The next four years promise to be stormy between Washington and Brussels. Visiting Davos for the World Economic Forum, Donald Trump became the first defender of the big American tech companies, overwhelmed by the regulations and sanctions imposed by the European Commission in recent years.
A pact against Brussels
In his usual style, the billionaire declared that the Europeans "shouldn't do this. As far as I'm concerned, it's a form of taxation. We have very serious complaints about the European Union." Donald Trump was referring in particular to the 13 billion euros in tax rulings that Apple must pay to Ireland. The manufacturer benefited from illegal tax aid granted by Dublin.
Tim Cook, one of the American president's open supporters, complained about the situation to him shortly after his election. We can be pretty sure that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Sundar Pichai (Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sam Altman (OpenAI) and all those who have pledged allegiance to Donald Trump in recent weeks have submitted their European grievances to the new strongman in the White House.
Mark Zuckerberg has been very clear on the subject: he intends to "work with President Trump to oppose foreign governments that target American companies to further censor". In addition to the cultural and societal war, there will be an economic war.
Brussels' reaction was initially cautious, just to see what sauce Donald Trump wanted to eat the European regulator with. And then we started to see the Commission continue its work almost as if nothing had happened, by deepening its investigation into X/Twitter.
Source: Bloomberg
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