Friday, April 18, 2025

Where were the presidents of Large Tech on tariffs?

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If you logged in to X or BlueSky last week, you were probably swept away in an attack on posts on Trump’s mutual tariffs and a submerging stock market. And if you follow the technology industry as close as I do, you probably also noticed who was not Publishing about tariffs: many of the same founders and general directors who flanked Trump on the day of inauguration in January. Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg kept their mother about the tariffs (although both Pichai and Zuckerberg still published about AI). Meanwhile, Elon Musk – well, we will come to this.

The silence was deafening, considering that “wonderful seven” Total lost trillions dollars of market value after Trump’s tariff announcement last week. But behind these technology leaders are frigid logic holding languages ​​in public – especially for those who sell equipment. The United States has become a very unstable nation in which the president’s whim should be taken into account before the exploit of any political chips or a public statement, especially in the environment in which this statement may be irrelevant an hour later.

“Sand does not cease to move long enough to make a convincing statement,” tells me one of the best communication directors who worked closely with two gigantic technical directors.

Technical directors are not Actually silence. They just lobby behind the scenes on their own behalf. Niki Christoff, Washington, DC, political strategist and former assistant to Senator John McCain during his presidential campaign in 2008, says that most strategic commercial rules – and conversations with Trump’s staff – now are happening through the facilities. “There is a lot of personal choice and attempts to conclude offers,” he says.

During the first term of Trump Cook carefully grown Direct relations with the president in order to lobby him in matters such as trade and immigration. It is challenging for me to imagine that Cook does not exploit this direct line now. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, who did not participate in the inauguration ceremony, Apparently he went to Dinner worth $ 1 million in Mar-a-Lago last week. Shortly afterwards, the White House returned plans to implement the export control of some tokens, which Nvidia sells China.

Private rear channels allow each leader of technology to lobby regarding specific tariff layoffs. The type of dismissals that would bring NVIDIA benefits, such as more bland rules regarding semiconductor imports for the GPU, differ from what Apple can be traveling, taking into account the complexity of the company’s supply chain and its relief in China. “Basically opposite tariffs are not useful if business leaders can get exclusions on their own products,” notes Christoff.

At the same time, general technology directors allow trade organizations such as Business Houndtable, which represents many gigantic technology companies, including Alphabet and Amazon, do lobbying for them, sources give Wired. Joshua Bolten, General Director of the Round Business Table statement Calling the administration for “quick achievement of contracts” with trading partners and implementing “reasonable exemptions”. General directors were also able to hang, while bankers like JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon Make Public claims on the lasting negative impact of tariffs On the subject of the economy and while the billionaire Hedging Founder Bill Ackman keeps Tweeting by this. “

There were several protruding values. The CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassa, said that he believes that the extensive Amazon external sellers can end Donating consumers of tariff costs. Last week, the general director of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, sat alongside Bill Gates and former general director Microsoft Steve Ballmer for an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin from CNBC, who asked about tariffs. Ballmer told Sorkin that he “took a sufficient number of economics in college [know that] Tariffs will actually bring some confusion “and that” disturbances are very arduous for people. “

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