Hello there, world! Welcome to the second issue of Regulator, a newsletter about the collision between Big Tech and Washington. If you enjoy this, consider subscribing to get this newsletter weekly and everything The Verge has to offer.
Lobbying might be a dubious industry, but lobbyists themselves are often some of the best sources in Washington reporting: generally speaking, they’re professionals with lots of prior experience who are paid quite a bit of money to know what’s happening and who’s making it happen behind the scenes.
In normal times, they’d be glad-handling and nudging officials to codify their companies’ objectives in the latest bill or whatnot. But when I hit up K Street — the DC catchall term for the lobbying industry — one month into President Donald Trump’s second term, the people who used to know everything suddenly did not, and it was making them spiral. Was some decadeslong immigration policy about to be unwound? Was some deputy agency head getting fired? Was that tariff actually about to be implemented? And more importantly: how the hell would their company handle it? To paraphrase what one lobbyist for a major tech company told me: we may not like the policies that are implemented, but the point is that they’re consistent, and we can plan our future around it.
Six months later, it seems there are two real policies, unwritten but ironclad: you can get almost anything you want if you either enrich Trump and his family, or hire a Trump associate to lobby on your behalf. I’m confident that a regular Verge reader could list at least five recent examples where major tech players either debased themselves or wrote a massive check to Trumpworld. (Here are mine off the top of my head: Coinbase funding a military parade, Justin Sun buying $TRUMP, Jeff Bezos turning The Washington Post into a “free market” publication, the recent Trump loyalty checklist, and, of course, Tim Cook’s gold statue.)
But the second tactic, a Trumpworld person, is highly unusual.
Traditionally, companies and lobbying firms will hire someone with general expertise in the area they’re lobbying on — ex-lawmakers, former staffers, agency alumni, etc. — who can work their connections with former colleagues. But with Trump in office, and most of the regulatory agencies neutered, companies are turning to people and firms that have some tie to the nebulous universe known as Trumpworld: those with little-to-no expertise in technology, whose only qualifications are that they can call someone in the White House to get strings pulled on their behalf and that they’re right-wing enough for the administration to trust them.
Meta, perhaps the most existentially threatened tech company under the current administration, has onboarded the most overtly MAGA figures so far. It has added two Trump allies to its board of directors: Dana White, the CEO of UFC, and Dina Powell, a top advisor in the first Trump administration. It has also hired Francis Brennan, a former Trump campaign official, as its head of strategic comms; Henry Rodgers, the chief reporter from The Daily Caller, to work on its public policy team; and, as of last week, conservative activist Robby Starbuck, who has actively campaigned against corporations’ DEI policies, as an AI advisor.
It’s hard to say if any of that hiring has worked yet, though; the antitrust case against Meta is still chugging along. But other companies are leaning into the darker political arts — a trend that recently burst into the public eye after Attorney General Pam Bondi abruptly (and messily) fired several senior attorneys at the Department of Justice.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported Hewlett-Packard Enterprise hired two prominent Trump allies — Arthur Schwartz, a political and media consultant who has worked with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump Jr.; and Mike Davis, a pro-Trump lawyer, Big Tech critic, and the head of the Article III Project — to get the DOJ to approve its acquisition of Juniper Networks, overriding Gail Slater, the head of the DOJ’s antitrust division. And on Monday, one of those attorneys — Roger Alford, Slater’s former lieutenant in the antitrust division — made a startling allegation: Schwartz and Davis had secretly cut a deal with one of Bondi’s top aides, Chad Mizelle, who Alford claimed was known for “[making] key decisions depending on whether the request or information comes from a MAGA friend.”
Davis, Schwartz, and HPE did not give comment to The Wall Street Journal about Alford’s specific allegations against them, while the DOJ said the merger was decided on its own merits and blasted Alford as “the James Comey of antitrust—pursuing blind self-promotion and ego, while ignoring reality.” But during a speech at the Technology Policy Institute conference in Colorado, Alford, who served in the first Trump administration, revealed that HPE’s success had inspired its rivals to hire their own Trumpworld lobbying armies. The DOJ, he said, was “now overwhelmed with lobbyists with little antitrust expertise going above the antitrust division leadership seeking special favors with warm hugs… I experienced nothing remotely like this when I served at the DOJ the last time.” And you would not believe what I’ve heard about Trumpworld lobbying in other agencies.
But why has the tech industry glommed onto the Trumpworld lobbying grift so quickly — faster than other industries navigating Washington? I recently spoke with Verge deputy editor Alex Heath, who’s been covering the corporate intrigue of Silicon Valley for quite some time, and he gave me a very nihilistic answer: because the CEOs never had ideology to begin with, other than their bottom line.
