Trump’s first 100 days: all the news impacting the tech industry

On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re diving into an especially messy set of ideas. It’s been a chaotic couple of weeks for big tech companies as the second Trump administration kicks off an unprecedented era of how we think about who controls the internet. Meta’s changed its rules to openly allow more slurs and hate speech on its platforms, TikTok was banned and sort of unbanned, and a bunch of tech CEOs attended the second Trump inauguration. 

There’s a major collision, or maybe merger, happening right now between billionaire power and state power and everyone who uses tech to communicate — so, basically everyone — is stuck in the middle.

Just to start out: the federal EV tax credit is still alive and kicking. It was not eliminated by the stroke of Donald Trump’s pen because it can’t be. The tax credit — $7,500 for a new EV, $4,500 for a used one — was passed by Congress as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and it would take another act of Congress to do away with it. 

Now the bad news: at Trump’s behest, Congress is very likely to do away with the tax credit at some point in the near future. Republican lawmakers have tried several times in the past to kill the credit, most recently in July 2024. But with Democrats in control of the Senate and Joe Biden in the White House, none of those efforts ever went anywhere. 

Elon Musk doesn’t miss an opportunity to take a dig at OpenAI — even when the news item in question is supposed to be favorable to President Trump. Just a few hours after yesterday’s White House presser on The Stargate Project wrapped up, Musk posted on X that “they don’t actually have the money.”

Softbank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX have committed to “deploy” $100 billion now and $500 billion toward the AI data center company over the next four years.

On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump issued a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, who ran the dark web marketplace Silk Road under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts.” Ulbricht has been serving a life sentence without parole since 2015, when he was convicted of multiple charges, including the distribution of narcotics.

The Silk Road marketplace, which was only accessible through the Tor network, became one of the most prevalent early commercial uses of Bitcoin. Buyers and sellers traded in illicit drugs, forged passports, and more.

President Donald Trump says he’d be open to his buddies Elon Musk or Larry Ellison buying TikTok.

“Larry, let’s negotiate in front of the media,” Trump said at a press conference with the Oracle co-founder, SoftBank CEO Masa Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to announce a $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure investment. “What I’m thinking about saying to somebody is, buy it, and give half to the United States of America. Half, and we’ll give you the permit. And they’ll have a great partner, the United States.”

A plan to build a system of data centers for artificial intelligence has been revealed in a White House press conference, with Masayoshi Son, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison joining Donald Trump to announce The Stargate Project. Their companies, Softbank, OpenAI, and Oracle (respectively), along with MGX are listed as “initial equity funders” for $500 billion in investments over the next four years, “building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States.”

According to a statement from OpenAI, “Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI” are the initial tech partners, with a buildout “currently underway” starting in Texas as other sites across the country are evaluated. It also says that “Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI will closely collaborate to build and operate this computing system.”

One of President Donald Trump’s first moves in office was an executive order repealing birthright citizenship — something he promised to do but didn’t deliver on during his first term. The move, which is almost certainly unconstitutional, would affect more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country as well as people in the US on non-immigrant visas, including more than 580,000 people with H1-Bs. The executive order is slated to go into effect 30 days after its announcement, though two lawsuits filed in federal courts could slow or halt its implementation. 

Trump floated the idea of doing away with birthright citizenship in 2018. At the time, his critics pointed out that the move would require a constitutional amendment since birthright citizenship is enshrined under the 14th Amendment. “No president can change the Constitution with the stroke of a pen,” Beth Werlin, then-executive director of the American Immigration Council, said at the time. To get around this, Trump’s executive order attempts to reinterpret the 14th Amendment rather than amending or repealing it altogether. 

A federal website for information on reproductive rights and healthcare access is suddenly down, following Donald Trump’s inauguration yesterday. Reproductiverights.gov seemed to be offline as of last night, CBS reports.

The Biden administration launched the website in 2022 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. On top of information about abortion rights, the website also included resources on accessing preventative care, including breast and cervical cancer screenings, prenatal care, and HIV screening. (The Internet Archive has a snapshot of what the website looked like as recently as January 15th.)

In his executive actions on day one of his presidency, Donald Trump rescinded an executive order Joe Biden signed in 2023 to establish safety guidelines for generative AI.

The Biden-era order required developers of large AI models like OpenAI’s GPT lineup to share the results of safety tests with the US government. It also directed the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop standards for safety testing, and it tasked other federal agencies with assessing any potential chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, cybersecurity, or critical infrastructure risks AI might pose.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order signaling his intention to eliminate the Biden administration’s electric vehicle policies, which he has falsely labeled a “mandate.” Trump also signed an order signaling his intent to weaken tailpipe emission standards, which would be a major blow to the environment.

The orders were among a barrage of executive actions taken by Trump in the immediate aftermath of his inauguration on Monday, as he set to work undoing some of the accomplishments of the Biden administration. He also declared a “national energy emergency” in a move meant to weaken environmental standards and allow corporations to pollute more freely.

President Donald Trump has issued an executive order telling the Department of Justice to not enforce a rule that demands TikTok spin off from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, or face a ban.

The order, issued on Trump’s first day in office, is meant to effectively extend the deadline established by the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act for ByteDance to sell its stake by undercutting penalties on American companies like Apple and Google working with TikTok. It directs the attorney general “not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today to allow my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way.” The AG is supposed to “issue a letter to each provider stating that there has been no violation of the statute and that there is no liability for any conduct that occurred.”

Brendan Carr is now formally the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, giving him the power to set the agency’s agenda and usher through a host of regulations with major implications for the tech and media industries as soon as he has a Republican majority.

In a statement, Carr named a few areas of focus: “issues ranging from tech and media regulation to unleashing new opportunities for jobs and growth through agency actions on spectrum, infrastructure, and the space economy.”