CEOs' embrace of Trump may be real

“And by the way, what they say in private is exactly what they say in public.”

Happy Inauguration Day, but how can we have a bad one? President Trump returns.

CNN once reported, “Trump gets 2 scoops of ice cream, everyone else gets 1.” And so it goes with presidencies.

This presidency starts off better because the RINOs are biting their tongues and the CEOs are coming around. Since Election Day, Trump has held court at Mar-a-Lago as world leaders, American politicians and CEOs have queued up to kiss his ring. I call it the Great Capitulation.

Longtime Trump supporters are skeptical of the incoming converts and I would not have it any other way. Newcomers have to prove themselves—even JD Vance had to after trashing him in 2016.

In dealing with the new crowd, one must consider motivation. What’s in it for me is a fair question.

In Vance’s case, it looks like he realized that Trump was not the ogre the media portrayed him as and that the two men were on the same side.

In RFK Jr.’s case, it was the realization that he could finally redeem himself as a Cabinet secretary and do his father proud.

In Elon Musk’s case, it was a corny thing called free speech. Both men are saving it.

In Mayor Adams’s case, it is a matter of political necessity. FJB wants him imprisoned.

A fellow who is just in it for the money still has value. Just make sure someone else doesn’t make him a better deal.

I trust Trump’s judgment over mine because he has more experience in dealing with powerful people and has actually met the people involved. His three-hour dinner with Bill Gates made perfect sense. Keep your enemies close.

Big tech and other corporations are lining up for Trump now. Ross Douthat of the New York Times did the public a great service by interviewing Marc Andreessen to find out what the motivation is.

Douthat began:

It’s great to have you. You’re a co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose portfolio includes Airbnb and over 100 A.I. companies.

A long time ago, you co-founded Netscape, the web browser that first brought many of us to the internet in the 1990s. And—just as a political matter—you supported Barack Obama for president, you voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then in 2024 you supported Donald Trump.

Andreessen is a longtime liberal Democrat who defends Al Gore to this day because as a senator, Gore spearheaded the efforts that led to the Internet as we know it—well, except the porn stuff. That I place on the devil.

Andreessen explained why the tech industry CEOs became Democrats: Bill Clinton and his sidekick were pro-capitalism. Andreessen saud:

Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.

Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro–gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.

Later, he amplified that point:

First of all, let me disabuse you of something, if you haven’t already disabused yourself. The view of American C.E.O.s operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong.

That’s like, Goal No. 5 or something. There’s four goals that are way more important than that. And that’s not just true in the big tech companies. It’s true of the executive suite of basically everyone at the Fortune 500.

I would say Goal No. 1 is, “I’m a good person.”

“I’m a good person,” is wildly more important than profit margins. Wildly. And this is why you saw these big companies all of a sudden go completely bananas in all their marketing. It’s why you saw them go bananas over D.E.I. It’s why you saw them all cooperating with all these social media boycotts.

I mean, the level of lock step uniformity, unanimity in the thought process between the C.E.O.s of the Fortune 500 and what’s in the pages of The New York Times and in the Harvard classroom and in the Ford Foundation—they’re just locked together. Or at least they were through this entire period.

We dismiss this as virtue signaling. I suspect that now he does too.

Being a good person was not good enough, however. By the time FJB became president, the Bill Clinton’s party had become party of the Marxism.

Andreessen said:

They came for business in a very broad-based way. Everything that I’m going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later, it happened in the energy industry. And I think it happened in a bunch of other industries, but the C.E.O.s felt like they couldn’t talk about it.

The problem is the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing.

Government-mandated enforcement of D.E.I. in very destructive ways. Some of these agencies have their own in-house courts, which is bananas. Also just straight-up threats and bullying.

Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on Rogan. Direct phone calls from senior members of the administration. Screaming executives ordering them to do things. Just full-on “[Expletive] you. We own you. We control you. You’re going to do what we want or we’re going to destroy you.”

DOGE is a nice endeavor to reduce spending, but the only way to cure corruption in Washington is to cut off the power. After the DEI ordeal, maybe CEOs will fight to reduce governmental power.

