🏛️ Big-tech antitrust survives a Trump-Vance administration

“He's one of Lena Kahn's few Republican fans. And the reason for that is because Lena Kahn, for all of her faults, and we've described them here, has been willing to take on big tech.”

“I think we'll see under Trump a lot more mid-market M&A. If I were to, you know, let's call it under a hundred billion dollars.”

“I think the Republicans have their own issues with big tech. But those issues tend to revolve around censorship and bias and search results and LLMs, things like that, as opposed to bigness per se.”

“So I think there are a few of these companies, Google being one of them, that are very much handicapped right now with respect to what kind of M&A they can do without dealing with the regulatory sledgehammer coming down on them. So I don't think that those guys are buyers, Jay Cal. I don't think that Google is in a place right now where they can go out and make a bunch of acquisitions. They're going to do everything they can to avoid the regulatory sledgehammer that's coming their way. First it was coming from the Dems. Now it's coming from the new administration.”

“I completely agree. I think that these big tech companies will need to pay a pound of flesh for the deplatforming and the censorship that they did.”

“But I hope that whoever replaces Lina Khan will continue to apply pressure to big tech because they are monopolies and they will abuse their power if they're allowed to and they need to be controlled.”

“And the wrath of LenaCon is officially over. She's out. Andrew Ferguson is in. This looks like a great appointment, another one by Trump in the column of somebody who wants to allow business to occur and wants a free market. He wants to do basically everything LenaCon didn't do, which is allow some M&A.”

“I think companies will be much more aggressive on M&A. Jason, it's what you've been asking for. I think you're going to get it. I think the reason why you're going to get it is you're going to have a very open-minded administration that will let the M&A happen.”

“I think that the vice president is an amazingly brilliant guy. He has also expressed kind of public support for Lena Cahn from time to time, right? And that's inside the Republican party. And on the left, obviously, there's tremendous support for Lena Cahn.”

“I've talked to M&A people, Philippe, and they have said it's not even worth bringing it to the board.”