Reid Hoffman, co-founder at LinkedIn and Inflection AI, shared his expectations for the incoming Trump administration in an opinion piece for the Financial Times. And while he appears hopeful that President-Elect Donald Trump could clear the way for more competition and faster innovation in the technology industry, Hoffman also expressed concerns around Trump providing certain individuals and companies with favored status in a way that could harm American innovation.
One individual with his hands in several technological pies that Hoffman says could gain from Trump’s ascendance is Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, and owner of The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X. Musk, alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, will also head up a planned advisory commission called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Hoffman called Musk’s ownership in xAI in particular “a serious conflict of interest.”
“Using his position to favor xAI in any way, such as awarding it government contracts, encouraging federal agencies to unfairly target AI companies, or imposing new regulations that limit exports will come at the expense of U.S. technological, economic and cultural security, and competitiveness,” Hoffman wrote.
Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink are all also in highly regulated sectors, the agencies governing which could experience layoffs or other influence from Musk in his role at DOGE.
Hoffman, who backed VP Kamala Harris’s nomination and has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s presidency, also highlighted the potential benefits and drawbacks to Trump’s support of crypto. He said that “ending arbitrary enforcement policies against the cryptocurrency industry” as seen under the Biden administration could create a “more stable environment for blockchain innovation.” But he questioned whether Trump will “use his new embrace of crypto, and his regulatory authority over it, as a way to privilege a few favored coins?”
Trump has his own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, with a native token that launched in October, and is reportedly working on a new stablecoin that can serve as a stand-in for the U.S. dollar. There have also been reports this week that Trump Media, the president-elect’s social media company, is in advanced talks to acquire cryptocurrency trading platform Bakkt.
Hoffman’s concerns that Trump might play favorites are not unfounded. As he noted in his piece, in Trump’s first term, the president-elect “targeted a number of iconic U.S. companies for personal and political reasons, creating constant chaos and uncertainty.”
For example, Trump frequently criticized Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, accusing the company of unfairly benefitting from USPS rates, which led to policies scrutinizing Amazon’s deals. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, now appears to be amenable to Trump, and has defended his decision to withhold the newspaper’s endorsement of Harris.
Musk also has a reputation for publicly challenging and criticizing competitors and people he disagrees with. The path to his acquisition of Twitter, now X, was littered with public critiques of the platform’s leadership and business model.
Hoffman — who helped fund E. Jean Caroll’s rape case against Trump, criticized him as a “convicted felon and pathological liar,” and has expressed fears that the president-elect would retaliate against him and others in business — ended on an upbeat note despite his skepticism.
“I very much hope that Trump succeeds wildly in enabling US entrepreneurship and innovation, increasing wages for workers and creating a country where every American is free to pursue their ambitions with dignity, purpose and a sense of belonging,” Hoffman wrote. “That’s why I will continue to do everything I can to build the next generation of companies that bring life-changing opportunities for individuals and society.”
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Thursday he is opening an investigation into the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) to determine whether the trade group’s members conspired to boycott “certain social media platforms.” While the press release doesn’t name social media platforms by name, one of them is likely Elon Musk’s X, which filed an antitrust lawsuit against the WFA in August and alleged that advertisers orchestrated a “systematic illegal boycott” of the platform.
“Trade organizations and companies cannot collude to block advertising revenue from entities they wish to undermine,” said Paxton in the press release. “Today’s document request is part of an ongoing investigation to hold WFA and its members accountable for any attempt to rig the system to harm organizations they might disagree with.”
Several of the WFA’s members – which includes global brands such as IBM, The Coca-Cola Company, and CVS Health – have stopped or significantly reduced the amount they spend for advertising on X since Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. There was an especially large exodus of advertisers, including Apple and Disney, from X in November 2023 following reports from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters that suggested Elon Musk’s X had failed to moderate its platform and remove illegal or hateful content. At the time, a White House spokesperson condemned Elon Musk for one of his personal posts, which it called “antisemitic and racist.”
Since then, X has sued many advertisers and ad groups, claiming these global brands were not reducing their ad spend based on individual decisions, but instead collectively conspiring to withhold billions of dollars in revenue from X. Now it appears Texas’ AG is bringing an investigation of his own.
“It’s still a major problem,” said Musk in response to Paxton’s Thursday post on X about the advertiser investigation.
Much like X’s lawsuit, Paxton zeroes in on a since-discontinued, not-for-profit organization within the WFA, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media or GARM. This was a US-based group founded in 2019 that included some of the country’s largest advertisers. It created frameworks and definitions for companies to understand hate speech, brand safety, and misinformation.
The AG’s investigations asks for documents and information from GARM that could reveal whether it told brands to boycott certain social media platforms that violated its brand safety standards.
When announcing her platform’s lawsuit against advertisers, X CEO Linda Yaccarino cited a July report from the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee looking into GARM’s practices. That report found:
Through GARM, large corporations, advertising agencies, and industry associations participated in boycotts and other coordinated action to demonetize platforms, podcasts, news outlets, and other content deemed disfavored by GARM and its members. This collusion can have the effect of eliminating a variety of content and viewpoints available to consumers.
GARM closed its doors in August, shortly after X sued, noting that it did not have the resources or finances to continue operating.
In the months leading up to this investigation, some advertisers have actually resumed ad spending on X, though at much lower rates than before. Comcast, IBM, Disney and other major brands reportedly returned to Musk’s platform this year. Furthermore, X announced in October that it reached an agreement with Unilever to resume its ad spending, and that the social media platform would drop its claims against Unilever, which X previously named as one of the companies that participated in the alleged boycott.
X and the World Federation of Advertisers did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
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X’s former top policy chief has taken a job at Tools for Humanity, the company building the tech to support World Network (formerly Worldcoin).
Nick Pickles, previously head of global affairs at X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, will serve as chief policy officer for Tools for Humanity, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman co-founded five years ago.
Pickles revealed the move in a Reuters interview published on Thursday, adding that he was “optimistic” about incoming president Donald Trump’s tech regulatory proposals.
Pickles spent years at Twitter before Musk acquired the company and rebranded it to X, working with regulators to shape proposals and represent the company in global forums. He was promoted in July.
Musk and Pickles’ new boss don’t exactly get along. Earlier this year, Musk sued Altman and OpenAI for allegedly abandoning the AI startup’s nonprofit mission in violation of contractual terms. Pickles declined to comment on the litigation when asked by Reuters.
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