Why Do People Like Elon Musk Love Donald Trump? It’s Not Just About Money.
"On a Friday morning in May, a day after Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in a scheme to influence the 2016 election by falsifying business records, I met a tech leader for breakfast in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. A lifelong Democrat, he had recently reinvented himself as an ardent Trump supporter. Unmoved by the conviction, he was on his way to a fund-raiser for the former president about a week later (starting ticket price: $50,000).
I co-founded Facebook in college 20 years ago, but I left California and start-up culture behind long ago for public policy and economics. As we sat over scrambled eggs, chicken sausage and whole-wheat toast, I was struck by how many of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in Silicon Valley — including some I knew — were now loudly backing Mr. Trump.
The event my companion jetted off to raised $12 million in a single evening. Among the former president’s highest-profile backers in the Valley are the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who endorsed Mr. Trump on their podcast, and Elon Musk, who founded one of the most well-funded super PACs supporting his campaign. Mr. Trump claims that Mark Zuckerberg called him to say that he wouldn’t support a Democrat in November, although Mr. Zuckerberg’s spokesperson denied the claim.
It would be easy to write off tech’s rightward drift as nothing more than the rich acting in their economic self-interest, but Silicon Valley has always been driven by profit, and it hasn’t tilted Republican since the 1980s. Even now, it remains largely Democratic, even though even some of Kamala Harris’s strongest Valley supporters worry about how she might approach tech policy.
Mr. Trump appeals to some Silicon Valley elites because they identify with the man. To them, he is a fellow victim of the state, unjustly persecuted for his bold ideas. Practically, he is also the shield they need to escape accountability. Mr. Trump may threaten democratic norms and spread disinformation; he could even set off a recession, but he won’t challenge their ability to build the technology they like, no matter the social cost.
These leaders are betting they can sway Mr. Trump to their ideas through public support and financial backing, and they might be right. Once a critic of cryptocurrency, he has shifted to opposing regulation after crypto executives donated to his campaign, and this month he and his sons unveiled a crypto business. Mr. Trump recently proposed a “government efficiency commission” — an idea Mr. Musk floated to him only weeks earlier. While Mr. Trump’s allies in Silicon Valley may be few, their support could grant them influence over how his potential second administration — and by extension, the Republican Party — shapes tech policy for years to come.
As much as they want to influence Mr. Trump’s policies, they also want to strike back at the Biden-Harris administration, which they believe has unfairly targeted their industry.
More than any other administration in the internet era, President Biden and Ms. Harris have pushed tech companies toward serving the public interest. Key to their approach is the support of start-ups to counterbalance the dominance of tech giants, whose combined market value eclipses the G.D.P. of many countries. Brian Deese, the former director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, has made clear that “big” companies are not inherently bad. But when they wield their market power, they can unfairly increase prices, narrow consumer choice, lower wages and impede the innovation that comes from fruitful competition.
Over the past three years, the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have taken on some of the largest tech companies — Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple — arguing that they’ve stifled competition and harmed consumers. They’ve already made progress, including a major antitrust ruling against Google that could create momentum for other cases.
It’s not just antitrust. Mr. Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission, led by Gary Gensler, another target of the tech elite backlash, has aggressively reined in cryptocurrencies, the mistakenly named category of products that offers little practical value to most Americans. The Biden-Harris administration also issued a landmark executive order last year that created a framework to ensure that A.I. technologies are safe and fair.
Most Americans see these actions as overdue. They blame tech companies for contributing to the mental health crisis among teenagers, political polarization, rampant misinformation and privacy violations. Many of us, reading the evidence about social media’s negative effects on our children, do not want to make the same mistake of failing to create guardrails for new technologies, however promising they may be.
Mr. Trump’s tech supporters see it differently. Echoing monopolists of the past, they say they are the victims of zealous progressives who want to overregulate the industry. Constraints on their market power threaten the growth of their businesses — and challenge their foundational belief that technological advancement is good in and of itself.
Last year, Mr. Andreessen, whose venture capital firm is heavily invested in crypto, wrote a widely discussed “manifesto” claiming that enemy voices of “bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy” are opposed to the “pursuit of technology, abundance and life.” In a barely concealed critique of the Biden-Harris administration, he argued that those who believe in carefully assessing the impact of new technologies before adopting them are “deeplyimmoral.”
It’s not surprising then that tech titans feel some camaraderie with Mr. Trump, who portrays himself as a savior and a martyr. Like them, he doesn’t want to have to play by the rules or entertain challenges to his vision for a “better” America. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he said in his first presidential run, “which is why I alone can fix it.” He launchedhis 2024 campaign by saying, “I am a victim,” and continues to claim that the justice system is rigged, as are elections. He will fight for self-perceived victims of all sorts, even (or especially) the ones who live in gilded mansions.
Arguments like Mr. Andreessen’s offer a false choice between economic and technological advancement — made possible by boundary-breaking business leaders — and ineffective, bureaucratic regulation. I, too, am a techno-optimist, and I believe that the world is largely better off because of the avalanche of technologies that have emerged over the past two decades. But just as we needed rules of the road for cars and safety regulations for planes, we need to manage these new technologies through public policy to ensure we like what they are doing to us, not resign ourselves to letting them run wild.
Some Republicans have appeared to realize this, which can make the budding alliance between tech and Mr. Trump seem strange at first glance. A group of economic nationalists, which includes JD Vance, claims to want more oversight of tech companies. Teaming up with Democrats, Senator Lindsey Graham has proposed a digital regulatory agency and Senator Josh Hawley has proposed a particularly aggressive framework to manage A.I. companies. Mr. Vance himself has said that Mr. Biden’s F.T.C. chair, Lina Khan, is “doing a pretty good job.”
In the presidential race, however, stray remarks about antitrust from Mr. Trump’s running mate hold little weight with the candidate himself. Mr. Trump controls his party, and tech leaders know the only voice that truly matters is the last one he heard whispering in his ear."
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