The barons at the inauguration and their fortunes

During Donald Trump's term, the relationship between the White House and Silicon Valley was on public display: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg appeared front row and side by side at the inauguration. The alliance coincided with enormous gains in wealth - Musk's fortune surpassed $1tn as AI spending expanded.

• •Zuckerberg, once known for founding a pro-immigration nonprofit roughly a decade ago, appeared at Mar-a-Lago under Trump's second term to show Meta's camera-equipped glasses to Trump, and axed his company's diversity, equity, and inclusion program.
• •OpenAI's Sam Altman was also seen at Mar-a-Lago.
• •Musk, meanwhile, put money into politics on a scale of his own, as the midterms would go on to show.

What Democrats promised

With the midterms won, incoming lawmakers turned to the AI industry. Texas representative Greg Casar said: "Voters rejected Republicans in part because they were bought and paid for by AI billionaires," urging his party to hold them accountable. Georgia's Jon Ossoff, re-elected to the Senate, pledged to bring big tech to heel, pointing to warnings from Silicon Valley's own titans that the artificial intelligence they are building risks human extinction.

Massachusetts senator Ed Markey put the threat of scrutiny more bluntly: "They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we'll be printing".

Democrats have both promised congressional investigations into tech companies and moratoriums on datacenters that could slow AI companies' buildout. Gina Hinojosa of Texas, Amy Acton of Ohio, and Keisha Lance Bottoms of Georgia have all pledged pauses on hyperscale datacenter construction. Letters to preserve records for future investigations have already gone out to Nvidia and Amazon.

Musk's exposure

No figure stands to attract more attention than Musk. He gave $450m in support of Republican candidates, most of all to Ken Paxton in Texas, who lost by a major margin. On election night Musk stayed silent for about eight hours and deleted a Tuesday tweet that read: "Vote red today!". By Wednesday morning he had turned to other plans, writing that datacenters in space were looking pretty good right now.

His business arrangements may draw fire too. Democrats may investigate or attempt to unwind the multibillion dollar merger of SpaceX and xAI, which has a $200m contract with the US military. And his "department of government efficiency," which laid waste to the humanitarian agency USAID and wide swaths of the US government, stands as a likely target for investigators.

With preservation letters already at Nvidia and Amazon and the SpaceX-xAI merger in Democrats' sights, the first steps of the promised scrutiny are already underway.