Elizabeth Lopatto, writing for The Verge:

President Donald Trump is being sworn in today, and we are about to find out what happens when the government is actually as corrupt as our most brain-rotted conspiracy theorists imagine.

“Trump Inauguration, Awash in Cash, Runs Out of Perks for Big Donors,” The New York Times reported, somewhat inaccurately. Sure, the Trump people ran out of VIP tickets, but that’s not what the donors were buying. This is pure, obvious corruption — the kind that used to trigger shame, back when we were a populace that could still experience that emotion.

Our tech overlords all have problems, and they want to buy the solutions. I guess it was easier than making products people actually like.

“First Buddy” Elon Musk spent at least a quarter of a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. Corporations and wealthy donors have sent half a billion more since he was elected. Amazon, Google, Uber, Microsoft, and Meta donated $1 million each to Trump’s inauguration, as did Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. (Joe Biden’s inauguration hardly received this kind of largesse.) “In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump said in December. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the three wealthiest men on Earth, are reportedly attending the inauguration; they were to be seated with elected officials and cabinet nominees, before the ceremony was moved indoors. (Cook is also reportedly attending.) Musk will have office space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, according to The New York Times.

So what are these men buying?

Real market opportunities are rarer than they used to be. Tech executives and investors have become openly resentful about their products’ societal repercussions and an unconscionable lack of adulation from the citizenry. Zuckerberg in particular seems bored with Facebook, his major moneymaker, and has been searching for a new toy. He spent at least $46 billion plus the cost of a company rebrand on the Metaverse, only to find that his Big New Thing didn’t have legs. His latest Big New Thing is AR glasses, which are heavily reliant on whatever AI (and, likely, tariff) policy Trump will dictate.

Nearly every major tech company has at least one lawsuit pending. Apple has an antitrust suit pending. Google just lost one. There’s also a Federal Trade Commission suit that could peel Instagram and WhatsApp off Meta. Trump cares little about the actual purpose of antitrust enforcement: making companies compete for customers with good products. All the pending litigation is just leverage for Trump to punish anyone who doesn’t fall in line. And Silicon Valley is more disinterested in consumers than ever. “Get out of jail free” is a pretty famous card in the game of Monopoly, after all.

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Keeping Trump happy could be expensive, but cheaper than legal battles. Selective legal enforcement puts every company under a sword of Damocles — make the wrong move and you can be cut to shreds by lackeys in Congress or the FCC. Just look at TikTok’s fawning appeals to Dear Leader. The Supreme Court has upheld the TikTok ban, but if Trump only punishes the people he doesn’t like, nothing happens to TikTok. (Crucially, the law’s still on the books to keep other Chinese competitors in line.) Did I mention TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew got a front-row invite to Trump’s inauguration from the man himself?

I suppose I have to explain why this makes the US a shittier place to live, given the “savvy” cynicism I’ve seen about how it’s all rotten here already. Tech companies, padding their bottom lines, have made their experiences worse, a phenomenon so widespread and well-recognized that now there’s slang for it. Whether the scandals are scams, child predation, worker exploitation, or violations of user privacy — pick your poison — Trump has offered tech a way to buy itself out of consequences. That makes life tangibly worse for everyone who isn’t a billionaire.

There are those who will say that this is good — that the corruption is happening in the open instead of the shadows. But public, open corruption allows even more rottenness to fester in secret. Consider all the strongman governments; besides their advances in bribery, what did they innovate? Silicon Valley’s leaders fashion themselves as titans of industry, but what they’re really building is a golden age of grift.

Things should be interesting in the coming days...