from Revolver News:
Silicon Valley is a famously difficult environment for incumbents. Today’s unstoppable juggernaut can quickly become tomorrow’s has-been. Just ask Xerox, Intel, or Yahoo. So it says a lot that Microsoft is still on top as the world’s second-largest company by market cap, fifty years after its founding and more than thirty years after becoming the juggernaut of American software. The company has thrived through both good and bad periods for tech and under both Republican and Democrat presidencies. The company pairs technical talent with real political savvy, and that savvy has been on full display with the arrival of the second Trump administration.
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Microsoft donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Five days before his swearing in, CEO Satya Nadella and President Brad Smith dined in person with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. OpenAI, which Microsoft owns 49% of, took the starring role at a White House ceremony announcing the new initiative Stargate, a bid to invest $500 billion into creating an AI supercomputer. And on Monday, President Trump revealed that Microsoft is in talks to purchase Chinese-owned TikTok so that it can evade a potential ban.
Microsoft, in short, is positioning itself aggressively as an ally of the Trump administration, a company that patriots can work with for the greater goal of making America great again.
This rebranding is all the more remarkable given Microsoft’s conspicuous pro-Kamala position dating well before the 2024 election.
But we should not be fooled: Microsoft’s agenda isn’t selfless, and it has not truly changed its censorious stripes. The company’s goal is to head off a well-deserved antitrust investigation and prevent scrutiny of DEI and pro-censorship values the company still clings to.
Just a few weeks after the 2024 election, The New York Times reported that the FTC had begun a new antitrust investigation into Microsoft. Coming as it did from the Biden Administration and its far-left FTC chair, Lina Khan, the focus on that investigation was Microsoft’s immensely successful cloud computing and AI divisions. With its friendly overtures to the Trump Administration, Microsoft hopes the president will order new FTC chair Andrew Ferguson to scuttle any investigation and leave Microsoft to do what it likes, unmolested.
Patriots and the Trump admin shouldn’t fall for it. Sure, Microsoft shouldn’t face antitrust targeting because it’s too popular or too profitable. It should face an antitrust investigation because it perfectly represents the kind of big tech powerhouse that has used its immense power to curtail American free speech.
In his excellent weekend interview on Face the Nation, Vice President JD Vance laid out an America-First interpretation about the hazards posed by “big tech.” The problem of big tech isn’t simply that it is large, but specifically that companies have used their size as leverage to curb the freedoms of Americans.
“We believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power,” Vance said. “There are two ways they can go about this: They can either respect Americans’ constitutional rights, they can stop engaging in censorship, [or] if they don’t, you can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump’s leadership is not going to look too kindly on them.”
