President Donald Trump kicked off the first day of his presidency by signing a flurry of executive actions, including halting enforcement of the TikTok ban and rolling back the Biden administration’s artificial intelligence order.
Having already run the country once before, Trump entered the presidency with the goal of hitting the ground running, having already selected nominees and chairs for key agencies that oversee tech. This time, Trump has the backing of many tech billionaires who attended his inauguration and showed up at his home in Mar-a-Lago.
Read on below as we keep track of all the ways Trump is leaving his mark on tech in his first 100 days in office.
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Another change from Google’s maps team.Google announced yesterday that Maps in the US will show Gulf of America and Mount McKinley, and CNBC today reports that the company’s maps division has added the US to its list of “sensitive” countries. CNBC says that that classification is reserved for “states with strict governments and border disputes” and includes countries like “China, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, among others.”
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Did Elon Musk write the federal worker buyout email? -
The Trump administration sent a memo instructing federal agencies to pause grant, loan, and other financial assistance programs. It’s a catch-all for a wide range of programs President Donald Trump has crusaded against and it’s unclear what specifically is in the crosshairs with this move, but it seems to target Biden-era programs to deploy clean energy.
But just before the funding freeze was set to take effect on Tuesday, a federal judge paused it until February 3rd at 5 PM, and could extend the pause after a hearing on Monday. The administrative stay will let the government continue to disburse only funds that have already been authorized. The freeze was supposed to stop funds for policies Trump rolled back through executive orders, “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”
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DeepSeek wakes up Trump.The president has called the Chinese AI startup “a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.” DeepSeek’s models are much cheaper to build than those of leading AI companies and, ever the businessman, Trump sees the appeal: “Instead of spending billions and billions you’ll spend less and you’ll come up with, hopefully, the same solution.”
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Trump says Microsoft wants TikTok (again).
Asked by reporters if Microsoft is in talks to take over TikTok’s US arm, the president was succinct: “I would say yes.” The company is reported to be among several investors, including Oracle, working on a joint bid. Microsoft previously tried to buy the social site back in 2020, which CEO Satya Nadella called the “strangest thing I’ve ever worked on.”
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Google said today that it plans to update Google Maps to reflect President Trump’s January 20th executive order to change the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali to the Gulf of America and Mount McKinley, respectively.
The company noted on X the updated nomenclature will appear once the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated.
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Without going into detail about what might happen to the $52 billion in subsidies from the CHIPS Act under his administration, Donald Trump said tariffs on foreign computer chips, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals are coming “in the near future.” He also namechecked DeepSeek’s AI releases, saying, “…coming up with a faster method of AI and less expensive, that’s good. I view that as a positive if it is fact and it is true, and nobody knows, but I view that as a positive.”
In the speech at the House GOP Issues Conference held at the Trump National Doral Resort in Miami Monday afternoon, he said that to return the production of these goods to the US, “we don’t want to give them billions of dollars like this ridiculous program Biden has.” Instead the incentive for manufacturers will be “they will not want to pay a tax.”
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Ever since Elon Musk closed his deal to buy Twitter he’s claimed the company, now called X, is in “a very dire situation from a revenue standpoint.”
Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that banks are preparing a coordinated move to sell off some of the $13 billion in debt they loaned Musk to finance the deal. It mentions an email sent to employees this month, also confirmed by The Verge, where the Chief Twit said, “…we’ve witnessed the power of X in shaping national conversations and outcomes,” but also claimed, “Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even.”
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Trump bends to the tech oligarchy.Here is their reward:
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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.
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Less Trump, unless you want it.As The Verge’s policy editor, I know how exhausting the Trump administration news firehose can be. There’s truly need-to-know stuff like the future of the Paris climate agreement and the TikTok ban. But we’re now collecting some updates in a stream whose posts won’t all appear on the front page, so readers get a break from the full weight of Trump’s random off-the-cuff proposals and his regulators’ antics. That said, we’re entering a new era in tech policy, so I hope you’ll periodically check it out!
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Brendan Carr amps up his censorship campaign.
Rosenworcel said the commission was rejecting complaints that “seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment”. Then, on Wednesday, the FCC said in a series of orders the complaints had been dismissed “prematurely based on an insufficient investigatory record”.
A fourth complaint, against a Fox station, has not been reinstated.
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NASA’s climate website is ‘moving.’
It’s “going to look a little different” as it migrates to a more general science site, according to NASA. President Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and researchers have been archiving environmental data in case it starts to disappear from federal websites.
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Satya Nadella on Elon’s Stargate accusations: “All I know is I’m good for my $80 billion.”
Nadella said he’s “not in the details” of investments in The Stargate Project, confirming only the $80 billion Microsoft will invest annually in building up Azure to handle AI.
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Dozens of popular subreddits are banning links to X after Elon Musk made a gesture that historians and human rights groups have described as a Nazi salute. Communities that have instituted a ban on links to X include r/formula1, r/military, r/nursing, r/TwoXChromosomes, and r/nintendo.
The shift is spreading across Reddit after neo-Nazis celebrated Musk’s speech at a rally on Monday for Donald Trump’s inauguration. During the speech, Musk twice raised his arm in a salute that historians, elected officials, and organizations that support Holocaust survivors have observed as a Nazi salute. During his speech, Musk places his hand on his chest and throws his arm forward at an angle, holding it mid-air for a few moments. “My heart goes out to you,” he says to supporters. Some supporters of Musk have defended him, saying the gesture went along with his words.
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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.
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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.
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A PSA for all those wondering why you’re suddenly following Trump and Vance on social.There is, alas, no grand conspiracy here. It’s just that every four years, on X, Instagram, and Facebook, accounts like @POTUS, @VP, and @WhiteHouse are transferred to the incoming administration. Here’s how it went down in 2021, and with the first Trump term.
There are people who say they never followed these accounts and now suddenly do, which would be much stranger. I have a theory about this, but if it happened to you I want to know!
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Trump is absolutely going to make ByteDance sell TikTok or shut down again.
Extreme First Amendment issues with having the government own a social platform aside, it’s striking how he keeps talking about “permits” even though nothing in the TikTok bill has anything to do with permits. Once a real-estate guy, always a real-estate guy, I suppose.
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Trump is discussing a 10 percent tariff on imports from China.
“We’re talking about a tariff of 10 percent on China based on the fact that they’re sending fentanyl to Mexico and Canada,” President Donald Trump said during today’s press conference where he also helped announce The Stargate Project. The administration is “looking at” imposing the tariff on February 1st.
You can watch Trump’s comments about the tariffs on YouTube.
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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.
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Donald Trump acknowledged his meme coin today.
Something tells me he’s not going to divest himself of it.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
