The Pluses and Minuses of Trump’s Dealmaking

For tech CEOs, having an investment banker playing the role of president has its advantages. President Donald Trump is displaying a willingness to consider all sorts of deals that might be verboten on national security grounds—as long as the government is getting paid. Not only is he allowing Nvidia to sell its China-specific H20 artificial intelligence chips to the country in exchange for a 15% cut of the resulting revenue, Trump signaled today that he might allow Nvidia to sell its more advanced Blackwell chips to China too, if it modified them in some “negative way” to make them less powerful.

Then there’s his willingness to disregard the TikTok sell-or-ban law so he can do a deal for U.S. investors to buy control of the app. Trump has previously expressed a hope that the government will get paid in that transaction as well: Earlier this year, he asserted that if TikTok was allowed to keep operating in the U.S. “it’s worth like a trillion dollars” and the U.S. should get half ownership as a result. He also took that stance back in 2020, incidentally, when he was the one insisting that TikTok be sold or banned. This kind of government-as-banker approach is certainly interesting. Executives have a president who speaks their language and who isn’t bothered by the niceties of government policy or regulations. (CNBC quoted Trump saying today that he initially asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang he for a higher cut: “I said, ‘Listen, I want 20% if I’m going to approve this for you, for the country.’”)