The gilded age of the tech barons is upon us

Trump's embrace of Silicon Valley tycoons is creating an oligopoly

- Matthew d'Ancona

Ceremony reveals where power truly lies. In the Capitol Rotunda in Washington DC on Monday, as Donald Trump was sworn back into office, the pecking order of the new regime was very clear indeed. Seated in front of the incoming Cabinet were the tech titans and (a courtesy granted to very few) their wives and partners. There they all were: Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman of Meta; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Tim Cook, CEO of Apple; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Sergey Brin, its co-founder.

As if to rub it in, senior Republican governors such as Ron DeSantis of Florida — once frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination — and Greg Abbott of Texas were pointedly exiled to an overflow room. Last Wednesday, Joe Biden warned in his farewell address of the coming of a new “tech-industrial complex”. In truth, it is already here.

The exclusivity of the moment (an indoor inauguration being, by definition, smaller scale) dramatised this radical concentration of power. The UK and the EU will struggle to adapt to this second Maga revolution. And, in truth, there is only so much they can do. Trump will not be remotely fazed by, say, greater consolidation of EU power in Brussels, or by the rise of a strongman leader in this country. In any case, he has already selected Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Giorgia Meloni of Italy, Boris Johnson (unexpectedly present in the Rotunda) and Nigel Farage (not in the VIP section, to his evident dismay) as his principal points of contact on this side of the Atlantic. Everyone else is second tier, or irrelevant.

A new order