How did Silicon Valley leaders go from heaping praise on Barack Obama to going all in on Donald Trump?
To hear characters like venture capital firm a16z’s Marc Andreessen tell it, much of their current support for Trump has to do with a Joe Biden administration that attempted to throttle tech innovation. In December, Andreessen said in a podcast that he and other tech figures had meetings with Biden officials that were “absolutely horrifying … we came out basically deciding that we had to endorse Trump.”
But according to Jacob Silverman, author of the newly released book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, the tech industry flourished under Biden as well, benefitting in particular from increased cooperation with the defense sector. Rather, characters like Musk, Andreessen, Peter Thiel and David Sacks found common ground with Trump on many cultural issues, and realized that if they asked nicely, he would deliver them exactly what they wanted from the federal government.
“I would argue the tech industry was doing very well under Biden … What they probably didn’t like were these mild acts of enforcement,” Silverman told POLITICO Magazine, referring to clashes over crypto and AI. “[But under Trump], they are getting pretty much everything they want. … I think [the alliance] is deeply reflective of the culture and politics and attitudes among the tech leadership itself.”
In an interview about how the tech-Trump alliance came to be, Silverman also discussed Musk’s potential involvement in the midterms, why the tech elite is worried about internal dissent and how democracy-skeptical Silicon Valley figures are trying to wall themselves off from American society.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Early on in the book, you describe a meeting between tech leaders and Donald Trump after he was elected in 2016. Explain how things have changed from that meeting, when many tech leaders seemed already willing to work with Trump, to now.
In 2016, that meeting was a bit of a surprise. Tech leaders coming into the open, giving their blessing, to some extent, to Trump. Certainly, I think a lot of people recognized a degree of expediency on the part of tech billionaires, thinking “Okay, we have to deal with the new ruling party.”
Also, as I described in the book, I thought that that meeting was pretty important because of the role of Peter Thiel as basically the kingmaker and the one deciding who was in attendance. It was a real validation of his early and pretty much unwavering bet on Trump. I think now what’s different is it’s a full embrace, and it’s kind of an unembarrassed one. Among senior leadership in tech, there’s kind of an exhaustion with woke politics and social justice issues. They don’t want to have to have opinions on those kinds of things anymore. And there is, I think, somewhat a sense of relief that they could go back to just being craven capitalists and businessmen again.
What you see more now is a lot of talk about cooperation and mutual benefit for the country, the government and industry and basically everyone helping to Make America Great Again and make money along the way. There’s very little moral or political valence to the kinds of discussions or comments that you hear from tech leaders now. And again, I think there’s almost a sense of relief. If you’re Mark Zuckerberg, who Trump has threatened to send to prison before, or if you’re the CEO of Alphabet, which the government has been trying to break up, some of this is about personal interests and survival, but I think it’s also deeply reflective of the culture and politics and attitudes among the tech leadership itself.
How does defense tech — relationships between tech companies and the U.S. military in particular — shape the politics of these figures?
In the early Silicon Valley history of the 50s and 60s, a lot of advancements in tech were the result of either investment or contracting agreements between Silicon Valley and the defense industry or the Defense Department. And then the DoD and DARPA helped give us the internet. But there was also this long period where tech saw itself as one of the inheritors of what was left of the counterculture, and that certainly has faded away to a great degree.
At first you had this revolving door between the tech industry and the defense industry that really increased in speed under Obama. And this is also a period where a lot of the War on Terror practices, including mass surveillance under the George W. Bush administration, became more institutionalized and codified under the law.
So, there’s been a general coming together of these two power centers where there’s a lot of mutual profit and mutual interests. Of course, the government wants the data that the tech industry is collecting as a matter of doing business, and they want the products that tech is creating. And what you increasingly hear within the tech industry is that a reluctance to work for the state because you’re a libertarian or a “cyberpunk,” or a reluctance to make weapons, has gone away. In some cases, there’s an outright enthusiasm for working in the defense industry. And this is where you get defense tech and companies like Palantir and Anduril, or even individual personalities like Palmer Luckey at Anduril. At least part of this new generation is very excited to make stuff for the state — it’s kind of more like a “Call of Duty” type attitude, where they grew up on this War on Terror media. And instead of feeling conflicted about it, they got business ideas.
And it’s also not just the defense tech startups. The big tech companies have also dispensed with a lot of their reluctance about being involved in military intelligence matters, and they pretty much all are going in that direction.
You write that “Under President Joe Biden, the tech industry and the U.S. government were arguably closer than ever, though their policy preferences diverged on antitrust matters. But on core issues of national defense and the tech industry’s role in it, there was little daylight between the two sides.” So, why is there now so much animus among this group toward Biden? If the sides kept working together, why do they hate him now?
