With the election in the rearview mirror, we’ve seen some major names in tech start sucking up to the new regime. Elon Musk has been kissing Trump’s ass for quite a while, largely throwing Tesla under the bus (and it probably won’t be an electric one), and it’s looking like he’s going to have a direct line to the president in some way, shape, or form.

What Changed

They always say that you get more conservative the older you get, but really it’s that you get more conservative the richer you get. Big Tech is in a position of power now. They’ve got a lot of money and are facing a lot of regulatory pressure, which could cost them money. So time to suck up to Trump. I guess.

The Innovation Has Slowed

The tech community has been talking about how these companies have been slowing on their innovation in the pursuit of profits and—well—they’re kinda proving that right. Meta has been turning all of their apps into soulless monetization machines; Google tries to suck value out of literally every corner of the internet in multiple flavors be it ads, search, or AI; Apple’s latest innovation is “what if your notifications were not only annoying, but also useless”; Tesla is two years away from FSD (and have been since like 2016); IBM has survived literally just selling solutions to their tech debt; and Microsoft helped cause Y2K this year. It’s really not looking good.

The Mighty Have Fallen

Google used to be known as the cool place to work, they would show people that they’ve got ping pong tables and propeller caps. They were the ones who would “do no evil”. Facebook were the “move fast and break things” company, more interested in shipping their product than anything else. Now Google’s “do no evil” motto is gone and Meta wants to move at a snail’s pace on things like fediverse sharing in Threads. These companies are, in the grand scheme of things, shells of what they once were.

Where is the Innovation Now?

Well I would say that it’s probably going to end up being in AI. It’s going to be an open season with Chevron being overturned, rendering government agencies powerless to regulate these companies. This largely unregulated space helps this kind of innovation flourish, but that comes at a cost when these companies are flipping switches going “this might just be the one that ends the world, we’re not entirely sure”. This is, of course, entirely reliant on chips being able to keep up (we’ll see how that goes).

Some Is Still At Big Tech

But the other thing is: Big Tech still has a lot of innovative people working in it. On a macro-scale, Apple has shifted its product team under operations, leading to products that are built for supply chain efficiency and fitting into particular pricing patterns. On a micro scale, the settings app is now respecting the app icon colors on your home screen, the iPhone is experimenting with more buttons, and Mac minis are getting mini-er.