It’s Official: Silicon Valley Is Fully MAGA-Pilled
The tech industry is falling over itself to embrace Trump and J.D. Vance. It’s a mask-off moment.
Elon Musk during the Cannes Lions International Festival Of Creativity 2024.
(Marc Piasecki / Getty Images)The assassination attempt on Donald Trump drew an already sympathetic class of top tech executives even closer to the Republican presidential nominee. Elon Musk, who had promised as recently as March that he would not directly support a candidate, announced soon after the shooting that he “fully endorses” Trump.
Despite the seeming abruptness of the turn, Musk’s backing was a fait accompli: He and Trump have reportedly been speaking together frequently in recent months, and their bitterly reactionary politics obviously align. Within days, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk was committing a remarkable $45 million per month to America PAC, a new pro-Trump super PAC that would also be supported by Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, Mark Zuckerberg castoffs Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and several members of what’s sometimes called the Paypal mafia, a right-wing network of tech industry leaders with Peter Thiel as its presiding majordomo.
If, two years ago The New York Times could make the dubious claim that tech giants like Musk were hard to pin down politically, there is no room now for even that level of credulousness. It’s official: Silicon Valley has been fully MAGA-pilled, and the tech authoritarians are bringing their money with them.
On Monday, Trump unveiled as his VP pick Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, a former Thiel employee and venture capitalist who owes his election to the Senate to a $15 million campaign cash infusion from Thiel. For the tech industry, whose rightward swerve has been hard to ignore this campaign cycle, the Vance selection was sensational. “We have a former tech VC in the White House,” crowed Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund who once drew notice for sharing a comic by the neo-Nazi cartoonist known as StoneToss. “Greatest country on Earth baby.”
Musk, who had reportedly been agitating privately for Trump to choose Vance, celebrated the pick on X. “Resounds with victory,” he wrote. Vivek Ramaswamy posted wistful, supportive remarks about being drinking buddies with Vance at Yale Law School. Using the term of endearment favored by his fellow mega-rich “All-In” podcast hosts, Chamath Palihapitiya celebrated the news: “A Bestie adjacent as the VP?!?!?!”
Thiel, who is infamous for his stated aversion to democracy, has claimed that he is sitting out this election, but his baton has been passed to a gaggle of ornery venture capitalists and tech CEOs whom you may recognize from their grievance-laden X posts: Lonsdale, David Sacks, Shaun Maguire, Marc Andreessen, et al. They are all very rich and control a lot of capital beyond their own. They are also wielding increasing influence over the Trump campaign: Sacks spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday.
Vance’s appointment as the VP candidate is a major moment for these Silicon Valley elites, who have thrived under Republican and Democratic presidents alike but now find their reactionary politics in tight alignment with MAGA faux populism. Many Americans know Vance as a hillbilly made good, but for America’s right-wing tech class, he’s simply one of them.
Silicon Valley conservatives had already turned on the money spigot for Trump. Vance’s ascension prompted them to fully open the tap. This week, Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who head the highly influential VC firm bearing their names, announced on a podcast that they would be donating to pro-Trump PACs. Stalwart conservative donors like Timothy Mellon, Jeffrey Yass, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Rob Bigelow, and Ken Griffin have collectively poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaign organizations. They are about to be joined by a bunch of guys who split time between mansions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami.
The libertarian-minded cryptocurrency industry has also quietly dominated political giving this year. Despite being relatively small in terms of revenue—and having experienced the disastrous collapse precipitated by FTX and other fraudulent enterprises in 2022—crypto companies have a lot of money to deploy to shove their regulatory priorities across the finish line. They’ve been lobbying Congress and statehouses for months, showing as much zeal for influence-peddling as Sam Bankman-Fried ever did. So far this cycle, Fairshake, a crypto PAC funded by Coinbase, Ripple Labs, Jump, and other top players—including Andreessen Horowitz and Winklevoss Capital Management—has raised about $177.8 million, putting it less than a million dollars behind Make America Great Again for the top spot among all political action committees.
Fairshake has already spent millions to successfully defeat Democrats like Katie Porter and Jamaal Bowman in primary elections. As the tech critic Molly White wrote on her new site Follow the Crypto, which tracks crypto political spending, Fairshake is focused on a single issue: “installing crypto-friendly politicians and ousting those the industry views as a threat.”
Vance happens to be a crypto devotee who has been circulating a draft bill that one lobbyist told Politico was almost too friendly to the crypto industry and would come across as excessively “partisan.” The crypto industry got their man on the ticket, and Vance and other Republicans will almost certainly be beneficiaries of Fairshake’s massive war chest. Any discussion, then, of the emergence of a right-wing Silicon Valley political donor class has to include the cryptocurrency industry, whose leaders’ politics tend to exist on a scale between libertarian and explicitly anti-government. (That is, when some of their brightest lights aren’t engaged in multibillion-dollar frauds.)
These are the political and monetary currents now being tapped by the Trump campaign. It’s pretty much the same plutocracy practiced by the Koch brothers, the Mellons, and numerous other members of the idle rich, but with a shiny Silicon Valley wrapper. For old money and new, their interests now align, as Donald Trump becomes the bizarre standard-bearer for venture capitalists’ techno-fascist political project.
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