I realize that might seem a little bit surprising to people, but I would argue that the tech industry was doing very well under Biden. Yes, there were some new challenges, especially in the form of the Federal Trade Commission and its chair at the time, Lina Khan. I would argue that the hatred of Biden actually gets at some of the irrationality and the reactionary character of these tech bubbles. I don’t know if they understood how good they had it. More specifically, you could say, hey, Eric Schmidt’s drone company is operating in Ukraine. Anduril is certainly operating in Ukraine. Anywhere the Biden administration was on the national security front lines, tech companies were often involved.
The things that they saw as threats to themselves, I would argue, were rather overrated. Marc Andreessen said that his red line was this proposal to tax unrealized capital gains, which really would only affect billionaires and maybe a few very rich millionaires, and was something that was never even actually implemented. Andreessen also said that he went to a meeting at the White House and the Biden administration just wanted to destroy AI. Granted, I wasn’t at that meeting, but that doesn’t seem like a very accurate assessment of the Biden administration’s AI policy. So on the one hand, I would say they did have certain areas of friction with the Biden administration, and maybe some areas that actually would have effects on their bottom line.
But overall, this struck me as an industry that was still in full bloom, doing very well and finding new revenue streams with the government under the Biden administration. What they probably didn’t like were these mild acts of enforcement and the fact that interest rates still weren’t where they wanted them to be.
So, you think they had a problem with not getting exactly what they wanted.
Yeah. A simple way to put it is that this is a group of people used to getting everything that they wanted, and they weren’t getting everything that they wanted, and that became intolerable. And I think that’s something we heard directly from them sometimes.
Do they feel like they’re getting everything they want under Trump?
I would imagine so. But there’s always room for discontent. One thing I think is worth noting is that even someone like Musk, who’s had this kind of psychodrama with Trump, hasn’t experienced major financial consequences or legal consequences from his up and down relationship with the president. In fact, he’s gotten multiple contracts for X-AI/Grok recently. So yes, if some of these electric vehicle subsidies go away, that would hurt a lot. But overall, I think he is doing rather well, and certainly other people around him are doing quite well.
What do you think Musk’s next move is? Was politics a quick distraction?
I think he may be involved in the 2026 midterms, but I wouldn’t expect him to take as much of a lead as he did in 2024, certainly in a place like Pennsylvania, where he was practically running operations. At the same time, I think something like a midterm election cycle suits Musk. He has a lot of political interests now, but maybe doesn’t have the attention span and the commitment for a long political effort. I don’t see him finally establishing this “America Party” or turning that into anything, but he could drop into some races and give a lot of money to Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie or others who appeal to him.
I think also you’ll continue to see his presence in foreign elections — he likes to beam into rallies with far-right leader Tommy Robinson in Britain or the far-right party AfD in Germany and tell them their country’s at stake.
The other factor, though, which is really pulling on Musk, is he runs five or six companies. Some of them are facing hard times, especially Tesla. The government still needs SpaceX, but Tesla sales overseas are really doing badly and suffering from his political interventions. I think he will probably have to focus on Tesla and his other companies for now, at least.
You mention in the book the Covid-era concerns of Silicon Valley leaders that many of their employees were actually out to destroy their companies. How have they attempted in the intervening years to shape the politics of their rank-and-file employees? How have these companies changed?
There’s now very little tolerance for internal dissent or anything political that feels disruptive. In the book, I talk about Google responding to employee protests some years ago over Project Maven, the DoD image recognition project. They dropped that contract. More recently, in the last couple years, when Google employees have held silent protests over the company’s work for the Israeli government, these Google employees have been immediately fired. It was 50 people. That seems pretty universal across tech. And again, I think that’s consistent with this idea that they don’t want to pay lip service to Black Lives Matter or #MeToo or other social movements. They really don’t want to have a public stance on Israel and Gaza, even if they have contracts related to these conflicts.
How does that work in a place that’s still largely liberal?
It creates some discontent across the rank and file. I reported on Sean Maguire, the very voluble right-wing venture capitalist for Sequoia, who in a recent post on X said “[Zohran] Mamdani comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda.” One, there are a lot of people who agree with Sean Maguire and his kind of very jingoistic statements about Mamdani and Muslims more broadly. So, there is a class of people he represents. There are also a lot of rank-and-file people, or even some in executive level, who don’t like that attitude, especially because there are a lot of Muslim workers in tech who are feeling the growing fault lines over Gaza especially. I think that conflict is actually going to grow and emerge from left-leaning tech workers and from a lot of Muslims and Palestinians in tech who don’t like the politics of their investors or their leadership. The open tension has been tamped down, but that can’t go on forever.
How has the super-charged growth of AI — both in terms of its capabilities and investment in AI products — changed the politics of Silicon Valley?
Well, it certainly brought AI tech leaders closer to the government and sources of big capital and big infrastructure investing. Because pursuing AI and pursuing AGI or superintelligence seems to require unlimited amounts of capital and resources. That also makes it very dangerous, because it’s not clear to me what the end point is here, or when enough is enough.
