For a while, it looked like President Donald Trump was going to have Big Tech’s back.

Now, the tech industry is collateral damage in his global trade war.

On Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen floated the idea of placing “a levy on the advertising revenues of digital services” if tariff negotiations with the US go south. This would be the opposite outcome that tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg were hoping for when they threw their support behind the new administration. 

To someone like Zuckerberg, Trump was supposed to be the strong-armed leader to bring the overbearing EU to heel. Instead, the rhetoric between the US and EU is ratcheting up just weeks before the EU is already set to fine Meta (and Apple) for violating its Digital Markets Act. 

While certainly more of a self-inflicted wound, Elon Musk’s popularity in the US has “inverted as his support for President Trump has increased,” Nate Silver wrote this week. Tesla’s stock price, meanwhile. has lost over a third of its value this year, and, thanks to tariffs, the company has removed the option to buy new, US-made vehicles in China. 

As I predicted last week, TikTok is particularly s …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Earlier this week, when it seemed as though TikTok’s fate in the US would actually be decided by April 5th, everyone — from Amazon to the founder of OnlyFans — was coming out of the woodwork to buy it.

As it turns out, none of them had a chance. And now, thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariff war, no one may get to buy TikTok. 

People familiar with the matter tell me that, despite all of the bids for the app, the White House was only seriously considering an Oracle-led consortium, which included many of ByteDance’s biggest investors who were set to roll their stakes into a new, US entity. 

The proposal, which would have licensed the app’s algorithm from China and shuffled some shareholder money around to make TikTok look more independent from ByteDance, was set to be announced before President Trump went nuclear on tariffs. As others have reported and I’ve independently confirmed, his tariff announcement on Wednesday torched any immediate chance of the TikTok proposal being blessed by the Chinese government. 

On Friday, less than an hour after Trump said he was pushing back the clock on banning TikTok by another 75 days to finish working out a deal, ByteDance …

Read the full story at The Verge.