President Donald Trump’s dealings with Intel and Nvidia amount to a “scattershot method of crony capitalism,” Walter Isaacson said Thursday.
“That state capitalism often evolves into crony capitalism, where you have favored companies and industries that pay tribute to the leader, and that is a recipe for not only disaster, but just sort of a corrupt sense of messiness,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
The Tulane University professor, widely known for his recent Elon Musk biography, argued that this method won’t succeed in reviving American manufacturing.
Isaacson’s comments come as the Trump administration wades further into influencing the way companies operate in the U.S.
The White House is pushing for a stake in embattled chipmaker Intel after Trump called CEO Lip-Bu Tan “highly CONFLICTED” and said he should resign.
Earlier this month, both Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices agreed to pay 15% of their China revenues to the U.S. government for export licenses to sell certain chips there.
Isaacson said he’s always been “dubious” of public-private partnerships. He highlighted Trump’s push for Coca-Cola to use cane sugar in its namesake soda as another example of “crony capitalism.”