In Silicon Valley, the heartland of US innovation that has long been considered a bastion of liberal beliefs, Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election provoked despair.
“This feels like the worst thing to happen in my life,” wrote Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, on X. “The horror, the horror”, said venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, an Uber investor who made a call for California to secede from the US.
Eight years on, the mood has changed. An influential segment of Silicon Valley’s wealth and power is now lining up behind Trump to win the White House in November alongside his vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, a former venture capitalist who lived in San Francisco for almost two years.
Over the past few weeks, an unfolding cast of prominent technologists have declared their newfound support for Trump, with momentum growing even faster since the attempt on his life on July 13.
“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Elon Musk wrote on X, the platform he owns, just 30 minutes after the shooting. Two days later, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, early internet pioneers whose venture capital firm controls $35bn, threw their backing behind the Trump-Vance ticket. And Keith Rabois, an early executive at PayPal and LinkedIn, who in 2016 called Trump a “sociopath”, pledged $1mn to his campaign. “Biden is the worst president of my lifetime,” the Khosla Ventures managing director now tells the Financial Times.
They joined a slew of Silicon Valley investors like Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, hosts of the “All-In” tech podcast, and Sequoia Capital partners Doug Leone and Shaun Maguire, who had publicly backed Trump weeks earlier. All of them have made, or are planning to make, large donations to a new pro-Trump political action committee led by Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of software giant Palantir Technologies and venture firm, 8VC.
Pishevar, far from hoping California would leave the union, has instead moved himself and his business to Miami, Florida and become a Trump supporter. “The Democratic party I knew under Obama doesn’t exist anymore,” he says, in an interview at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “The shift in Silicon Valley is indicative of the recognition that the Republican party has become much more open to grand ideas to really rebuild America and embrace tech and innovation.”
Yet the shift is far from universal in a sector, and location, that is still overwhelmingly a Democratic stronghold. Around 80 per cent of donations from internet companies have gone to Democrats so far in this election cycle, according to Open Secrets (though that has dropped from 90 per cent in 2020), and Big Tech veterans like Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman are still backing President Joe Biden, and have urged peers to do the same. In San Francisco, only 9 per cent of people voted for Trump in 2016, rising to 13 per cent in 2020.
Some of San Francisco’s life-long Democrats believe the trend is being overplayed, the work of a small number of influential figures with big megaphones. “It’s a handful of west coast financiers doing what Wall Street bankers have long done — feathering their nests,” says Michael Moritz, the billionaire former leader of Sequoia Capital. “They represent Silicon Valley about as much as the traditional Wall Street types represent the Bronx.”
What happens in this wealthy enclave of the United States is hardly representative of the rest of the country. But the divide here reflects political rifts being felt nationally, as friends and co-workers disagree over whether a second Trump term represents a threat or an opportunity.
Moritz’s views are at fierce odds with his colleagues, Leone and Maguire. Hoffman was part of the founding team of PayPal — alongside Musk and Sacks and longtime Trump donor, Peter Thiel. Lonsdale and Thiel’s Palantir co-founder and chief executive, Alex Karp, is a major Biden donor.
At the same time, the willingness of some of Silicon Valley’s best-known wealth creators to back Trump exposes how parts of the technology industry feel the Democrats have failed to help them thrive.
“People who innovate are fleeing. It is an intellectual mistake that the progressive wing doesn’t engage,” says Karp. “I personally am not thrilled by the direction [of the Democratic Party], but how far can they go before I reconsider? I am voting against Trump.”
The reasons for the shift are as commercial as they are ideological.
Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters are betting the former president will lower their tax burden and boost their business profits. Many of them are desperate to avoid Biden’s plan to tax unrealised capital gains at 25 per cent for individuals whose wealth is over $100mn. The tax would “absolutely kill both start-ups and the venture capital industry that funds them,” Andreessen Horowitz posted on its website last week.
Competition regulators have clamped down on tech companies in recent years, forcing Big Tech into years of paralysis on mergers and acquisitions, and starving venture-backed start-up companies of lucrative exit deals. Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney-general for antitrust at the Department of Justice, have targeted tech monopolies, going after Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple and others in the courts.
Rapid developments in artificial intelligence in the past 18 months have made this a particularly pressing problem for tech companies. “We are on the edge of an AI surge that will make the dotcom boom look like spring break,” says Boris Feldman, co-head of Freshfields’ global tech practice, who advises multiple “magnificent seven” tech companies. “Tech CEOs are concerned that, because of Khan’s obsessive hostility towards major tech companies, [the FTC] will be willing to impede developments in AI, placing us at a competitive disadvantage to non-western countries.”
