For Microsoft, will Trump’s antitrust and environmental views help or harm?

I recently wrote about how President-elect Donald J. Trump’s actions on AI might affect Microsoft. This week, I’m focused on what his antitrust regulation and environmental plans — and the biggest wildcard of all, his personal vendettas — could do to the company. 

What Microsoft can expect from antitrust lawsuits

Trump believes that the less regulation on big business, the better. So you would expect him to put an end to antitrust suits against the tech industry. But that’s not necessarily the case.

There’s no doubt that Lina Khan, the head of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) who has aggressively pursued antitrust prosecutions against tech, will be let go after Trump’s election. And many of Trump’s advisers, notably venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, would like to see tech antitrust prosecutions to stop. 

However, some advisers close to Trump, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, want the administration to take on Big Tech — mainly because they want to stop Meta and other social media companies from policing against misinformation, white supremacism, public-health health deceptions and election lies.

Microsoft has largely been spared Khan’s prosecutions, even as the Biden administration has targeted Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Apple. The one recent federal antitrust action against Microsoft by the FTC, for buying the gaming giant Activision, didn’t go well for the feds. A judge let the purchase go through, although the FTC has since appealed the case.

That might make you think that Microsoft is in the clear under Trump. But The Washington Post reports the FTC will be investigating Microsoft’s cloud business for anticompetitive practices. In addition, the FTC appeal of the Activision case still stands, so that case could be revived.

Trump could demand that whomever he appoints to head the FTC drop those actions. Odds are, he won’t, thanks to his main tech adviser, entrepreneur Elon Musk. His AI startup, xAI, competes directly with Microsoft, and is now valued at $50 billion after investments this spring from Andreesen and others. Musk also recently amended an antitrust suit he filed against OpenAI, adding Microsoft as a defendant. 

Don’t be surprised if the FTC under Trump not only follows through on Khan’s investigations of Microsoft, but also files an AI suit against the company, thanks to Musk’s influence.

Trump, Microsoft, and climate change

Trump believes climate change is a hoax. He’s vowed to tear up environmental regulations and attack green energy. His campaign slogan, “Drill, Baby, Drill,” and his close friendship with the oil industry make clear that he’ll do everything he can to increase reliance on fossil fuels and kill clean sources of electricity.  

He was also a booster of nuclear power during his first administration, though he wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about it on the campaign trail. Even so, the stock market price of nuclear-power-related companies jumped the day after his election, and most people expect him to be a nuclear backer.

What does this have to do with Microsoft? Plenty. Microsoft has vowed to make itself carbon-negative by 2030, and Trump’s attack on green energy will make it more difficult for the company to find clean energy sources.

Exacerbating Microsoft’s climate-change challenges is the fact that data centers that power AI require a tremendous amount of electricity. As I’ve noted before, Microsoft might be abandoning its promises to fight climate change because of that. And the company could also pour billions into reviving nuclear energy with a proposed deal to reopen Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear power disaster in US history. 

Given Trump’s views about climate change and his support for AI, he’ll most likely do everything he can to give Microsoft and other AI companies all the electricity they want no matter the effect on the environment. And he’ll also likely let them go full speed ahead with nuclear power. In fact, Microsoft President Brad Smith recently said he expects Trump to cut environmental regulations to provide Microsoft with all the electricity it wants for its AI data centers. 

Gregory Allen, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies — he worked on AI at issues the Department of Defense during the Trump and Biden presidencies — agrees. On a call hosted by The Information, he said Trump “can invoke emergency powers and waive a lot of environmental regulations to allow people to build new nuclear and other electrical generation capacity in order to power the big data centers that folks want for these advanced AI models.”

He added that he expects that to happen “pretty early in the Trump Administration.”

Trump’s vendettas and grievances

The president-elect is driven by vendettas and grievances more than he is by policy. And when it comes to tech, he has plenty of them.

In the 2020 election, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife started a foundation “to ensure that everyone can vote and every vote can be counted.” Since then, Trump threatened to investigate him and send him to jail if re-elected, saying, “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison.” 

Zuckerberg got the message, offering accolades, saying after last summer’s assassination attempt, “Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life…. On some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight, and I think that that’s why a lot of people like the guy.”

Then there’s Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. When Trump was president, he frequently took aim at Amazon and Bezos because the Post published articles that angered Trump. He didn’t just criticize and threaten him; Trump also yanked a multi-billion-dollar cloud contract with the Defense Department from Amazon.

This time around, Bezos is doing Trump’s bidding. He canceled the Post’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris even though the newspaper has endorsed candidates for president for decades. After Trump was elected, Bezos praised him, writing on X, “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.”

Those are just two of tech titans who have praised Trump even though he had targeted them. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has so far managed to avoid getting on Trump’s bad side. He hasn’t gone out of his way to praise the president-elect, either, offering Trump only a pro forma congratulation after the election.

But with Musk as a Trump adviser, and what will likely be a big focus on AI in the new administration, it’s not clear whether Nadella will be able to stay out of Trump’s crosshairs. What’s also not clear is how Nadella will react if Trump threatens him — and how that might affect Microsoft’s financial future and its sense of itself as a moral company.