Transcript
Jack in the Box Advertiser (0:02)
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Bell Lynn (0:28)
Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Thursday, January 30th. I'm Bell Lynn for the Wall Street Journal. All this week, we are exploring what President Trump's second term could mean for the tech industry over the next four years and beyond. Elon Musk is in the Trump White House as lead of the Department of Government Efficiency, or doge, which has been tasked with trimming costs, including even government employees. But Musk is no ordinary member of Trump's orbit. He's also a tech executive who Six companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and Xai, all of which could be impacted by the president's policies. Today we are looking at how Musk has made his mark on DC in the early days of Trump's presidency. WSJ columnist Tim Higgins tells us how Trump has dispatched Musk to various areas of government and outside of government and what that could mean over the next four years. All right, Tim, let's start with something.
Tim Higgins (1:37)
That'S front and center for some people.
Bell Lynn (1:39)
Deepseek, the Chinese AI company that said.
Tim Higgins (1:42)
It'S released a revolutionary AI model with some pretty broad implications for the American company OpenAI. So sticking with the topic of OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, what's going on between Elon Musk and Sam Altman and how does their dynamic potentially affect how Trump is thinking about AI and his relationships with Big Tech?
Unnamed Analyst (2:04)
It's a feud that goes way back. Elon Musk versus Sam Altman. Remember, these two created OpenAI. There was some disagreements over how it was going to go into the future. And Elon left, and he has been on the sidelines for a while now, critical of that company. He started his own AI company called xai. So that's a little bit of the backstory. So then when you see Sam Altman at the White House next to President Trump on day two of his second term. And Donald Trump is very, let's just say, verbose and very complimentary of Sam Walton calling me an expert essentially in AI, you can imagine that Elon Musk was not happy and he is not one who's shy. And he took to X, the social media platform, and just let it all out. Nothing was off limits. It seemed when it was coming to Sam Altman called him a swindler, suggesting maybe they didn't have the money for this massive project that they announced at the White House, a project of $500 billion to build the infrastructure needed for that AI future that Sam Altman is predicting is possible. So really sending the message, the White House sending a message. Donald Trump sending a message that just because Elon Musk is the first buddy, just because he's a guy who donated more than $250 million to help get him elected, just because he's essentially living on the floor in the White House complex, just because he is out there constantly on the X platform touting Trump, doesn't mean this is an exclusive relationship. That if Sam Altman or another one of these tech bro billionaires comes forward with announcements of jobs and massive American spending, Donald Trump clearly wants to be part of that. It's one of the things you go back to the first term that was so clear about the way he interacted with American business. He likes those headlines. He wants to put forth the message that America is growing and that there are jobs and there's investments. And it seems that Sam Altman picked up on that and was a very savvy play to get himself into the White House next to Trump to try to have that relationship.