Why Silicon Valley Elites Are Turning MAGA
JD Vance’s nomination is, among other things, an invitation from the GOP to America’s tech overlords.
On Monday, Donald Trump revealed that his 2024 running mate will be 39-year-old J.D. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio. Most will remember Vance, whose government career began just 18 months ago, as the writer of Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir (and, eventually, movie) that in 2016 earned him the role of elite-friendly interpreter of the white underclass. After a few years straddling the discourse as a moderate conservative pundit — during which he publicly compared Trump to a deadly drug and privately likened him to Hitler — Vance expediently declared his support for the former president, begged for forgiveness, ran for office as a MAGA hardliner and 2020-election denier, and won.
Vance presents as an outsider-insider, a Trump-style elite class traitor, and a convert, all of which are useful identities in the Republican Party of 2024. But he’s also something else: a former venture capitalist with extremely close ties to some of the most powerful people in tech. His nomination is, among other things, an invitation from the Republican party to America’s tech elite — one that an increasing number are eager to accept.
Before starting a VC fund of his own, Vance worked for billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who in 2016 broke with his peers to publicly support Trump. Thiel eventually became Vance’s patron, donating record-setting amounts to his Senate campaign, and his arrival on the ticket represents an enormous payoff for Thiel, whose esoteric right-wing politics have been echoed by the nominee. It also comes as Thiel finds himself with quite a bit more company: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who run one of the most influential venture firms in the world, have been telling their employees they plan to make large donations to Trump’s campaign, according to The Information. Elon Musk announced his formal endorsement of Trump within an hour of Saturday’s assassination attempt; meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk plans to donate up to $45 million a month to a new super-PAC led in part by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale (other major donors include billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss). Influential investor and podcaster David Sacks spoke on the first night of the RNC, while some prominent pro-Trump VCs now see things turning their way:
JD Vance announced as Trump's VP!
— Shaun Maguire (@shaunmmaguire) July 15, 2024
The tide is turning ???????? pic.twitter.com/Y61ttnbT5h
There are two very different ways to process this change, which presages greater alignment between big tech and the Republican Party, especially, but not only, if Trump wins the election. Those in and around Silicon Valley voicing their support for Trump tend to sound a lot like Vance, describing disillusionment with the Democratic Party and progressivism. Their narratives have similar shapes — the crazy left made me do it; I underestimated Trump; the media lied, and I believed them — but on closer inspection, they tend to get more specific. Musk is genuinely obsessed with the threat of the “woke mind virus” but also now identifies with Trump in the incredibly narrow and personal sense that he lives in constant fear of assassination. In his speech at the RNC, Sacks vented to the Milwaukee crowd about how Democrats ruined San Francisco. There are policy objections regarding the Biden administration’s regulatory approach to AI, its antitrust and tax policies, and the SEC’s aggressive treatment of cryptocurrency. There’s ample space to claim that this is a matter of being simply “pro-tech,” whatever that may mean.
In response, Trump has signaled flexibility on subjects he previously didn’t care much about, flipping his positions on crypto and the TikTok ban.
The 45th and potential 47th President of the United States...
— delian (@zebulgar) May 1, 2024
Giving remarks at the 2024 Hill and Valley Forum at Capitol Hill
4 years ago you had to issue an apology if you even said you voted for him
In 2024, every major defense tech fund is sharing a stage with DJT pic.twitter.com/iRGL9r8Fyk
Whatever their stated reasons for supporting Trump, tech’s new MAGA cohort tends to emphasize conversion: I was a Democrat, or at least not a Trump supporter, until I had no choice. Like Vance’s conversion narrative, theirs are convenient and likely overstated.
Big tech’s ties to the Democratic Party are well documented but indicative above all of an industry that multiplied in size during the Obama administration, when it all but openly sought and achieved some level of regulatory lenience. California is a blue state, San Francisco is an even bluer city, and big-tech employees across the industry tend to support Democrats, but the firms they work for are large corporations whose leaders believe they could make more money with less regulation and lower taxes. While some tech leaders in charge of or affiliated with large public companies had previously been critical of Trump — Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, for example — they have since been cowed by a hyperpoliticized tech backlash and official threats during and after Trump’s presidency. Some have retreated into political illegibility and studiously apolitical image-making. After the assassination attempt, more restrained tech leaders offered condolences and condemnations, reasonable responses to a broadly significant event but also a valuable chance to soften their tone about a movement that has been and can once again be turned against them.
This brings us to the other way to process the growing MAGA-tech alliance: Of course! What took them so long? This has always been a natural fit in the ways that matter most, and now a lot of people think Trump is going to win. Silicon Valley, despite its popular reputation as a hub for consumer products, was built on defense contracting; in 2024, defense tech is once again booming. Crypto is fundamentally a libertarian technology. Tech leaders and investors are spooked by a nascent labor movement against which they have fought aggressively. They’re annoyed by meddling regulators and contemptuous of the critical press. They’re fed up with activist employees. That the tech industry as a whole could in any material way be considered a genuinely progressive force was at best a misunderstanding and at worst a successful political campaign to pull them further in the other direction.
The tech elite’s current MAGA turn is led by particular sorts of players, many of whom are already major government contractors or, as investors, see the government as both a potential funder and the largest possible client. They’re people who feel relatively immune among their peers to the influences that might have been holding them back from speaking more like powerful people in other industries, in which support for Trump by the extremely wealthy is regarded not so much as a mystery as an obvious product of aligned interests and favor-seeking with a dash of more personal intra-elite solidarity. The fact that all of them except Thiel but including Vance are terminally online X posters is no small thing (their diversely aggrieved posts are worth keeping in mind when they suggest, for example, that it’s really all about taxes). Some of them are VCs who don’t need to worry about resistance from employees or shareholders in the ways executives at major public companies do and who don’t mind the falling social cost of publicly embracing Trump — a significant but ultimately flimsy factor in how they talked in public until now. One owns the social platform they all use to talk to one another and has made it abundantly clear that, from his rare position of extreme power, he doesn’t have to care what his employees or investors think.
Vance’s presence on the ticket gives permission to industry figures who might have been reluctant to voice support or donate. He’s one of them! He even posts like them! But it’s also an implied threat to the sorts of cautious tech executives who, burned by their every encounter with partisan politics over the past decade, may otherwise want to keep quiet. Vance has staked out a position on AI that is both anti-regulatory and highly skeptical of major AI firms on specific ideological terms, praised FTC commissioner Lina Khan for some of the agency’s aggressive antitrust actions, and been critical of Section 230 protections but specifically for large tech companies (he is an investor in Rumble, a YouTube alternative). It sketches out the sort of conditional promise with which Vance is personally familiar: You can have what you want in exchange for your loyalty.