🤝💼 Everyone Wants to Be Friends with Trump, Altman Is the Quickest, and Musk Is Jealous 😤

🚀💰 The Stargate Announcement and Its $500 Billion: The Grand Beginning of Trump’s AI Plan, Altman’s Approach, and Its Impact on Other Tech Giants 🌐🤖

President Donald Trump with Sam Altman (OpenAI), Larry Ellison (Oracle), and Masayoshi Son (SoftBank) at the White House during the presentation of Stargate.

This week, there’s a lot going on, but it’s worth detailing and connecting what has happened behind the scenes, away from what has been published and discussed in traditional media. These events are incredibly significant and provide an excellent explanation of the moment we are living in — more thrilling than ever before.

It turns out that everyone now wants to be friends with Donald Trump, sever ties with their Democratic past, and become part of the new era — a clearly technopolitical era where artificial intelligence and the presidency of the United States collide, shaking the entire world.

What’s intriguing about this case is that it had to be a president like Trump who could interpret and capitalize on the transformative power of AI and technology. Perhaps it’s an electoral move, maybe an economic interest, or possibly a strange mix of intuition and boldness that makes him a daring, controversial, and successful leader. Interestingly, his return to the White House has caused a seismic shift in Silicon Valley, with aftershocks in Texas and Washington.

It’s likely that the change of allegiance by the tech leaders mentioned here — already well-known — marks a turning point for Silicon Valley and its relationship with the Democrats. The speed with which Trump has repealed the Biden administration’s AI regulations, the staging of the first major announcement of the new president’s AI plan in the Oval Office alongside Sam Altman (OpenAI), Larry Ellison (Oracle), and Masayoshi Son (SoftBank), Elon Musk’s childish reaction on X saying that the Stargate project doesn’t have the $500 billion it promised, and especially Altman’s gestures and words alongside Trump, are a real bombshell in the AI landscape as we knew it until now. The paradigm shift is here. The political leader who wants to capitalize on the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence is named Donald Trump, and the tech leader who wants to make it happen is named Sam Altman.

A Picture No One Expected

Who would’ve thought the image would look like this — not a picture of Trump with Musk? Stargate is a highly ambitious project that Trump has cleverly embraced from the first moment of his presidency, sending a clear message to other tycoons and tech leaders, as well as the entire world, especially China and a navel-gazing Europe, as evidenced by the Davos conferences.

Meanwhile, Trump has combined Musk’s inclusion in his administration with his photo op alongside Altman but, most importantly, with initial governmental decisions that conflict with Musk’s interests, particularly regarding Tesla and electric vehicles. It will be essential to closely monitor the tension and relationship between Trump and Musk, beyond the tired narrative exploited by pundits who latch onto any inappropriate tweet or gesture — like the Nazi salute during the president’s inauguration — to caricature, ridicule, or sensationalize the situation.

While some dwell on the Nazi salute or the TikTok ban moratorium in the U.S., they seem to forget to mention Stargate. They also overlook the fact that all the CEOs and owners of major tech companies were present at the inauguration, except for Bill Gates and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.

Priscilla Chan, with her husband Mark Zuckerberg (Meta); Lauren Sanchez, with her partner, magnate Jeff Bezos; Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and magnate Elon Musk on Monday at Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Altman Moves Fast, Others Scramble to Keep Up

Altman wasted no time, offering effusive praise for Trump in the Oval Office and on social media, including a tweet this Thursday. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos won’t take long to follow his lead and replicate his audacity. Meta’s recent announcements — removing fact-checkers on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in the U.S., company-wide layoffs, Zuckerberg’s unfiltered comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the removal of equality policies, and his backlash against anything “woke” — pale in comparison to Altman’s efficiency, speed, and strategy with Stargate and Trump.

As for Jeff Bezos, it’s worth noting that he preemptively censored his newspaper, The Washington Post, from endorsing Democratic candidate Kamala Harris during a campaign phase that already hinted at a likely Republican winner. Bezos is now ready to confront his editorial staff to redefine the paper’s direction in the Trump 2.0 era, which has already begun. However, paradoxically, the Amazon owner wields less influence than his fellow “tech multibillionaires” (as Pedro Sánchez would say) in editorial terms, despite owning a traditional media giant like The Washington Post. Meanwhile, Musk with X, Zuckerberg with Facebook and Instagram, Sundar Pichai — with Google, who also attended the inauguration — and even Sam Altman with ChatGPT (increasingly editorial with its integration into Microsoft Bing Search), or Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who also didn’t miss the party, seem to hold more sway.

It’s a striking metaphor of the moment we’re living in: the Amazon magnate faces more challenges and wields less influence with The Washington Post under Trump’s presidency than his peers, who control social networks or search engines rather than traditional media.

Pedro Sánchez in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum.

Europe, AI, and Regulatory Paralysis

These past few days have been crucial — and forgive me if this newsletter is longer than usual — but the events of the past few hours are far from minor. AI superagents are on the horizon. China is waging a true open-source battle, and its tools are becoming increasingly useful in the West. Meanwhile, Pedro Sánchez heads to Davos to take on the “tech multibillionaires,” or as Biden calls them, “tech oligarchs.”

The current moment is incredibly challenging for any progressive European observer because analyzing these developments through the classic political dichotomies of right vs. left or good vs. evil is incompatible with the global technological and geopolitical logic now taking hold. Technology is reshaping the rules, and geostrategy is being shaken with unprecedented energy.

Going to Davos to quote Peter Thiel — who famously said that freedom and democracy are incompatible — as a simplification of what this statement represents in the U.S., Europe, or China, while Europe and Spain are known for excessive regulation that even Mario Draghi wouldn’t endorse… well, what can I say?

Add to this the rollout of a national AI model, ALIA, that is overpriced, delayed, and underperforming compared to Meta’s 2023 models, and what can I say? Combine this with poor interterritorial sensitivity, such as the lack of linguistic diversity in the model’s training, the marginalization of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and the exclusion of regional media in co-official languages from digital transformation funds — and it’s hard to be optimistic.

Next week, even more and even better. ✨ Don’t forget to share this newsletter and recommend it to your contacts and friends. 📩 Now more than ever, AI and technology are essential. 🤖🚀