Why Trump and tech CEOs are together

January 26, 2025

By Kim Komando

This past week, someone called me a “f***ing MAGA c***” in the comments for my newsletter, The Current. That reader didn’t leave a name (surprise) and clearly didn’t appreciate what I said about Stargate: “[The] announcement by President Trump, along with the biggest tech CEOs, is the most consequential technical project of the century.”

First, let’s address a question that lit up my inbox on Inauguration Day: “Why are all the tech CEOs surrounding President Trump?”

Inauguration: A reflection of the times

The presidential inauguration is a time capsule of who and what matters most in America. Seats go to the most powerful: Former presidents, military leaders, Supreme Court justices and others handpicked by the incoming president.

On Trump’s guest list? Tech titans including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and Apple’s Tim Cook. Fun fact: Five of the top 10 richest people in the world were there, representing a combined net worth of over $900 billion.

It wasn’t long ago steel magnates like Andrew Carnegie or automotive tycoons like Henry Ford were center stage. Today, it’s tech CEOs. Why? Because government policies on data privacy, antitrust and AI shape entire industries. In other words, tech is driving our economy.

Stargate is a moonshot

This $500 billion investment, led by Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son, is the most ambitious AI project ever. Think of it as the tech world’s Apollo program, building a massive AI infrastructure and energy solutions to drive breakthroughs.

Stargate is expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and revive U.S. chip production, which has fallen to just 12% of global manufacturing.

Revolutionizing medicine and more

Stargate’s AI is going to change medicine, for starters. It will detect biomarkers and DNA mutations signaling diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s many years before symptoms appear. It will also revolutionize:

• Agriculture: Optimizing crop yields and robotics in farming.
• Education: Personalized learning for every student.
• Transportation: Self-driving cars, trains and faster air travel.

• Finance: Smarter investments by analyzing real-time market trends.
• Environment: Earlier warnings for hurricanes, wildfires and floods.
• Warfare: This is where it gets serious — think autonomous drones that can fly into high-risk areas, reducing the danger for soldiers, or AI that analyzes satellite images to detect threats, deploy defensive systems in real time and even predict enemy movements.

The global AI race

China is investing $20 billion annually in AI to become the world leader by 2030. Let me tell you, the nation that dominates AI will define the future of geopolitics and economics. We need that nation to be us.

Sure, AI’s promise comes with risks. How do we ensure fairness in AI decision-making? Protect our privacy with a vast AI surveillance system? Address job displacement as automation grows? Let’s not forget AI data centers require an enormous amount of electricity, sometimes as much as what’s used by entire cities.

Despite the challenges, I’m hopeful. I want diseases to be a history lesson and innovation without bounds. Call me whatever names you want, but what I do on my national radio shows, podcasts and this newsletter isn’t and has never, ever been about politics. My mission is to share with you what matters in the tech world now and in the future. And we’ll have some fun along the way, too!