The Tech Oligarchs Have Found Their Man

Turns out the corrupt, buffoonish Trump is what they were looking for all along.

Apple headquarters in Silicon Valley (Daniel L. Lu via Wikimedia Commons)

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Appearing on CNN a week ago, the supposedly moderate New Hampshire Republican governor Chris Sununu expressed his gladness that Elon Musk, who spent $277 million to get Donald Trump elected, is “an outsider” who is “not looking for anything” from his hostile takeover of the American government. When the interviewer pointed out that in fact Musk holds billions of dollars in federal contracts and so has quite a conflict of interest, Sununu countered that “everyone has a conflict of interest,” and besides, Musk has so much money that he could not possibly care whether his new ability to shape federal policy will benefit him personally. “He’s doing it for the bigger project and the bigger vision of America.”

We’ve heard this so often about the ultra-rich when they enter politics as candidates: It is their very commitment to devoting their lives to amassing ever more money that shows they can’t be bought. This is something many Trump supporters say about him, all the evidence of his relentless grasping for every last dime notwithstanding. And now, apparently, we’re even saying it about the oligarchs who use use their money to bend government to their will.

This is not just about Elon Musk, as compelling a character as he may be. Our existing archetypes of villainy may be inadequate to capture just what he represents, but our problem is not only with him. We’re also witnessing a procession of his tech industry plutocrat peers lining up to offer tributes to Donald Trump in the form of million-dollar checks — Bezos, Zuckerberg, Cook, and more surely to come — an expression of support that tells us as much about them as it does about the president-elect.

Musk goes radical right

That’s not to say Musk does not stand apart. If you are blessed enough to be tuned out of social media, you may have missed the fact that earlier this week, he changed his avatar on X to a cartoon of Pepe the Frog, a meme associated with various kinds of far-right extremists, including neo-Nazis. He also changed the name on his account to “Kekius Maximus,” referencing a related alt-right meme:

This followed his full-throated endorsement of the far-right German AfD party, which many people consider to be just a step or two away from neo-Nazism itself. “As someone who has invested significantly in Germany's industrial and technological landscape,” Musk wrote, “I believe I have earned the right to speak candidly about its political direction.” That direction should be to the far right, in part to retain Germany’s “cultural integrity.” Musk clearly has acquired a taste for making political leaders quake before him; he has also embraced the British far right and begun a campaign against Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and there will doubtless be other countries where he will soon seek to use his influence to boost right-wing parties.

So this is the man who in the next four years may wield more influence over the federal government than any private citizen ever has. Apart from his copious conflicts of interest, he is a toxic man-baby, embodying everything repellent about contemporary internet culture — desperate for attention, marinating in hate, credulous toward every idiotic lie that passes his eyeballs — to the point where the world’s richest man is now also the world’s most influential spreader of misinformation.

The corruption of the tech bros

Musk is the apotheosis of the tech bro, embodying all the worst habits and desires of that increasingly disturbing species; even more than most of them, his simultaneous capacity for grandiosity and pettiness knows no limit in either direction. Yet as the tech industry tramples to the right with Musk at the head of the parade, it’s worth remembering that not too long ago, it might have been reasonable to think that if we were fated to be ruled by an insular group of capitalist oligarchs, the Silicon Valley gang might not be bad ones to choose.

They were undoubtedly smart and creative, and they seemed to have some worthwhile foundational values. They were the geeks, not the jocks, so they ought to have the empathy that outsiderdom can produce. They dressed casually and had liberal social opinions on issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights. “Don’t be evil” was the internal Google motto for its early years, one the Valley appeared to share — simplistic, and not necessarily incompatible with generous helpings of greed, but it suggested an understanding that it would be easy for the powerful technologies they were developing to be used for problematic ends. They wanted us to know that they were on guard against the temptations of moral corruption that come with the wealth and influence they would inevitably amass.

At the very least, one might have thought, the emergence of this new order of nerd overlords certainly would be an improvement over earlier classes of amoral financial monarch, the sweat shop czars and railroad magnates and oil company tycoons, chomping cigars and beating their wives while they crushed anyone who stood in the way of their endless lust for wealth. The tech rulers had to be better than that, right?

Or maybe not. In 2018, Google removed the phrase “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct, perhaps because they had decided that there are enormous growth opportunities in evil. The tech bros turned out to be as eager to extract monopoly rents as any railroad king, all the while convincing themselves that their genius entitled them to rule as their increasingly enshittified products grow worse and worse.

