Trump’s victory will benefit Elon Musk and xAI

Disclaimer: I voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and stand by my choice.

Republican politician and businessman Donald J. Trump has won the 2024 U.S. presidential election in a strong political comeback, despite various pre-election polls showing him neck-and-neck with his opponent Kamala Harris (the current and now outgoing Vice President, a Democrat).

As many who follow the news know all too well, one of his most outspoken allies in this election was none other six-company owner/operator and technology multibillionaire Elon Musk, who committed tens of millions in funding to a political action committee advocating Trump’s re-election.

All of Musk’s technology companies stand to benefit from Trump’s return to office

Musk owns or operates the following companies, all of which stand to benefit from Trump retaking power:

• Tesla Motors: Though Trump has pledged not to enforce electric vehicle mandates or tighter emissions standards, Musk’s popular electric vehicle and autonomous vehicle company could benefit from loosened restrictions on vehicle standards overall, especially with regards to autonomy. Already, Tesla stock is up more than 13% today on the election being called for Trump.
• SpaceX: Musk’s rocketry and spacefaring company has feuded before with the federal government, particularly the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) which just last month levied $633,009 in fines to SpaceX alleging it failed to “follow its license requirements during two launches in 2023.” Musk would likely seek to use the Trump Administration to recall this fine and remove future licensing requirements preventing what he sees as necessary speed and nimbleness from the agency or a more “hands-off” approach.
• Starlink: Similarly, Musk’s satellite internet offshoot Starlink, which currently has more than 6,000 satellites beaming internet from orbit, would likely benefit from Trump’s pledges to reduce administrative burdens and red tape from federal regulatory agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and FAA.
• Neuralink: Musk’s experimental brain implant company has reportedly caused the death, injury and dismemberment of test monkeys but also also been successfully implanted into a paralyzed human patient, allowing them to control a computer with their brain signals. Given it is a medical device, it is overseen by the federal Food and Drug Administration, which has already approved Neuralink implantation in humans and trials. But the Trump victory will likely only further clear the way for Neuralink to ramp up its trials on more human subjects and do so faster.
• X: Musk’s social network, the renamed Twitter he purchased for $44 billion two years ago, has already been through a process of mass and targeted layoffs, as well as policy and feature updates permitting more freewheeling and extremist speech and content, and led to a more political right-wing oriented userbase and content. This trend is likely to continue and X to gain even more prominence as a mouthpiece for Musk’s, Trump’s, and their allies’ positions.

xAI may benefit and move from being a runner-up in the AI race to a leader

But most importantly of all, xAI, Musk’s AI startup offshoot of X designed to rival his former company OpenAI, is now likely to become far more of a viable alternative to the U.S. government and military as a contractor and AI technology services provider.

Already, the U.S. government has been courted by and is reportedly working with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta to integrate generative AI models into various departments.

However, now that Musk helped propel Trump to a victory, expect xAI to join in the list of federally approved AI vendors and possibly even preferred AI vendors — though of course, the government is technically supposed to remain vendor-neutral for companies operating within the U.S., signing contracts based on request-for-proposals and the businesses’ fitness for the job.

xAI will also likely benefit from repealed Biden-era AI Executive Order

Yet as AI influencer Andrew Curran noted on Musk’s X network this morning, another direct outcome of Trump reassuming the White House come January 2025 (when he is to be sworn in) is a strong likelihood — outlined in the Republican Party election platform — of the repeal of outgoing President Joe Biden’s Executive Order (EO) on AI, which Biden issued in October 2023 and requires developers of powerful foundation models to share safety test results and other critical information with the US government and subjects companies training AI models to red-teaming exercises by the federal agency The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

While many in the AI industry and outside of it applauded this order as a means of ensuring safety of AI deployments on American and global society, some analysts suggested it could lead to undermining U.S. AI competitiveness on the global stage, both in the commercial (direct-to-consumer and business-to-business) marketplace and the military arena.

As such, with the likely repeal of this EO come January 2025 or early 2025, it could aid xAI and its competitors in shipping new models faster — though as we’ve seen with xAI’s Grok-2 and its permissive image generation feature, that can also lead to a rise in deepfakes and other wild, offensive, but also creative and imaginative AI imagery.

Either way, things are looking good for Musk’s companies and xAI in particular – and that may help the company’s models become more enticing to developers and business customers.