I have documented how President Trump has been Big Tech’s greatest supporter abroad, shaking down other countries to remove taxes and regulations on U.S. technology firms. He has also delivered for the industry at home.
A new report from Public Citizen looks at 142 federal investigations against tech corporations that were handed over to Trump from the Biden administration, for a host of securities, labor, consumer protection, anti-discrimination, and other violations. According to the analysis, 47 of the 142 investigations, nearly 1 in 3, have been either halted or withdrawn, including examinations of Activision, eBay, Hewlett Packard, Meta, Microsoft, PayPal, Rocket Mortgage, SpaceX, Telsa, and more.
While investigations do not connote definitive misconduct, the scale of the effort suggests alternative motivations, including the over $1 billion in political spending tech firms have made over the past two years.
Almost half of the 47 halted or withdrawn actions affect the crypto industry, where Trump has reversed his skepticism and turned to crypto as a moneymaker that now represents the majority of his personal wealth, according to Accountable.US. The Trump administration has formally pulled back on crypto enforcement, and several executives from companies previously in legal hot water joined Trump in his signing ceremony for stablecoin legislation known as the GENIUS Act.
Another 11 dropped cases involve fintech companies that merge technology and financial operations. The sector benefited from the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at the direction of tech moguls like Elon Musk, whose ambition to turn social media site X into a payment network is well documented. Investigations into fintech consumer deception, improper and excessive fees, and even fraud have been dismissed.
While leaders in these sectors have often decried the “weaponization” of the Biden administration enforcing the law on their companies, weaponization through selective enforcement is much easier to discern, and fully on display since Trump’s inauguration, where the largest tech CEOs watched just a couple of rows from where the president took the oath of office.
The disappearance of tech industry scrutiny should lead to questions over whether more high-profile cases, like antitrust lawsuits against Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Google (which has already been found guilty of monopolization twice), will be deep-sixed as well. “The elimination of agency independence means enforcement investigations and lawsuits will not proceed if President Trump wants to kill them, and that agency officials who resist White House orders will be removed,” report author Rick Claypool writes in the report.
THE REPORT INTIMATES THAT THE TECH INDUSTRY is benefiting from a significant return on investment. Public Citizen estimates that the industry, as broadly defined in the report, spent $1.2 billion in “political influence” since the 2024 election cycle, including direct political spending ($863 million), payments to Trump’s own businesses ($222 million), lobbying ($76 million), and donations to Trump’s inaugural festivities ($25 million).
Less formal expenditures include Amazon paying $28 million to Melania Trump for a documentary about her and acquiring the streaming rights to The Apprentice, which would give Trump royalties. ByteDance investor Jeffrey Yass has spent $116 million on Republicans during and since the 2024 elections. ByteDance’s key product is TikTok, and despite a federal law forcing Chinese divestiture of the media company, Trump has illegally extended the deadline multiple times.
Elon Musk put up more than $352 million in political spending by himself, and some investigations into his companies have been dropped, including the dismissal of a Justice Department civil rights case against SpaceX for discrimination in hiring. Musk has since allegedly broken with Trump, but has given millions to Republican super PACs as recently as late June. Trump said after the split that he wants Musk’s businesses “to THRIVE, in fact, THRIVE like never before!”
Trump has reversed his skepticism and turned to crypto as a moneymaker that now represents the majority of his personal wealth.
When administration officials did review SpaceX contracts, they found them vital to the functioning of the Defense Department and NASA, making it unlikely that violations of law will be prosecuted. Indeed, there has been no movement forward on the 19 still-existing investigations against Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, X (formerly known as Twitter), the Boring Company, and Neuralink.
Musk is not the only tech mogul who has spent time in Trump’s government. Crypto firm Tether’s lead banker, Howard Lutnick of Cantor Fitzgerald, is the secretary of commerce. Attorney General Pam Bondi was a registered lobbyist for Amazon and Uber as recently as 2020. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum saw his tech company purchased by Microsoft and briefly became a Microsoft executive. The head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, David Keeling, ran workplace safety for Amazon.
The “PayPal mafia” network of tech executives, which includes Musk, White House AI czar David Sacks, and venture capital investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, were instrumental in hiring staffers for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort, which took particular interest in dismantling agencies deemed a threat to crypto, fintech, or Musk’s companies. More than half of DOGE staffers had direct PayPal mafia ties.
Other large spenders since 2024 include crypto firms Coinbase ($76.1 million) and Ripple ($55 million). While some of this money was bipartisan, that mainly speaks for the ability of crypto and other firms to buy Congress wholesale and render majority control essentially irrelevant to their interests.
The intertwining of Trump’s political decisions and business interests is on full display in the crypto cases. Justin Sun, a crypto billionaire under investigation by securities regulators and law enforcement, spent $193 million on coins and crypto ventures created by the Trump Organization; his fraud case was put on pause. The Trump Organization may purchase a stake in the U.S. subsidiary of Binance and launch its USD1 stablecoin on Binance’s exchange; Binance had SEC investigations dismissed and may be able to shed its corporate monitor in a Justice Department case where it pled guilty. Coinbase has seen multiple cases dismissed; it recently hired Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita as a top adviser. Crypto.com’s case into selling unregistered securities was closed; the $TRUMP meme coin trades on its exchange.
In another unprecedented action, crypto exchange BitMEX literally received a corporate pardon that reversed a $100 million fine and got executives out of prison for facilitating money laundering.
THE ANTITRUST CASES AGAINST FOUR LEADING tech platforms will offer the biggest test of whether the Trump administration is willing to ignore the law when it comes to Big Tech. Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department Antitrust Division leaders had to convince Trump to keep a trial against Meta on track.
A verdict in the remedy phase of the first Google trial is expected any day now; Google will almost certainly appeal. The other cases against Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple will stretch out through the length of Trump’s second term. The politicization of antitrust into a pay-to-play system controlled by lobbyists has been growing under Trump, and the idea that Big Tech will somehow be unable to run the same tactics is more than a little questionable.
Meanwhile, the largest Big Tech firms are operating under consent decrees that the administration could withdraw, just one way the White House could soften the blow of antitrust investigations by compensating Big Tech firms elsewhere. We have already seen the Trump administration be more than solicitous toward artificial intelligence, where many of the top firms are also the Big Tech companies under antitrust scrutiny. For example, the Trump administration declined to enforce a subpoena into alleged violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act by Scale AI; Meta recently put a 49 percent stake into that company and poached top executives. There are open federal investigations into AI firms like OpenAI, Nvidia, Snap, and xAI.
“To Corporate America, the message is that breaking the law in pursuit of profit might just be worth it—especially if you are seen as an ally of the administration,” the report concludes. “In other words, for insiders, corporate crime pays.”