United States President Donald Trump has seemingly formed an alliance with some of the country’s most notable tech billionaires.

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai are some of the tech tycoons who attended his inauguration. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has jumped on the bandwagon, praising him in a recent post following a proposed $500bn investment in artificial intelligence technology.

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The lavish praise may seem like a shift in the allegiance of tech leaders who have historically been seen as more supportive of Democrats than Republicans. That shift may be a result of Democrats under former President Joe Biden embracing antitrust efforts that targeted large tech companies and generally becoming more critical of billionaires.

These tech titans now seem to be eager to embrace a Republican leader who will cut their taxes, work against unionisation efforts, give them government contracts and let their companies be as big as they want them to be.

Zephyr Teachout, a lawyer, author and associate professor of law at Fordham University, says Big Tech leaders were not aligned with the Democrats, though, and that has become even more clear than it was recently.

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“Tech leaders were never with Democrats. They have always been aligned with power,” says Teachout. “In the Obama era, Google wrapped its arms and tentacles around and into the Obama administration, and for a combination of cultural reasons and reflected glow, there was a sense that Big Tech were, for Democrats, ‘our people’.”

As The Intercept reported in 2016, the White House under President Barack Obama had a very close relationship with Google. It reached the point where leaders from Google were offering the administration “expertise, services, advice, and personnel for vital government projects”.

Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says business leaders have been known to sway from the left to the right depending on who is in power. He says labour relations are also a big part of why tech executives are getting behind Trump.

“After the last Trump election … a lot of the companies had labour uprisings in their ranks, where elite engineers and other employees organised to oppose major lines of business, such as products for China and military contracts,” Schneider said.

“That took a big toll on these leaders, and they have made clear they want no more of it. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter gave a lot of other tech CEOs permission to purge their trust and safety teams. The embrace of Trumpism is a further extension of that path,” he added.

During the Biden years, many tech companies saw their employees organising to form unions and becoming more critical of their companies’ actions, such as entering into contracts with the US military. Musk has been a prominent union opponent for years and has been able to beat back resistance from the employees of his companies.

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Embracing Trump may feel politically expedient right now, but it may not end up being sound in the long term. Trump has repeatedly shown that he will dump associates who were once loyal to him the second they do something he does not like or are no longer useful. Tech CEOs who are feeling the love now may not be feeling it soon enough.

“The history we have seen from the first term is that, even if he’s your friend right now, that doesn’t mean he’s going to be your friend in a year,” says Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University. “Even if there’s an ideological alignment, and even if they think their companies will benefit from them sucking up to Trump, that’s going to happen right up until it doesn’t. He doesn’t have any loyalty to them.”

From Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist in the initial few months of his first term, to his many chiefs of staff to Anthony Scarmucci, communications director also in the first term, Trump was known for firing people who were once close to him during his first term. After all, “You’re fired” was his catchphrase as a reality TV show host.

Role for Democrats

Now that the sands have shifted, Democrats will have to decide how they will approach Big Tech going forward. Will they continue to pursue antitrust efforts and fight to tax billionaires? Or will they limit those efforts to appease the billionaires?

“Democrats should be part of the people — workers, small business owners, local communities whether in cities or small towns — and fight against the rapacious middlemen that steal wages, exploit consumers, and destroy the chance for small businesses to thrive,” Teachout says. “Democrats should be the party of small D democracy, and that’s incompatible with gargantuan octopuses of power.”

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Essentially, Teachout says Democrats should not pull back on their efforts to reform Big Tech and tax billionaires, and they should continue to fight for working-class people. She says Democrats need to lay out a clear agenda for breaking up Big Tech and recognise the threat that Big Tech poses to “innovation, equality, and democracy”.

“I think they need a fundamentally different approach. Rather than focusing on solving problems in tech from the top down, policy should focus on building power from the bottom up, empowering communities to solve their own problems rather than reinforcing the power of billionaire CEOs,” Schneider says.

“That means insisting that tech companies protect interoperability and the right for users to easily exit to other services. That means public investment in open-source software [including for AI] that communities can run and control,” Teachout said.

Social media platforms like Bluesky, which has become popular with left-leaning internet users who want to avoid platforms like Musk’s X, were built to be open and protect the rights of users. This may be an indication of the direction people on the left will be going when it comes to technology.

Lemley says Democrats probably will not be able to accomplish much of anything for at least the next two years while Republicans control the House and the Senate, but they can speak out about tech-related issues and get the public on their side. He said much of the public is already ready to get behind the kind of message they could be hammering.

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“I think the public sentiment against Big Tech has been pretty dramatically growing,” Lemley says. A January 24 poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows people do not support billionaires getting involved in government policy.

It is not yet clear if this breakup between Democrats and Big Tech will be permanent, but it is clear some in the Democratic Party were ready for it, as the algorithms that help spread disinformation on social media platforms have certainly not benefitted their messaging operations or their electoral odds.

“I think the new startups are going to have to make common cause with Democrats at some point, whether it’s immigration or education or simply taking science seriously, the Trump administration is not one that is actually positioned to encourage innovation in America or competitiveness in the long run,” Lemley says.