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BY Harry McCracken

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Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company ’s Plugged In .

It’s difficult to imagine human beings less similar in temperament than Donald Trump and most of the executives who run big tech companies. But the tech industry, like any business, is transactional by definition, and Trump might be the most nakedly transactional public figure of the century. In the president’s second term, that shared trait has given us too many weird and discomforting moments to count, from Apple, Google, and Microsoft funding the new White House ballroom to the U.S. government taking a 9.9% stake in Intel.

In both January 2025 and January 2026, I wrote newsletters arguing that the executives contorting themselves to be the president’s buddy were merely postponing the day when they’d have to confront some controversy too consequential to ignore.…