“The Biden administration was reflexively hostile to the tech industry,” he told me, “and flattery works with this president.”
That’s a rule so consistent that one could call it a policy.
Below the fold, Alex and I go into the lore of tech’s tumultuous relationship with the executive branch. But first, here’s what we’ve been writing about recently…
“I talked to Sam Altman about the GPT-5 launch fiasco” I can’t mention Command Line without highlighting Alex’s recent on-the-record dinner with the OpenAI CEO, which goes into Sam Altman’s ambitions for the next decade: buying Google Chrome, winning the AI race against China, and raising a trillion (with a t!) dollars to build data centers. And yes, they do talk about the GPT-5 launch fiasco, as the label says.
“Elon Musk’s gangster tech regulation comes for Apple” Speaking of antitrust, Musk is now threatening to sue Apple for not carrying xAI in the App Store — and according to resident Musk expert Liz Lopatto, there’s a deeper proxy war happening here against OpenAI.
“AI companies are chasing government users with deep discounts” These are very deep discounts — federal agencies can access OpenAI and Anthropic chatbots for $1 a year! — but as Lauren Feiner reports, it’s a lucrative side hustle and a political power play: “get as many users as you can in hopes that a service becomes so valuable that employers have to keep paying for it, eventually at a much higher cost.”
“A treaty to end plastic pollution is still out of reach — that’s not necessarily a bad thing” Yeah, I did a double take at the headline, too — but attendees at a recent United Nations conference explain to Justine Calma what happened behind the scenes.
I can’t believe Alex Heath is more cynical than me
Regulator is premised on the idea that tech and politics have no idea how to handle each other, and whenever I’m baffled about a tech titan fumbling through Washington, I always send a Slack message to Alex, because he seems to know all of them. (His latest issue of Command Line is about a dinner with Sam Altman, for god’s sake.) The more I talk to him, though, the more I realize that even as reporters, we have two versions of the same story — told through the perspectives of our sources.
In politics, everyone operates under the premise that they’re doing things because of values, and political reporting tends to approach Trump’s relationship with the tech industry in that framework: the CEOs who used to champion diversity, equality, environmentalism, liberal democracy, etc., now being forced to jettison their morals to keep their companies afloat. But in Alex’s experience, those CEOs never had morals to begin with — which recontextualizes the last eight years of the tech-politics relationship completely.
Tina Nguyen: Could you go more into the Biden versus Trump relationship with the tech industry?
Alex Heath: The Biden administration very much wanted to rein in Big Tech, whether it was through deregulation on the federal side, antitrust cases, Lina Khan at the FCC blocking mergers and acquisitions, or wanting platforms to reiterate the administration’s view on the COVID-19 pandemic.
But with Trump, it’s purely transactional. It’s purely, if you give me this, I give you that. Trump is obsessed with optics, but I think he really just wants leverage. I’m not a politics reporter, but I think tech is playing ball this time because they know if they play ball, they can at least get part of what they want, whereas with Biden, it was unclear that they could get anything.
The Biden versus Trump dynamic doesn’t come to mind whenever people think of tech interacting with politics, but it does sound like it really informed the tech industry’s relationship with the government as a whole. How was that shaped in previous administrations — Obama, Trump One, and Biden?
The tech industry was relatively small during Obama. It wasn’t most of the S&P 500 like it is now. It was still an upstart. Obama used social media, but it was a tool. It wasn’t seen as a challenge to power, necessarily. The first Trump term certainly was when people started to realize, like, oh, there could be an impact here: Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, etc. And then Biden’s term was like, well, they are big now. We gotta rein them in.
Now Trump is saying, they’re big, but I don’t necessarily care about reining them in. I care about using and utilizing them for my own power. So if it means that I need to beat up on a company to get one over on them, to get them to make some concession or kill some DEI project, then I will. But I don’t think he ideologically wants to rein them in. It seems that he just wants to use the power that they have for his own gain.
Prior to this administration, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of Silicon Valley leadership was leaning Democrat. You had your outliers, but it seemed as if there was tech leadership that really believed in a specific set of liberal values. How fast did the mentality shift from “this our political position” to “alright, here’s what we do to keep our companies around”?
They have some values, I guess. But I think it’s always been about making money. And to make money in this regime, you got to play ball, you got to kiss the ring. I think it was just easier to make money and not have to worry about this stuff until the last six years or so. And it’s gotten progressively more intense every year. But it’s not like every CEO was a Democrat that has flipped. I don’t know if they’ve actually been in either one of these parties this whole time. I think they’re capitalist. That’s their political role of view.
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