Trump is unlikely to go soft on tech monopolies, and indeed his running mate Vance has been vocal on his desire to rein in Big Tech. But the sense in tech circles is that a Republican administration will not be nearly as anti-merger as the current government. On top of that, both Trump and Vance, who invested in dozens of fledgling AI companies at his firm Narya Capital, have positioned themselves as strong sceptics of regulating AI.
Looser regulation would be a particular boon for the founders and backers of AI start-ups. “American technological pre-eminence lives or dies on the fate of whether start-ups can succeed,” said Andreessen last week, explaining that his venture firm’s “little-tech” agenda was at the root of his decision to support Trump.
Andreessen Horowitz has another major financial interest in championing Trump: cryptocurrency. Trump has pitched himself to tech executives as “the crypto president” and he plans to make a speech, in person, at a major Bitcoin conference in Nashville later this month. The price of Bitcoin surged immediately following the assassination attempt on Trump, with crypto investors increasing their bets he will win.
Andreessen Horowitz has an $8bn bet on crypto, making it one of the largest crypto investors in the world. But it has had to fight to influence US politicians as the crypto industry faces heightened scrutiny from regulators after the collapse of crypto exchange FTX and the conviction of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, for embezzling customer funds. Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has been an “existential threat” for crypto investors, Feldman says. “They must get him out. They will spend whatever it takes to accomplish that.”
There are ideological reasons behind the shift, too. Silicon Valley’s culture over the last two decades became defined by progressive attitudes that aimed to root out social injustice, with tech giants adopting mottos such as Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”, Meta encouraging employees to challenge its management on company issues, and tech workers forcing their employers to veto government defence contracts on moral grounds.
Over time, that has changed. Google ditched its motto in 2018 and Meta started restricting political speech by staff in 2020. Growing geopolitical tensions between the US and China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have pulled tech giants such as Google back into government work on defence programmes — and employees are told to leave if they don’t like it.
One of the most obvious divides with tech industry culture used to be Trump’s stance on immigration. Half of start-ups valued at $1bn or more were started by immigrants. Any proposal to “choke off” immigration “makes me sick to my stomach”, said Andreessen in 2016 in a direct response to Trump. But an immigration crisis at the US-Mexico border has fuelled some of the tech swing to Trump since then, particularly from Musk, according to people close to him.
“I think it’s totally cultural,” says Jacob Helberg, a Palantir adviser and former major Biden donor now supporting Trump with his husband Rabois. “Most people are willing to absorb high taxes. I think part of what we’re seeing is the perspective of time has led a lot of people to conclude that President Trump’s policies were actually more right than wrong.”
Provocateurs like Musk have railed against “wokeness” for years, and that sentiment has become an increasingly mainstream opinion in some tech circles, with companies reining in their rhetoric and, in some cases, their action on diversity and sustainability.
Last week, Musk not only endorsed Trump but also announced he would move both X and SpaceX from California to Texas in protest at a new state gender identity law for schoolchildren.
Even some Democrats in Silicon Valley admit that parts of the liberal agenda swung the pendulum too far one way and alienated supporters. “Political correctness in the party is a huge problem, the Democrats can’t yet understand the cost of it,” says Palantir chief Karp.
There is an even more simple explanation for the sudden outpouring of support, however: Silicon Valley’s power brokers now think Trump will win, after the events of the last month, and they want to have credibility with, and access to, the new administration.
Big Tech’s top executives are staying silent for now, but there are signs of a wider movement happening. On July 12, Meta finally lifted all of the restrictions it had placed on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts after the January 6 2021 attack on the US capitol.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Meta, on Friday said Trump’s immediate reaction to the shooting was “badass” — though added he was not planning to be involved in the election in any way.
Now that the public support for Trump that was once taboo in Silicon Valley is broadly acceptable, more might follow.
This would be vindication for PayPal co-founder Thiel, who was disavowed by parts of Silicon Valley for his donations to Trump eight years ago, and moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles in protest at the tech hub becoming a “one-party state.” He has not donated to Trump this campaign so far, but has been the biggest source of funds behind both the venture capital and political career of Vance.
But Silicon Valley’s newer generation of Trump boosters may find it harder than expected to gain the access they hope for. “They’re all calling and they all want to support me,” Trump said of Fortune 100 chief executives in an interview with Bloomberg this week. “And if you knew about politics, whoever’s leading gets all the support they want. I could have the personality of a shrimp, and everybody would come.”
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