As TikTok stares down an impending federal ban, Donald Trump’s win in the presidential election could be a lifeline. It’s a plot twist for the embattled, Chinese-owned social media company. During Trump’s last presidency, the president-elect had been the one to initiate the calls to ban TikTok, which only petered out because he didn’t win […]
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Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here! This week probably wasn’t the best one to make any type of big announcement. But when it comes to startups, there are quite a few contrarians, leaving us […]
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President-elect Donald Trump looped in Elon Musk on his phone call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, according to Axios. As one of Trump’s top campaign donors, Musk has forged a strong alliance with the incoming president. The Tesla CEO has been rumored as a candidate for a position in Trump’s cabinet, and his […]
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Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! We’re just two days past the election, and there is already a ton of speculation about what another Trump presidency will mean for transportation and tech — […]
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Following Donald Trump’s election victory, thousands of bettors anticipate a potential $450 million payout from online betting sites, says Reuters. As Trump’s odds surged on so-called prediction markets near the end of the race, platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket gained attention for diverging sharply from traditional polls, which suggested a much closer race. Talking with […]
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A few weeks before the US presidential election, Donald Trump suggested that a breakup of Google's search business may not be an appropriate remedy to destroy the tech giant's search monopoly.
"Right now, China is afraid of Google," Trump said at a Chicago event. If that threat were dismantled, Trump suggested, China could become a greater threat to the US, because the US needs to have "great companies" to compete.
Trump's comments came about a week after the US Department of Justice proposed remedies in the Google monopoly trial, including mulling a breakup.
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Early Wednesday morning, Donald Trump became the presumptive winner of the 2024 US presidential election, setting the stage for dramatic changes to federal AI policy when he takes office early next year. Among them, Trump has stated he plans to dismantle President Biden's AI Executive Order from October 2023 immediately upon taking office.
Biden's order established wide-ranging oversight of AI development. Among its core provisions, the order established the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) and lays out requirements for companies to submit reports about AI training methodologies and security measures, including vulnerability testing data. The order also directed the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop guidance to help companies identify and fix flaws in their AI models.
Trump supporters in the US government have criticized the measures, as TechCrunch points out. In March, Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) warned that reporting requirements could discourage innovation and prevent developments like ChatGPT. And Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) characterized NIST's AI safety standards as an attempt to control speech through "woke" safety requirements.
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Now that the US presidential election has been called for Donald Trump, the sweeping tariffs regime that Trump promised on the campaign trail seems imminent. For the tech industry, already burdened by the impact of tariffs on their supply chains, it has likely become a matter of "when" not "if" companies will start spiking prices on popular tech.
During Trump's last administration, he sparked a trade war with China by imposing a wide range of tariffs on China imports, and President Joe Biden has upheld and expanded them during his term. These tariffs are taxes that Americans pay on restricted Chinese goods, imposed by both presidents as a tactic to punish China for unfair trade practices, including technology theft, by hobbling US business with China.
As the tariffs expanded, China has often retaliated, imposing tariffs on US goods and increasingly limiting US access to rare earth materials critical to manufacturing a wide range of popular products. And any such retaliation from China only seems to spark threats of more tariffs in the US—setting off a cycle that seems unlikely to end with Trump imposing a proposed 60 percent tax on all China imports. Experts told Ars that the tech industry expects to be stuck in the middle of the blow-by-blow trade war, taking punches left and right.
© Yaorusheng | Moment
Elon Musk — the billionaire CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, and the owner of The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X — took a sharp swing to the right this election to support President-elect Donald Trump, using his vast wealth, influence, and megaphone on X to influence the outcome of the election. Musk’s support came […]
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A grueling election cycle has come to a close. Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the U.S., and, with Republicans in control of the Senate — and possibly the House — his allies are poised to bring sea change to the highest levels of government. The effects will be acutely felt in the […]
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Yesterday, Donald Trump won a second presidential term from American voters. His first term was marked, among other things, by attempts to water down environmental laws and regulations aimed at the auto industry. And as a candidate in 2024, Trump has promised plenty of disruption to the sector through both trade policy and an abrogation of the government's commitment to fight climate change. Here are some of the more significant changes we think are coming.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was one of President Joe Biden's signature policy achievements, part of a $450 billion climate package. One of its many sections revised the way we incentivize consumers to buy electric vehicles, with an update to the clean vehicle tax credit that requires final assembly in North America, as well as ever-increasing amounts of US-sourced battery components and minerals to be eligible.
But such policies are not loved by the Republican Party. During his first term, Trump repeatedly criticized EVs, saying that "all-electric is not going to work," and he vociferously attacked EVs during his campaign, telling supporters at his party's national convention in July that "I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one," referring to a current White House goal to reach 50 percent EV adoption by 2030, and calling the most significant climate legislation ever "the new green scam."
© Emily Elconin/Bloomberg via Getty Images
While Trump's administration is unlikely to be supportive of certain climate tech startups, it will have a harder time ending the broadly popular law.
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I was interviewing Franz Nicolay about his book, Band People, and at one point I asked him, “Where do you think ambition comes from?”
Before he could answer, I blurted out, “I think it comes from a big hole in you!”
We laughed. He didn’t disagree.
Here’s Tony Schwartz on the two lessons he learned from being Donald Trump’s ghostwriter:
The first lesson is that a lack of conscience can be a huge advantage when it comes to accruing power, attention and wealth in a society where most other human beings abide by a social contract. The second lesson is that nothing we get for ourselves from the outside world can ever adequately substitute for what we’re missing on the inside.
Casually, and anecdotally, this is what I’ve often observed in my (thankfully limited) experiences around famous or quasi-famous people.
First, it’s hard to tell in the “suck-cessful” what’s ambition or drive or hard work or whatever you want to call it and what’s sociopathy.
Second, fame never fixes anything for anybody.
Because nothing from the outside will fill what’s missing on the inside.
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