Business News – February 8, 2025Trump’s embrace of the world’s biggest tech CEOs reorients the ‘attention economy’NBC News. February 6, 2025.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