(L-R) Priscilla Chan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos , Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, among other dignitaries, attend the United States Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. | Pool photo by Shawn Thew
The jarring prominence of tech CEOs at President Donald Trump’s inauguration Monday — positioned, as many noted, in front of Trump’s Cabinet picks — represents a massive sea change in American business and its cultural politics.
The tech world’s turn to the right post-election has captivated anyone who watched these companies serve as a GOP punching bag for the past several years. There are plenty of good business reasons for any billionaire to want a healthy relationship with the notoriously transactional Trump administration, and equally numerous reasons for Trump to show off how much corporate America has fallen in line.
But as cynical as both motives seem, there’s also something deeper about the politics of tech culture afoot — or at least the political frustrations of tech-world bosses operating in the West Coast cultural milieu.
In the days leading up to the inauguration, two tech leaders in separate contexts explained, from their own perspectives, the complex cultural phenomena that led to this point.
The two have different politics, but both are thought leaders from the world of venture capital, so they speak a little more freely than your typical corporate executives. Marc Andreessen, a major Trump booster who was involved with the new president’s transition, and Paul Graham, who urged moderates to vote for Kamala Harris, now both argue that the progressive norms that have transformed American institutions since Barack Obama’s second term hit especially hard in Silicon Valley.
That, combined with (and maybe, in their telling, responsible for) the Biden administration’s adversarial relationship with the tech industry, led to the remarkable scene at Trump’s inauguration.
“The young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq,” Andreessen told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat in an interview published Friday.
The effect Andreessen says that had on Big Tech, however, was especially intense: “By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: ‘[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.’”
That take may be a little bit facile and removed — a lot of those newly arrived Harvard kids were, surely, white men who did quite well within the system. (Or at the very least radicals with the careerist instinct to toe the company line.) And the story of radical young elites causing headaches for management is not by any means a new one. But Andreessen does speak for a lot of fast-moving entrepreneur and investor types who’d prefer not to be bothered by cultural niceties. His conversation with Douthat gets at some real resentments that have festered for a long time within the “Californian ideology” forged in the heady digital environment of the early 1990s.
That whole ideology, seen now, amounts to a kind of bargain: That in exchange for fealty to basic liberal causes, and support for the Democratic Party, Silicon Valley titans would be pretty much left alone to make as much money as they want.
In Andreessen’s telling, both sides of this bargain were eventually broken, first by demands from Democrats to honor more progressive cultural norms, and then by perceived overweening scrutiny and regulation by the Biden administration, like its attempts to clamp down on cryptocurrencies.
Paul Graham, a Kamala Harris-supporting liberal, expanded on this phenomenon in his own essay, “The Origins of Wokeness.”
“This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did,” Graham wrote. “Many were involved in hiring, and when possible they tried to ensure their employers hired only people who shared their political beliefs.”
Graham still considers himself a liberal, and opposes the Trumpian campaign against “wokeness,” suggesting a more accommodationist approach. Still, his frustration with and resentment toward the cultural, intellectual and professional climate of the past 10-15 years is palpable, and he concludes with a call to “fight back” at those on the left who would try to impose their viewpoint within any given institution.
Andreessen described increasingly progressive views among elites as an accelerant for what he saw as the anti-tech approach of the Biden administration, as liberals in part blamed Silicon Valley platforms for the rise of Trump and populist politics worldwide. In fact he blames this political anxiety for Biden’s cautious approach to artificial intelligence as well. Just as social media was “literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler,” he said sardonically, “AI is going to be even worse, and we need to take it right now.”
The extent to which such claims are true can be debated, but the fear of a muscular regulatory state powered by progressive ideology and aimed at the tech industry was clearly a major part of the Silicon Valley meeting of the minds at Trump’s inauguration Monday. (It’s not just limited to these two men, either: See Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about “masculine energy” and laments about the Biden administration while speaking with Joe Rogan.)
“We have to stay involved in the political and policy process for the next — God willing — 30, 40 years we get to do this,” Andreessen concluded.
Thirty years is about the age of the grand bargain between Washington Democrats and Silicon Valley, one that took root during the dot-com boom of the Clinton administration and flourished under Obama. Given the dizzying pace of cultural and political change that tech titans’ own products have brought about, Andreessen and his cohort might not have to wait that long to find themselves with an entirely new set of challenges from those that forced their current about-face.
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trump's tech eos
A not-insignificant portion of Trump’s flurry of day-one executive orders were directly related to his governance of the future.
POLITICO reporters covered for Pro subscribers the barrage of tech policy shifts already in motion, including:
A grace period for TikTok: Trump signed an EO that delayed enforcement of the TikTok ban by 75 days, saying the digital platforms that provide and host the app won’t be fined for doing so, something many observers say is legally questionable. He also reiterated his hope that the United States government would obtain 50 percent ownership of the app, something one law professor told the POLITICO Tech podcast would “raise truly insane First Amendment problems.”
Blocking content moderation: Another EO promised that government will “secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech” online and ensure no federal employees do anything to infringe on that right, a reaction to perceived meddling in online speech by the Biden administration. It also promises “appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.”
Making DOGE real: Trump signed an executive order, somewhat unexpectedly, renaming the U.S. Digital Service the “U.S. DOGE Service,” and giving it the responsibility of “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity” — a far cry from its initial mission of cutting trillions from the federal budget. An administrator will coordinate with DOGE teams with at least four employees inside each agency.
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son pays tribute
President Donald Trump (left), accompanied by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, speaks to the press at Trump Tower in New York on Dec. 6, 2016. | Andrew Harnik/AP
Among the familiar American tech moguls present at Trump’s inauguration, one from overseas was there to make a big bet on allying with the new president.
In an excerpt from Gambling Man, his new biography of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Lionel Barber wrote today in POLITICO Magazine about why Son has decidedly sided with Trump after long attempting to placate both Western and Chinese interests.
“Like the rest of the Big Tech bosses in the U.S. who have been paying homage or making contributions to Trump’s inauguration this month, Masa knows the importance of having a friend in the White House,” Barber writes. “By instinct and temperament, he won’t have much sympathy for tariffs, but he appreciates that the tech sector is heavily dependent on federal policies in global trade, mergers, foreign investment and cryptocurrency.”
But, he notes, there are always limits to a relationship with someone as transactional as Trump: “When the president-elect asked him to double his pledge [to invest in U.S. projects] to $200 billion on the spot, the SoftBank boss laughed and called Trump a good negotiator.”
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