This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
The second Trump administration is seeing major PDA from corporate America, particularly tech CEOs.
That’s expected to be evident at Trump’s inauguration, when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk (natch) will reportedly sit on the dais during Monday’s ceremonies. Apple’s Tim Cook and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai will also reportedly be in attendance.
While America’s corporate overlords have always courted Washington to some extent — there’s an entire street named for it — there’s greater visibility around their presence this time around. Especially for those who publicly repudiated Trump in his first term.
Investors in the executives’ companies are left to suss out what, if anything, will come from the bosses’ courting. For most of them, the hope is probably nothing. For most of these CEOs, this looks like defense forged in the fiery lessons of the first Trump administration, when the president wielded Twitter like a cudgel against companies that had raised his ire, whipsawing shares.
In 2018, he complained that the US Postal Service was losing money on packages it delivered for Amazon. The prior year, he attacked then-Merck CEO Ken Frazier after the executive resigned from a presidential council following Trump’s comments about white nationalist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va.
But it wasn’t limited to when Trump was in office. Last fall, he targeted Deere at a campaign event, threatening 200% tariffs if the tractor maker moved some production to Mexico as planned. Last spring, he called Facebook “an enemy of the people” in an interview with CNBC.
So maybe CEOs figure that throwing a million or two at the inauguration, taking a quick trip down to Mar-a-Lago, or making a commemorative custom bottle of Diet Coke is a small price to pay to not be publicly called names at best and specifically tariffed at worst. Flattery may not make your stock go up, but it might prevent it from going down.
All this means for most investors, as veteran tech analyst Mark Mahaney told us, is that the defensive appeasement from Big Tech should make the Trump of it all irrelevant, allowing the market to stay focused on fundamentals and rates.
However, the defense might be a little different for other companies like Tesla, which intersects with the federal government in myriad ways, from SpaceX’s NASA contracts to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s investigation into Tesla’s self-driving features.
#tech #CEO #PDA #Trump #defense #Morning
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