Tech Voices: Trump on Musk, “woke” AI; Lutnick warns on TikTok

Seeking Alpha’s roundup of statements, remarks and announcements that could impact the technology sector.

• President Trump said he’s not out to “destroy” Elon Musk’s companies by yanking their government subsidies.

“Everyone is stating that I will destroy Elon’s companies by taking away some, if not all, of the large scale subsidies he receives from the U.S. Government. This is not so! I want Elon, and all businesses within our Country, to THRIVE, in fact, THRIVE like never before! The better they do, the better the USA does, and that’s good for all of us. We are setting records every day, and I want to keep it that way!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Thursday.

In addition to Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), Musk either heads and/or holds majority stakes in SpaceX (SPACE), Starlink (STRLK), xAI, X and Neuralink. SpaceX, which provides space transport services for NASA and owns Starlink, is particularly dependent on government contracts. Tesla, meanwhile, has benefited from various EV tax credits.

• Trump signed an executive order on Thursday aimed at preventing federal agencies from procuring AI large language models, or LLMs, that promote “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, ideology.

“While the Federal Government should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace, in the context of Federal procurement, it has the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas,” according to the order.

“LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI. Developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM’s outputs unless those judgments are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user,” the order added.

• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said TikTok will “go dark” unless Chinese parent company ByteDance (BDNCE) divests its U.S. business by Sept. 17.

“We’ve made the decision. You can’t have Chinese control and have something on 100 million American phones,” Lutnick said during an interview on CNBC on Thursday.

“Basically, Americans will have control. Americans will own the technology. Americans will control the algorithm,” Lutnick said, adding that if China doesn’t approve the divestment deal, “then TikTok is going to go dark.”