Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., Dec. 15, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
U.S. stocks of late have been shaky as investors turn away from artificial intelligence shares, especially those related to AI infrastructure, such as Oracle, Broadcom and CoreWeave.
The worry is that those companies are running into high levels of debt to finance their multibillion-dollar deals.
The stock lost 2.7% on Monday, while shares of CoreWeave, its fellow player in the AI data center trade dropped around 8%. Broadcom also retreated over concerns over margin compression, sliding about 5.6%.
That said, the broader market was not affected too adversely as investors continued rotating into sectors such as consumer discretionary and industrials. The S&P 500 slipped 0.16%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked down just 0.09% and the Nasdaq Composite, comprising more tech firms, fell 0.59%.
The broader market performance suggests that the fears are mostly contained within the AI infrastructure space.
“It definitely requires the ROI [return on investment] to be there to keep funding this AI investment,” Matt Witheiler, head of late-stage growth at Wellington Management, told CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Monday. “From what we’ve seen so far that ROI is there.”
Witheiler said the bullish side of the story is that, “every single AI company on the planet is saying if you give me more compute I can make more revenue.”
The ready availability of clients, according to that argument, means those companies that provide the compute — Oracle and CoreWeave — just need to make sure their finances are in order.
Tesla testing driverless Robotaxis in Austin, Texas. “Testing is underway with no occupants in the car,” CEO Elon Musk wrote in a post on his social network X over the weekend. Shares of Tesla rose 3.6% on Monday to close at their highest this year.
U.S. collects $200 billion in tariffs. The country’s Customs and Border Protection agency said Monday that the tally comprises only new tariffs, including “reciprocal” and “fentanyl” levies, imposed by U.S. President Trump in his second term.
Ukraine-Russia peace deal is nearly complete. That’s according to U.S. officials, who held talks with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy beginning Sunday. Ukraine has offered to give up its NATO bid, while Russia is open to Ukraine joining the EU, officials said.
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And finally…
Customers walk in the parking lot outside a Costco store on December 02, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois.
The logos of Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Claude by Anthropic, Perplexity, and Bing apps are displayed on the screen of a smartphone in Reno, United States, on November 21, 2024.
Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Merriam-Webster declared “slop” its 2025 word of the year on Monday, a sign of growing wariness around artificial intelligence.
Slop is now defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. The word has previously been used primarily to connote a “product of little value” or “food waste fed to animals”
Mainstream social networks saw a flood of AI-generated content, including what 404 Media described as a “video of a bizarre creature turning into a spider, turning into a nightmare giraffe inside of a busy mall,” that the publication reported had been viewed more than 362 million times on Meta apps.
In September, Meta launched Vibes, a separate feed for AI-generated videos. Days later, OpenAI released its Sora app. Those services, along with TikTok, YouTube and others, are increasingly rife with AI slop, which can often generate revenue with enough engagement.
Spotify said in September that it had to remove over 75 million AI-generated, “spammy tracks” from its service, and roll out formal policies to protect artists from AI impersonation and deception. The streaming company faced widespread criticism after The Velvet Sundown racked up 1 million monthly listeners on without initially making it clear they produced their songs with generative AI. The artist later clarified on its bio page that it’s a “synthetic music project.”
According to CNBC’s latest All-America Economic Survey, published Dec. 15, fewer respondents have been using AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, in the last two to three months compared to the summer months.
Just 48% of those surveyed said they had used AI platforms recently, down from 53% in August.
PayPal CEO Alex Chriss speaks at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai, India, on Oct. 7, 2025.
Indranil Aditya | Nurphoto | Getty Images
PayPal said Monday that it has applied for approval to form PayPal Bank, which would be able to offer loans to small businesses.
“Establishing PayPal Bank will strengthen our business and improve our efficiency, enabling us to better support small business growth and economic opportunities across the U.S.,” PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said in a statement.
The U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will review an application proposing the establishment of PayPal Bank, along with Utah’s Department of Financial Institutions, PayPal said.
The company, which owns popular payment app Venmo, hopes to also offer interest-bearing savings accounts to its customers, the statement said. PayPal already makes credit lines available to consumers and has been trying to expand its roster of banking-like services as it competes with a growing number of fintech companies that are aiming to take business from traditional brick-and-mortar banks.
Shares of PayPal rose 1.5% in extended trading following the announcement.
In October, PayPal said quarterly revenue increased 7% year over year to $8.42 billion, more than analysts had expected. But in 2025 the stock has slumped about 29%, while the S&P 500 index has gained almost 16% in the same period.