Washington — Vice President JD Vance said Saturday that “we believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power,” despite the prominent positioning of tech CEOs at President Trump’s inauguration last week.
“They can either respect America’s constitutional rights, they can stop engaging in censorship, and if they don’t, you can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump’s leadership is not going to look too kindly on them,” Vance said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
The comments came in response to the unusual attendance of a slate of tech CEOs at Mr. Trump’s inauguration, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai. The tech titans, some of whom are among the richest men in the world and directed donations from their companies to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, were seated in some of the most highly sought after seats in the Capitol Rotunda.
Vance noted that the tech CEOs “didn’t have as good of seating as my mom and a lot of other people who were there to support us.”
In an August interview on “Face the Nation“, the vice president outlined his thinking on big tech, saying that companies like Google are too powerful and censor American information, while possessing a “monopoly over free speech” that he argued ought to be broken up.
The tech sphere went on to play an outsized role in Trump’s 2024 election victory, with Musk spending more than a quarter of a billion dollars to back Mr. Trump and other Republican candidates. Musk became a key ally to the president and in November, Mr. Trump tapped the Tesla CEO to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, a new temporary agency aimed at reducing wasteful federal spending. Meanwhile, other tech CEOs cozied up to the president with visits to Mar-a-Lago ahead of the inauguration.
But Vance said in Saturday’s interview that big tech and the tech giants, despite their recent closeness to the president, are “very much on notice.”
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