What’s next for tech giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft with Trump win

Donald Trump at a Philadelphia campaign rally. 

Donald Trump has won the presidency — and the tech world is waiting to see what his administration will mean for key issues such as AI regulation, immigration, antitrust cases, and mergers and acquisitions.

Trump has promised to assemble a different cabinet for his second time in the White House. His advisors are likely to include some of the business leaders that backed his campaign, not least among them one of the most powerful figures in tech: Elon Musk.

In an election-night speech, Trump showered praise on Musk, marveling at his SpaceX rockets.

“Elon, he is an amazing guy,” Trump said early Wednesday morning.

There’s a lot at stake for the sector, with a slew of companies facing antitrust battles. And with immigration top of mind for many voters, H-1B visas could be impacted, dealing a potential blow to tech companies experiencing staffing shortages amid an AI hiring frenzy.

Here’s how Trump’s second term could impact Big Tech.

On the campaign trail, Trump threatened prosecution if reelected

Though Trump has cozied up to one major tech leader — Musk — others are in his crosshairs.

While on the campaign trail, Trump threatened retribution against some tech companies, including jailing Meta’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg.

He threatened to imprison “election fraudsters,” including Zuckerberg, who has a long history with the president. It’s unclear whether Trump will follow through on his threats.

Trump also heavily criticized Google throughout his campaign, saying the tech giant was “rigged” and didn’t display positive stories about him, calling the company “very bad,” and suggesting he’d “do something” about its power.

In September, Trump escalated his feud with the company by threatening to order the Justice Department to prosecute Google “at the maximum levels” during his second term. He accused the tech giant of engaging in illegal behavior and interfering in the election with the stories it displayed on its search results page.

The Justice Department usually operates independently of the president; Trump said on the campaign trail that the criminal justice system had been weaponized against him and threatened to do the same to his political rivals.

That norm-breaking change could mean more regulatory issues for the likes of Google — if Trump makes good on his promise.

Tariffs remain the biggest question mark

Barclays warned in September that the tech industry would be one of the hardest hit by Trump’s plan for wide-ranging tariffs.

“While the new proposed tariffs would have a modest direct negative impact on corporate earnings if implemented, the second order effects from higher cost inflation and slowing economic growth would be an incremental headwind to corporate earnings and cause further pain,” the bank said.

Mark Lemley, a professor who’s the director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology, warned that Trump’s plan for huge tariffs on foreign goods could also harm tech companies during his second term.

“A Trump administration will involve a US withdrawal from the world and the imposition of giant tariffs,” Lemley told B-17. “That is likely to have devastating consequences for US tech companies that sell in foreign markets as well as crippling domestic consumption.”

Retail analysts told B-17 the industry was following the question of tariffs extremely closely.

“You can look at that in two ways,” GlobalData’s Neil Saunders said. “You can say it’s a negotiating strategy, and it won’t actually come to pass, or you can say it will come to pass, maybe in a diluted form and not that severe.”

“It’s causing a lot of nervousness,” he added.

If Trump does follow through on his campaign proposals, it would mean significant changes to the way retailers do business.

“It would be a massive upheaval to most of the cost structures for these companies,” Chris Walton, a former Target executive, said.

Given the expense of reorganizing supply chains, Walton said, large retailers are still researching their options and making any simple adjustments rather than committing early to a new strategy.

On antitrust cases, ‘most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked’

Antitrust cases are already underway for the major Big Tech companies — including Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon — but normally, there’s not much an incoming president could or would do to alter current cases, George Hay, an antitrust expert who’s a law professor at Cornell University, told B-17.

“It’s very rare that, at the presidential level, there’s any attempt to influence the course of cases which have already been filed. Those have a life of their own,” Hay said. “They depend on the judge, the courts, the lawyers who carry on a case. It’s extraordinarily unusual for the administration to become at all active.”

Hay said that while most presidents wouldn’t have any say on existing cases, “Trump is a bit more of a wild card.”

But he added he couldn’t think of “any reason why he would interfere with cases that have already been filed,” adding: “It would be quite an extraordinary thing to do.”

While not much is expected to change for current antitrust cases, Hay said, Trump may take a less aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement than Vice President Kamala Harris would have.

Besides, Hay said, “most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked,” meaning there aren’t many new antitrust cases that could be filed against the biggest tech companies.

One factor that could change things is who Trump appoints as the assistant attorney general leading the antitrust division.

Hay said that if Trump appoints an experienced, practicing lawyer, “even if that lawyer is relatively conservative, I don’t think things are going to change very much.”

“The changes we’ve observed over history are when the Republicans appointed an academic,” Hay added. “That’s where you see some radical changes.”

But overall, he said, not much is likely to change on the antitrust front under Trump’s second administration.

“So if I had very strong views about antitrust, I could sleep well at night regardless of who gets appointed,” Hay said. “Because it’s a system with laws and courts and people, and most of the people and most of the courts, and most of the laws are not going to change.”

Republicans have historically been ‘more merger-friendly’

Hay said he expected that “more big mergers will be proposed under Trump,” and Dan Romanoff, a senior equity research analyst at Morningstar, suggested that Trump was less likely to oppose major deals.

More aggressive merger guidelines were put in place under President Joe Biden in 2023; Hay said that now, under Trump, “those are going to go, and they’ll be replaced.”

But still, he said, new guidelines wouldn’t have much impact on the biggest tech companies.

Anna Rathbun, the chief investment officer at CBIZ, told B-17 that M&A activity had been low for the past two years because of low interest rates — not because of an antagonistic attitude from the Biden administration.