With Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos joining the CEO of TikTok as guests of President-elect Donald Trump at Monday’s Inauguration, many have noticed how differently some tech titans are greeting the second Trump presidency. This follows the many CEOs racing to Mar-a-Lago to dine with Trump, contributing to a narrative that has emerged that “corporate America is going MAGA,” and that “Trump’s election has accelerated a cultural shift in the nation’s boardrooms” as corporate leaders “rush to suck up to Trump.”
President Joe Biden, in his farewell address, ominously warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy,” while Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin warned “cyber barons have decided to move right into government,” pointing to the enormous power tech titans have over our communications and data industries.
These business leaders are rushing to meet Trump now, as they would any President, and Americans of all political inclinations should cheer them on, because their engagement is vitally needed for the benefit of our nation and for our economy, both in terms of making the most of potential opportunities as well as avoiding potential pitfalls.
Read More: Here’s Who’s Attending Trump’s Inauguration
CEOs recognize that there are many issues where their interests, and the interests of their companies, shareholders, and other stakeholders, are aligned with President Trump’s priorities. They hope to work collaboratively with Trump to bring these opportunities to fruition. For example, many business leaders have expressed enthusiasm for Trump’s pro-economic growth agenda, across tax cuts, deregulation, less stringent antitrust enforcement, positive incentives for onshoring manufacturing, and his pledge to bring down energy costs.
At the same time, business leaders recognize that there are certain issues on which CEOs will need to educate Trump. He has demonstrated that he genuinely listens to the business community when they come to him in good faith, and that he can change his mind as long as he does not feel trapped, coerced, or humiliated.
For example, although Trump was a harsh critic of crypto during his first term, he has subsequently become an avid crypto booster after sustained, savvy engagement from top crypto business leaders. Similarly, despite ferocious blowback from parts of the MAGA base, Trump strongly affirmed his support for H-1B visas following encouragement from business leaders, including DOGE co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. And after nominating vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy for Secretary of Health & Human Services, Trump listened to concerns from top pharma business leaders and has subsequently curtailed some of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine instincts while redirecting fire towards pharmacy benefit managers, declaring “we have a thing called a ‘middleman’ … that makes more money than the drug companies, and they don’t do anything except they’re middlemen. We are going to knock out the middleman.” Financial leaders have similarly addressed with Trump the need to streamline layers of regulatory oversight. Neither leaders of pharma nor finance had to engage in golf outings, tithing schemes, or sycophancy to gain Trump’s attention.
That Trump is open to feedback from the business community, and that he is willing to change his mind, is a refreshing change from some recent administrations, who shunned good faith outreach from business leaders. Even though President Biden and Vice President Harris are centrist Democrats, they were surrounded by populist lieutenants and were regularly fearful of the inflammatory rhetoric of self-styled “progressive” Congressional leaders. The FTC and DOJ antitrust prosecutions vilified our most successful businesses and tried to derail needed mergers on the basis of size, rather than target the few sectors where there was possible predatory misconduct.
Over the last four years, I heard from many frustrated major CEOs who sought to engage with the Biden White House or with the Harris campaign the same way they are now engaging with Trump, but found themselves locked out by subordinates and campaign aides. Business conferences had great difficulty enlisting Biden or his cabinet to engage in constructive dialogues. When asked if she ever meets with business leaders, Biden antitrust chief Lina Khan replied, “Only in Court!” In their last-minute tantrums, the FTC has taken adverse action against iconic American enterprises ranging from Pepsi to Deere to Snap, like a wounded animal thrashing about. Not a single of the major business leaders who supported Biden was brought into the Administration for a cabinet post or ambassadorship while Trump has already nominated a dozen business leaders to serve.
Read More: What Trump Says He Will Do on Day One
That accessibility and willingness to engage with business leaders is especially crucial when it comes to issues where CEOs are most worried, as they seek to steer Trump constructively towards successful outcomes. Many CEOs worry about the potential of large-scale tariffs to trigger reciprocal trade wars and inflation, as well as the inflationary implications of immigration policy turbulence. They feel that they have made successful strides in such fronts with their quiet lobbying of Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent over other more alarming options as well as Trump’s reversal of his prior hostility to H1-B visa renewals, to the fury of his staunch anti-immigration oriented close advisors such as Steve Bannon and Steven Miller.
On contentious issues such as these, Trump respects strength, and collective action. CEOs know they can’t allow themselves to get dominated by Trump, who interprets pandering to be weakness and has an instinct for the jugular when he senses weakness. It is easy to wonder whether some tech leaders have already gone too far in their pandering to Trump. Most of these genuflecting tech titans had been visionary engineers with iconoclastic styles themselves but benefit from little experience in diplomacy. Their approach vacillates between resentful disdain or pandering sycophancy, both of which continually backfire on them.
At this time, CEOs have no reason to alienate Trump needlessly, as his first term showed how he can catalyze stock sell-offs in individual names with his tweet storms. For example, when President Trump attacked Harley-Davidson on Twitter in June 2018 over its perceived outsourcing of manufacturing, the stock fell nearly 10% immediately afterwards. Yes, many companies who suffered from such political tantrums, rebounded quickly. Still they have found that if they can influence him privately, with flattery, where he does not feel cornered of publicly humiliated, he is somewhat malleable. CEOs know to pick their fights, avoiding divisive social issues across political lines. Even the presumed corporate retreat on ESG is less than meets the eye, as it’s not a new, post-election development but part of a trend of moving away from that overwrought nomenclature, metrics, and bureaucracy.
The CEOs who appear to have established the most constructive relationships with Trump have done so through establishing relationships defined by unfiltered candor, authenticity, and a willingness to call balls and strikes truthfully. CEOs remain the most trusted voice by Americans, and their willingness to continue calling balls and strikes truthfully and providing Trump with their honest, unfiltered advice should be celebrated. These same, once skeptical business leaders rallied around Trump in 2017 but were repulsed by many of his words and actions within eight months, withdrawing support, not returning to give him a second chance until now. Should Trump revert to divide-and-conquer tactics, pitting them against one another or using them as photo ops to advance a MAGA social agenda they do not share, we know they will again speak out.
