Tech’s Winners and Losers From Trump’s Election | Commentary

The 2024 election was one for the gamblers. Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi played a significant role in a U.S. presidential contest for the first time, correctly forecasting the outcome. Silicon Valley’s VCs loudly backed Trump, betting he’d win and deliver a return. And Elon Musk turned X into a megaphone for his Trump endorsement, putting all $44 billion on red.

Did these bets pay off? And who lost? Here’s a rundown of 2024’s winners and losers:

Winner: prediction markets

Heading into election day, both Polymarket and Kalshi had Donald Trump as the clear favorite, with his odds of winning hovering above 60%. Then, as the early votes came in, these sites made decisive moves toward Trump, pointing toward his victory just as the TV networks began reading exit polls. Prediction markets will now be viewed as reliable election prognosticators (at least until proven otherwise) helping them draw more attention and users. “This is a complete shift of the Overton Window,” Polymarket CEO Shayne Caplan said Thursday. “It is an inflection point in news and politics.” He may be right.

Loser: pollsters

Nate Silver, the world’s most famous election prognosticator, said the contest was tossup on election day. Ann Selzer, a famously accurate pollster, had Kamala Harris up three points in Iowa on the eve of the election. You know what happened next. The prediction markets — far more certain than Silver — accurately predicted Trump’s definitive victory. And Harris lost Iowa by 13 points. The timing was poor for the pollsters, who flopped just their upstart competitors started shining.

Winner: Elon Musk

Elon Musk is the most obvious winner in this election outside of Donald Trump. Musk bet the house — or at least the $44 billion he spent on X — on Trump winning and will cash in big. Expect the Trump administration to increase U.S. spending on its SpaceX partnership, and to clear regulations holding the company back. Musk will also likely play a role in the administration’s AI policy, an advantageous position given that he runs xAI, one of the world’s biggest AI companies. Musk still has some risk given that his relationship with Trump could implode over time. It’s a dynamic worth watching.

Loser: Sam Altman

Imagine OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walking into the White House for a conversation about AI regulation next year only to see Elon Musk sitting across the table. Altman cannot be thrilled that his nemesis will be so close to power after he’s spent years working to influence global AI policy. Trump’s election adds a layer of complexity to the OpenAI business, as if it needed more.

Winner: Facebook

Few people are happier this week than Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not about who won, but his social platform’s ability to stay out of the headlines. Yes, the campaigns spent a lot of money on Facebook ads. But Facebook, Instagram, and Threads all deemphasized politics content this week. I had to scroll down eight posts in my Facebook Newsfeed on Tuesday to find a single election post. Instagram had a “Vote’ sticker in Stories but filled Reels with the same benign, non-political content. And Threads mostly consisted of people complaining they could not follow the election there. What Zuckerberg sacrificed in engagement and relevance, he made up for with a peaceful election season.

Loser: billionaire newspaper owners

Jeff Bezos stopped his newspaper, The Washington Post, from endorsing a candidate right before the election. As did Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Both men then posted tweets congratulating Trump for his victory. If the billionaires decided to not endorse to maintain their papers’ credibility — as Bezos argued — they failed. Meddling owners driving coverage are as bad as agenda-driven reporters pushing narratives. It is very tempting to use a newspaper’s influence once you buy one. But once you do, the value drops.

Loser: global trade

Trump plans to put 20% tariffs on all goods coming into the United States and a 60% tariff on goods coming in from China. That’s going to create challenges for companies like Apple that rely heavily on imports from China. And it leads to questions about the future of companies like Shein and Temu, which use tax exemptions to ship low-cost items directly to U.S. consumers. Global trade is one of the clearest losers this week.

Winner: podcasters

If you wanted to label the 2024 election with a fun digital moniker, as per tradition, you could reasonably call it The TikTok Election or The Polymarket Election. But the truth is, it was the Podcast Election. Donald Trump made podcasts core to his media strategy, appearing with Lex Friedman, Theo Von, The Nelk Boys, Andrew Schultz, and Joe Rogan. It worked. Trump cut the Democrats’ lead among young voters by 11 percentage points. Harris appeared on a few podcasts, including the popular Call Her Daddy show, but she didn’t prioritize the medium like Trump. Expect this format to play an even more significant role in elections moving forward.

Loser: Big Tech antitrust

The Biden administration assembled the Avengers of Big Tech antitrust, installing Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice, Lina Khan at the FTC, and Tim Wu on the National Economic Council. It was the full mug, as they say, involving all three people that antitrust proponents hoped the administration would hire. Now, with mixed results, the Biden antitrust era comes to an end. Wu is already gone. Kanter may be replaced. And though VP-elect J.D. Vance has praised Khan, she is most likely to be replaced as FTC chair. It’s not like Big Tech slowed down all that much in the Biden era. But, at the very least, these companies will likely to pick up the M&A activity that effectively stopped during the past four years.

Winner: Silicon Valley

The tech industry was more involved in this election than any in recent memory. A handful of very outspoken VCs stood with Trump. Tech workers formed their own group supporting Harris. Both candidates stopped in the Bay Area to fundraise. Elon Musk took an outsized role in the Trump campaign. In this cycle (after trending this way for years) Silicon Valley became the business world’s most important political force. And for better or worse, we’re going to see how it plays out.

This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz.

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