Big Tech’s problem with FJB’s administration was crypto.

Andreessen: They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. That’s really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics. The crypto attack was so weird that we didn’t know what to make of it. We were just hoping it would pass, which it didn’t. But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to A.I. that we realized we had to get involved in politics. Then we were up against what looked like the absolutely terrifying prospect of a second term.

Douthat: Just to zero in: When you say, “kill A.I.,” what does that mean? Because the Biden administration obviously would not say that it intends to kill A.I. It would say that it wants to make America the world leader in A.I. while regulating it in a way that prevents our enemies around the world from obtaining potentially world-altering technology.

That would be the narrative, right? So why is that wrong?

Andreessen: [Laughs.] What you just said would be great compared to what we actually got. So again, the precondition we got with crypto was to just flat out try to kill it. This whole debanking thing—they just debanked an entire generation of founders.

They debank their families. They really destroyed people’s lives. They just killed companies left, right and center, just debanking, destroying companies.

They did regulation through enforcement. They would never define what the rules were. They would just arbitrarily sue people when they didn’t think they could sue people and win, then they’d issue these things called Wells notices, which is basically a public announcement that the government is going to sue you in the future, which is basically a death sentence for a company, right?

Now then the government went after crypto currency because it is a direct threat to central banks, specifically the Federal Reserve. Government control of money empowers the deep state.

Trump has embraced crypto and AI. Boy howdy. Axios reported:

The $TRUMP memecoin—a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon—now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump's net worth.

Why it matters: The coin (technically a token that's issued on the Solana blockchain) has massively enriched Trump personally, enabled a mechanism for the crypto industry to funnel cash to him, and created a volatile financial asset that allows anyone in the world to financially speculate on Trump's political fortunes.

After another massive overnight rally, as of Sunday morning Trump's crypto holdings were worth as much as $58 billion on paper, enough—with his other assets—to make him one of the world's 25 richest people.

Democrats tried to bankrupt him and wound up making him $58 billion. Good for him. You can see why tech CEOs went to Mar-a-Lago.

Can they be trusted not to flip with the next election? Mark me down for a big NO on Bill Gates. I don’t know about most of the others. I do know what Andreessen. who studied computer at the University of Illinois, told Douthat about Al Gore:

So the famous quote is, “I invented the internet.” He never said that, I’ll defend Al’s honor to the death. What he said is, “I took the lead in the Senate in creating the Internet.”

What he meant is that he was the tip of the spear for funding four national supercomputing centers. They picked four college campuses, and Illinois was one of them.

If three decades later a man is still defending Al Gore, I have to say his loyalty is above reproach—unless you screw him over.

As for the other tech CEOs, Andreessen knows them. He said, “I can tell you what they say. And by the way, what they say in private is exactly what they say in public. I have not picked up on any disconnect at all.”

The best Republicans are the ex-Democrats: Reagan, Trump and me.

Reagan said trust but verify. I don’t know about the others, but Andreessen passed the test.

* * *

On Saturday night, I reran a newsletter from January 22, 2024, “They should have just let him win in 2020.”

On Sunday, NYT ran a piece in which opinions editor Patrick Healy and columnists David Brooks, Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg said the same thing.

Goldberg: In retrospect—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—we’d have been better off if Trump won in 2020. He’d have entered his second term in a much weaker position than he’s in now. Instead, the last four years have given the country the chance to memory-hole many of the worst failures of his first four years.

Douthat: He would have been weaker, the cultural conflagration would have been more intense, there would have been no “peak woke,” liberalism would have radicalized even further. Whether that would have taken us to a better place is, I would say, a very open question.

Healy: I think you’re right, Michelle—and I still think Trump would have won if not for the pandemic and its knock-on consequences, including so much mail-in voting. Let’s turn to the first 100 days of Trump. From reporting by The Times and others, it sounds like the new administration will begin with a flurry of executive orders as Trump tries to show and enact major change and seize operational control of government quickly. What’s the most disruptive or transformative or substantial executive order or other move by Trump that you are expecting, and does it worry you, does it encourage you, or something else?

Bwa-ha-ha-ha.

Like I said, Happy Inauguration Day everyone.