The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

By Jeffrey Goldfarb

NEW YORK, April 30 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The early returns from Silicon Valley’s attempted reprogramming of Washington are disastrous. Titans of technology either threw their support behind Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, or opened their wallets for him after he won the election. If the current trends persist, however, any gains generated from their investments will be offset by far wider losses.

Luminaries from Tesla boss TSLA.O Elon Musk to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen fretted last summer over President Joe Biden’s cryptocurrency crackdowns and artificial intelligence apprehension. In Trump, they saw a kindred contrarian spirit who, despite his nationalist rhetoric, might be willing to let them chase the next big things unconstrained.

The rebellious ethos is in effect. Trump rolled back his predecessor’s digital-coin crackdowns and efforts to slow AI’s breakneck pace. Andreessen’s firm, a16z, embraced the turnabout and is raising a massive $20 billion fund to back machine-learning projects. By shattering other norms, though, the president is also hurting computer whizzes and internet impresarios.

Musk may be suffering the worst. The distracted billionaire’s slapdash government cost-cutting initiatives are taking their toll. Backlash from customers and investors has erased roughly 40% of Tesla’s market value since it peaked in mid-December.

Startup financiers aren’t faring much better. A Trump-branded meme coin being used to funnel money to the president is undercutting attempts to legitimize the token economy. An a16z index measuring the state of the crypto industry is down 20% since the election. Moreover, haphazard tariff policy has curbed the M&A activity and stock-market debuts needed to crystallize investments. The anti-immigrant sentiment the White House is fomenting, including by weaponizing deportation, risks scaring off many entrepreneurs and engineers.

Big Tech is reeling, too. Import levies threaten to raise prices, and endanger the availability, of supplies used to build semiconductors and data centers. Valuations are tumbling as fears mount over inflation, recession and the decline of U.S. hegemony. Despite cozying up to the White House, Meta Platforms META.O boss Mark Zuckerberg is in court trying to stop a U.S. government breakup of his empire. Even after Nvidia NVDA.O CEO Jensen Huang attended a $1 million-a-head fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, the administration banned more of the company’s chips from reaching China. The president's provocation of allies and enemies alike has put Alphabet GOOGL.O and others in the trade-war crossfire.

An unlikely trade truce wouldn’t easily undo all the damage either. It will take more than a few keystrokes to rebuild trust in the country, its bonds and the dollar. In the meantime, the tech industry may want to rethink the drawbacks of endorsing a president who likes to move fast and break things.

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CONTEXT NEWS

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on April 22 that he would be spending "significantly" less time overseeing President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, on the same day the car company he runs disclosed a 71% decline in first-quarter net income from a year earlier and a 20% drop in automotive revenue.

(Editing by Peter Thal Larsen and Maya Nandhini)

((For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on GOLDFARB/jeffrey.goldfarb@thomsonreuters.com))