Silicon Valley didn’t turn right, we read it wrong

Remember when Elon Musk was in Hillary Clinton’s camp? He said Trump didn’t “seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the US”. That’s broadly the story of most tech “bros” – Mark Zuckerbergs and Eric Schmidts. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey gushed in 2010: “Wow...I had the honour of sitting right next to Secretary Clinton.”

Some pundits explained this liberal slant as morality – most billionaires were setting up philanthropic trusts at the time. Others said it was self-interest, because govt projects padded tech revenues. But now when the tech world makes no pretence of progressive politics at all – Meta’s ditched diversity; Musk wielded a chainsaw on stage “for bureaucracy” – an alternative explanation is needed.





Journalist Jacob Silverman provides it in his book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalisation of Silicon Valley.

Although Musk figures on the cover and in the title, the book is not about him. But as the biggest billionaire of all, and briefly Trump’s right hand, he’s an exemplar of the class. “He became the most high-profile example of a dramatic rightward political shift among top tech executives and venture capitalists, and his public persona utterly transformed,” Silverman writes.

The question is why. And it would be a mistake to look for answers in the months leading up to Trump’s re-election, because “This new political reality didn’t start with Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or the 2016 election…”

Look back far enough, and the tech industry began life in the military’s lap. It made its earliest chips for American ICBMs. In the post-9/11 era, “tech companies...established a massive, indiscriminate surveillance apparatus at home.”

Even when tech bros were cultivating a friendly, politically-correct image, the reality was that they “marketed themselves like utopian college campuses but governed themselves as ruthless surveillance states”.

Silverman cites Twitter, whose largest outside shareholder was Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the relationship went beyond money.

The Saudi state was able to “track dissident thought…unmask pseudonymous accounts and trace their owners, who were then arrested”. How? The Saudis had “a spy ring inside Twitter itself”.

To imagine the tech universe as liberal and progressive even though it consorted with the most repressive regimes – in 2016, Uber got $3.5bn from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund – is delusional. What we fell for, Silverman says, was its PR.

So, why have the “bros” embraced reactionary politics now, why are they raging despite having everything?

One, Trump’s re-election “moved the window of acceptable political opinion firmly to the right, (and) a wealthy class already predisposed to authoritarian beliefs readily followed”.

Two, they aren’t exactly young anymore, and see that they have failed to change the world in any fundamental way. San Francisco, home to Silicon Valley, is decaying. In Thiel’s words: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Three, they consider themselves superior to the rest of humanity and miss the adulation that waned after a string of scandals last decade. So, they need a new power trip.

Loose monetary policies since the pandemic gave them the opportunity. Easy money enriched billionaires massively, even though most – like Trump acolyte Vivek Ramaswamy, for whom Silverman worked briefly – have nothing useful to show for their fortunes.

The only use they’ve found for their billions is to amass power for power’s sake.