in that,” he said.

Speaking from the Oval Office hours after his inauguration, Trump said the tech leaders would not be getting anything in exchange for their support.

“They’re not going to get anything from me,” Trump said. “I don’t need money, but I do want the nation to do well, and they’re smart people, and they create a lot of jobs.”

But in the days that followed, Trump has seemingly allowed Musk — who donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to support his campaign — to have free rein over implementing rapid change at federal agencies. Tech leaders also cheered an executive order aimed at loosening policies “that act as barriers to American AI innovation.” Trump also reversed his earlier position on TikTok “because I got to use it” and found it beneficial to his electoral win, he told reporters.

“And remember, TikTok is largely about kids, young kids,” Trump said when he was asked about the national security concerns lawmakers in both parties have about its Chinese parent company. “If China is going to get information about young kids out of it, to be honest, I think we have bigger problems than that.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Still, a Republican lobbyist said the idea that Trump was “ceding power to the richest people in the world” was misplaced.

This person added that what Trump gets is what he and conservatives have fought for years for: looser policies around content moderation. Republicans have long argued those policies amounted to censorship on various platforms. Now, their messaging will proliferate the platforms in an uninhibited manner. For Democrats who have warned of the threat of disinformation for years, it is a near-total defeat.

The lobbyist gave real weight to content policy changes at X, formerly Twitter, under Musk for helping Trump win last fall. Now, others will take a page from Musk’s playbook, this person said. 

“It’s mutually beneficial,” the lobbyist said. “They obviously make s—loads of money, and Trump won an election because [the internet] got opened up, and he’d like for our party to continue to get coverage that I think he thinks is less biased.”

With Trump back in power and the tech executives appearing to be willing to play ball, conservatives who have long sought to shift tech policy to the right or advance their causes now hope the climate is ripe for progress. Last week, a coalition of conservative intellectuals published an agenda it believes should guide the right on tech policy moving forward, combining interests of both social conservatives and the tech right.

The agenda, titled “A Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right,” said a “new era of technological change … threatens to supplant the human person and make the family functionally and biologically unnecessary.”

“But this anti-human outcome is not inevitable,” the authors continued. “Conservatives must welcome dynamic innovation, but they should oppose the deployment of technologies that undermine human goods. We must enact policies that elevate the family to a primary constituency of technological advancement. Our aim should be a newly re-functionalized household for the 21st Century.”

Brad Littlejohn, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, was a co-author of the platform. He said he does have some concern that the budding relationship between Trump and the tech executives could lead to those companies’ securing “a regulatory regime that is very friendly to their attempt to prop up this attention economy.”

But Littlejohn said he sees “a tremendous opening right now” to advance a conservative tech agenda because of how the conversation has shifted on many issues, from allowing kids to have phones in school to social media addiction.

“Up until the last year or two, there’s been a sort of tone of resignation” around many tech issues, Littlejohn said. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, this is happening, but what’re you going to do about it? We’re powerless to resist.’ And then all of a sudden, people are like, ‘Oh, wait, we’re not.’”

Though there have already been some notable shifts and moves, a senior Republican Senate aide reported not having noticed too much change on the major social media platforms.

“From the attention economy standpoint, things don’t feel” different, this person said. “X is what it is. … I don’t really know what’s going down on Facebook. My Instagram is still pretty neutral.”

One of the biggest things Trump is getting from the executives, this person said, is not directly obvious on their platforms: “legitimacy” and an acknowledgment that “this guy runs the world.”

“In 2016 they all were reflexively anti-Trump,” the aide said, “because they thought that was the best way to achieve their goals. Now they’re just going full 180, but [they have] the same goals.”