TikTok realized the advantage of bowing to autocrats. The tech barons at Trump’s inauguration are following suit
The biggest names in tech gathered in the Capitol’s rotunda to watch Trump’s inauguration  (Getty Images)
The biggest names in tech gathered in the Capitol’s rotunda to watch Trump’s inauguration (Getty Images)

We’ll never know what prayers were whispered by the billionaire tech barons — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon head Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Google boss Sundar Pichai — as they sat together inside St John’s Church in Washington DC Monday morning.

First the men crowded together at Donald Trump’s pre-inauguration church service, then they attended the ceremony at the Capitol itself, along with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI chief Sam Altman, and TikTok boss Shou Zi Chew.

But while we don’t know what they spoke about, their companies have access to our deepest fears, desires, conversations, and life updates.

The power concentrated among these men is stunning when you stop to ponder it. Across the world, Meta regulates the speech of an estimated 3.3 billion daily users — roughly 40 percent of all humanity. Amazon is the world’s second biggest retailer and its fifth biggest employer, governing a global marketplace of smaller vendors. Apple oversees the digital lives of 1.5 billion iPhone users, while SpaceX and OpenAI are shaping the future of space travel and AI respectively.

Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, arrive before the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, arrive before the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

So we can assume that these men are smart enough — or well enough advised — to understand what they are witnessing: not just the swearing in of a new president, but the birth of a fusion between corporate interests and American authoritarianism.

To understand this new frontier, look at what’s happened to TikTok over the past few days. The Supreme Court upheld a new law Friday, forcing the app to be sold off by its Chinese owners or else effectively banned across the U.S.

Saturday night, ahead of schedule, it went dark. And Sunday morning it was back, after an eleventh-hour promise from then-incoming president Trump to extend TikTok’s deadline. By Monday, TikTok CEO Chew sat next to Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, during the inauguration.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in the middle, with Tulsi Gabbard to the right (Getty Images)
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in the middle, with Tulsi Gabbard to the right (Getty Images)

The case against TikTok was always impossible for the American public to prove or disprove. We cannot know for sure if its Chinese parent company Bytedance has ever secretly handed over our data to China’s government, as Chinese law demands (TikTok denies it).

Nor do we really know whether it has secretly censored information or skewed its algorithm at China’s behest (there is some evidence of this, but no smoking gun). Both points boil down to a basic reality of internet governance in a multipolar world: every computer ultimately answers to the country where it’s plugged in.

That fact was easy for Americans to forget as long as American companies dominated the internet. Yet the rest of the world was keenly aware that their data could and would be collected and analysed by the U.S. government, via secret court rulings and surveillance programs such as PRISM. China recognised this early, building its so-called "Great Firewall" in order to maintain "digital sovereignty".