“A difficult time to invest.”

“Everybody’s paralyzed.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be particularly positive.”

“The chaos that is reigning right now is causing everyone to sit on their hands.”

That’s Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, ON Semiconductor CEO Hassane El-Khoury, Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson, and Nasdaq Private Market CEO Tom Callahan on the world of Donald Trump right now. Their comments over the past week capture a growing disquiet among business leaders, a month into a presidency that many of them had cheered.

“What decision do you make? Do you want to go left or right?” El-Khoury told Semafor in an interview this week. “Are we going to grow the business? Well, I don’t know. Are there tariffs or not?” (Since that interview, Trump threatened to double his own proposed 10% tariffs on China and put a 25% levy on European goods.)

CEO optimism is fading as Trump pushes ahead with trade restrictions, while business-friendly deregulation has yet to materialize. US consumer confidence in January recorded its biggest one-month decline since November 2023. The US stock market, long Trump’s preferred proxy for economic might, is lower than it was before his inauguration, trailing major indexes in Europe, China, Mexico, and Canada — all targets of the president’s planned tariffs.

Microsoft — whose CEO, Satya Nadella, joined the post-election pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago — is calling on the White House to ease export limits on AI chips to allied or neutral countries. Chevron may lose a lucrative drilling concession in Venezuela over Trump’s immigration spat with that country’s strong-arm leader.

Trump’s picks to run key regulatory agencies, including those overseeing antitrust and the airwaves, appear likely to continue Biden-era enforcement priorities while adding new ideologically driven crackdowns and corporate purity tests. His pick to run the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, reaffirmed tough merger guidelines put in place by his predecessor, Lina Khan, which will do little for M&A, already off to its slowest start in a decade.

The Trump administration sued last month to block HPE’s takeover of Juniper, and said in a court filing last week that it’s unlikely to settle a lawsuit brought by the Biden administration seeking to block a travel-software merger.

“There isn’t a serious CEO in America who would prefer the disastrous, negative-growth policies of the previous administration over the pro-growth, low-tax, and low-regulation policies of President Trump,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields said. “In just four weeks, more than $1 trillion in private investment has flowed back into our country, and that’s a direct result of the Trump Effect, which is laying out the welcome mat for investment.”

Corporate executives making decisions on multiyear timeframes are struggling to decide whether to take Trump seriously, literally, or neither, and plan for a future after 2028. “You can’t move a factory overnight,” El-Khoury said. “It takes four years to build a fab.”

Onsemi gets about one-third of its revenue each from the US, Japan, and China, where half of its buyers are companies assembling cars or phones there for export. “Do you ignore it?” he said of Trump’s tariff threats, which expanded Wednesday to include a proposed 25% levy on European goods. “Or do you start doing scenario planning? That takes a lot of time and bandwidth.”