Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney had some scathing words Friday for tech executives who are pandering to US President-elect Donald Trump, accusing them of being nice while pushing anti-competitive policies to the detriment of us all.
“After years of pretending to be Democrats, big tech executives are now pretending to be Republicans in hopes of currying favor with the new administration,” Sweeney said in a post on X. “Watch out for a nasty monopoly campaign to shame competition law as they rip off consumers and crush competitors.”
Google and Apple are among Trump’s new tech industry supporters, with both donating $1 million each to the inauguration, with Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly making a personal contribution. Sweeney and Epic have been battling both companies for smartphone software distribution for years.
The short version is that Sweeney wants to sell games on iPhone and Android phones without using Apple and Google’s official storefronts and payment processing systems—or paying a fee for the privilege—and argues that the companies are unfairly monopolizing the mobile software market by doing something very hard to do. He achieved some success in Europe, but the situation in the United States has not changed much. Last year, Sweeney vowed to “continue the fight until there is a final victory” over Apple and Google’s “completely corrupted vision of the world.”
Although law firm Skadden predicts that “aggressive antitrust enforcement is unlikely to disappear entirely” during Trump’s second term, the new administration is expected to be more lenient on antitrust cases, and FTC Chairwoman Lina Hahn said this week that it hopes Amazon and Meta won’t be handed a “sweetheart deal” in future antitrust lawsuits.
It’s probably no coincidence that Amazon and Meta made their own multimillion-dollar donations to Trump’s inauguration, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also loosened Facebook’s content moderation policy in an apparent attempt to please the new administration.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said he wanted to personally congratulate Trump and that the GPU maker would do everything it could “to help this administration succeed,” though Nvidia has not announced plans to donate to the inauguration.
Trump himself commented on the change in attitude of major technology leaders. “Everybody fought me in the first term,” the president-elect said in December. “Everyone wants to be my friend this term.”