How Silicon Valley went MAGA

I have little doubt that the Silicon Valley plutocrats now taking field trips to Mar-a-Lago and slipping checks into Trump’s sweaty palms regard him as a moron. But they likely see in his ignorance and corruption a perfect compliment to their own ambitions. Consider how Marc Andreessen, one of the Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists, recently explained his conversion to the cause to Joe Rogan:

Andreessen said Trump’s election in 2016 was a wake-up call that forced him to interrogate himself as a “fully assimilated Californian” and reevaluate his political views. His political shift from coastal elite to Trump world happened because “the Biden administration just, like, flat-out tried to kill us,” he told Rogan. “They came straight at our founders, and they tried to kill crypto, and they were on their way to trying to kill AI.” Andreessen added that in the Biden administration, “technology became presumptively evil … and then, the kicker was, philanthropy became evil.”

Some of this is nonsensical, but other parts make a kind of twisted sense. The Biden administration did indeed favor applying regulatory guardrails to crypto, because crypto is a giant scam, one that is already leaving a trail of victims in its wake. In what Andreessen (and many others) regard as a nightmare scenario, federal regulation might offer consumers some protection from having their life savings stolen by crypto con artists, even if it might be at the cost of limiting the “innovation” represented by, say, the Hawk Tuah girl meme coin. Perish the thought. Andreessen also finds the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau particularly irksome. After all, it has “consumer protection” right in its name.

And how was the Biden administration “on their way to trying to kill AI”? It did issue an executive order on the subject, which was mostly about studying the issue and developing guidelines to make sure AI complies with existing laws as it goes forward. And yes, some members of the administration occasionally expressed the opinion that this potentially powerful technology might present problems in the future, so we should start thinking about how it might be regulated. That does not appeared to have slowed the AI gold rush down by a micron.

Even raising such concerns sent Andreessen and his peers into a fury. It may have something to do with how the idea that they are the ones boldly creating the future is so central to the tech industry’s ethos, but they clearly find it appalling that the federal government could have the nerve to even think about constraining them in the name of some prosaic idea like consumer protection or antitrust. Don’t the losers in Washington know that if you’re going to “disrupt,” well, everything, then you’re going to have to break some eggs?

So in their anger, these masters of the universe took another look at Trump and realized just how much they should have liked him all along. So he’s vulgar and stupid and doesn’t bother pretending to be open-minded in the way they do — so what? The best thing about him is that he can be bought, and for not that much money.

And speaking of money…

We’re living in a moment of unfathomable wealth at the very top, mostly for those in the tech industry. Look at the dozen richest people in America, all with net worth over $100 billion; ten of the twelve made their money in tech. We’re also living in a moment when nearly all the restraints on the ability of the ultra-wealthy to buy political influence have been removed. And yet we treat the financial free-for-all of politics today as barely worth taking note of.

I’m old enough to remember when campaign finance was a hotly contested issue. There were laws debated and passed (remember McCain-Feingold?), legal cases with uncertain outcomes, and a small army of good government wonks devoting themselves to designing a more secure campaign financing structure, all in the name of a goal everyone at least pretended to share: a system free of corruption.

But piece by piece, Republicans and the Supreme Court dismantled almost every pillar of that system, so that today not only are there effectively no limits at all on the purchasing of politicians, everyone has almost forgotten that there ever were. Two decades ago, the legal limit on contributions to federal candidates was a figure everyone even remotely involved in politics knew, the way a baseball fan knows there are nine innings in a game. Today it’s been forgotten, because nobody mentions it and nobody cares; I do this for a living, and I had to look up the current limit (it’s $3,300, if you’re wondering).

Trump’s inaugural committee has raised $200 million, some of which will no doubt find its way into his pocket, and most of which has been given in pursuit of some manner of favorable treatment by his administration. It might be regulatory favors or a mere absence of harassment, including waivers from the coming tariffs, which will be a key conduit for corruption. You can bet the million dollars Tim Cook personally donated will serve him well when he has to ask Trump for a waiver so Apple doesn’t have to pay tariffs on Chinese-assembled iPhones.

A million here, a hundred million there, it doesn’t much matter to the tech plutocrats. What matters is that they get to do whatever they want, shaping our world in their preferred image without government meddling. And at least for now, that’s exactly what they’re going to get.