And what it also means is that they need a lot of capital and favors from the U.S. government. They need a lot of money from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds and from dictatorships like Saudi Arabia. And they need land and favors from local governments and environmental reviews and all kinds of things that position tech as much more of a big power player and a big political mover, rather than some insurgent or countercultural force like it’s often styled itself as.
There is a widespread belief that AI is the next thing, and perhaps the only thing. Some people call it the last invention. It’s seen as something that will basically fix everything, including climate change, somehow retroactively. And it’s a little disturbing that [Silicon Valley leaders] have this almost religious faith that they just need to keep pouring in hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars into AI development and it’s going to be worth it. In fact, as Mark Zuckerberg recently said, he’d rather risk misspending a couple $100 billion than miss out on superintelligence.
Some of the people you mention in the book are skeptical of democracy writ large, to the extent that just supporting any political candidate will only go so far in dismantling the system in the way they want. What else are they doing to realize these goals?
The main presiding figure here is Peter Thiel, who has long been skeptical, at the very least, of democracy. Democracy interferes with his idea of true freedom. Those feelings are more widely felt now among the tech elites than they were when Thiel was a little bit lonely on that front in the late 1990s. Some of these guys are listening to Curtis Yarvin or reading Nick Land and some of these theorists, and I think they broadly agree that democracy is kind of an outmoded piece of government software.
And so, there are some practical things they are trying to do, like various attempts at charter cities and securing actual physical sovereignty over a piece of land. These are projects like Próspera in Honduras or the Solano County project California Forever, which is a little more within the bounds of democratic mores, but is still going to be some kind of company town. There’s also Musk’s various efforts in Texas to establish his own private communities, or even on a smaller level, you have something like the school that Mark Zuckerberg established during the pandemic.
These are all attempts at what’s sometimes called “exit,” a way to secure your own sovereignty by making your own currencies with crypto, to escaping the education system, to ultimately securing land and creating your own communities. One thing I’ve heard is that some of the politically connected people in the charter cities movement, people receiving investment from Thiel and others, were very excited about the prospect of the U.S. taking over Greenland. I think that their vision for the kind of escape that they want is unrealistic to a great degree, and I think it’s one of the ultimate flaws with the people my book is about. They seem to have become rather anti-social and almost xenophobic; they don’t really want to be among the rest of us.
And some of this, I argue in the book, came out of the perceived social failures and political failures of San Francisco, the city for tech, where a lot of them came from. They see the city as a failure and irredeemable to some extent, and that has also fed into this idea that “We need to get out of here. We need to build our own sovereign communities.” I think they’ll continue to do that any way they can, but I don’t expect it to necessarily be new countries, even if some people would like it that way.
Was there anything that came up in your reporting of this book that surprised you?
One thing is, these guys are rather sincere in a lot of ways. They say a lot of what they think. Yes, there’s trolling and joking and irony, but they post a lot, and a lot of them have podcasts, or go on other people’s long podcasts, and some of them give public speeches or go on TV. I think they’re often truthful about their view of the world. And yes, we have to analyze that critically, but I think it’s worth engaging with that. Related to that, they are so online that a lot of their view of the world is mediated through their phones and social media. So where some of us might go to San Francisco or other urban areas and maybe see some problems, their sense is that America’s urban areas are riven by crime, that there are migrants attacking people at all times and are war zones, as Trump describes it.
I think that doesn’t match a lot of everyday people’s experience, but it does seem to be a mindset that these guys have fully bought into. I think that’s partly attributable to their media intake, and I think it’s partly attributable to the fact that while they may occasionally go through San Francisco, it’s usually in the back of a black car and not on foot. They have removed themselves to some degree, and they’re just consuming Laura Loomer content on their phones and things like that.
What comes after Trump? Are these tech elites you’re describing all in on JD Vance? How are they reacting to some Democrats’ efforts to win them back?
I think the tech industry, more broadly, would be very excited about Vance, because he’s one of them. He’s a Thiel disciple, and has written about how much Thiel influenced the course of his life. He was a venture capitalist and had his own small VC firm. He has financial interests with some of the people we’ve been talking about. So, while he’s not necessarily the kind of charismatic leader like Trump is or a movement leader, I think tech elites will be very happy to support Vance.
I think the Democrats, in some ways, still may not understand what they’re dealing with. I’m sure there are tech elites who will donate and vote Democrat. But there is also the factor of the cryptocurrency industry, which is obviously part of the tech industry. And I think Democrats think that they can still do something with that industry, or get some of their donations and support. But I see the crypto industries pretty firmly aligned with MAGA and Republicans and pretty unbending in its goals, and it’s also gotten a lot of what it’s wanted. So, I see it as much more of an adversary for the Democrats than a force they can win over.
