Welcome to Axis Prairata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

Sponsored by AT&T. I'm Dan Premack. On today's show, a clean tech company this week tries to live up to its old hype and why future trash collectors might be doing their pickups in space.

But first, the incredible shrinking tech lash. It was just four months ago that President Trump

was in this public spat with Amazon, accusing it of not paying enough taxes or high enough

postage rates. And Amazon shares fell a lot on that, about 10%, or 77 billion dollars.

That's kind of the same time Facebook was caught up in that privacy scandal involving Cambridge

Analytica, which saw it lose $93 billion. Now, those are big chunks of change, even for super duper

platinum card holders like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. And all of it played against this backdrop of what was being called the tech lash, kind

of a bipartisan agreement that Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley companies were growing way

too powerful, way too fast, controlling all parts of our lives without enough controls.

In fact, even Democrats at one point made breaking up big tech a central campaign pledge.

But all of that was then, just a few months ago, and this is now.

Amazon and Facebook stock came roaring back.

Actually hitting record highs this week, and those so-called fang stocks, which is Facebook,

Amazon, Netflix, and Google, they're almost single-handedly responsible for the overall

stock markets being up this year.

And now, Trump did return

today to his Amazon bashing via Twitter, but that seems to mostly be a reaction to something he read

in the Bezos-owned Washington Post, and the markets aren't even taking it too seriously. Amazon

was down just about 1% while I was talking. Moreover, the president tweeted last week that Google

was a, quote, great American company after the European Union

fined $5 billion for anti-competitive behavior. So I'm pretty sure it goes, the enemy of my enemy

...