Donald Trump and J.D. Vance on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wis.
Photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images
Silicon Valley has gone MAGA.
GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is a former venture capitalist with deep ties to the conservative tech milieu, and the choice seems to have galvanized some of the industry’s big names into proclaiming their support for Trump. For a minute there, Elon Musk pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in support for the campaign, before thinking better of it and launching a potentially fraudulent voter registration website to harvest data for the Trump campaign instead. Others, such as investors Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, are all in.
This flies in the face of stereotypes about the industry as a bastion of contrarian libertarians and “left coast” liberals, but there’s nothing new about powerful Silicon Valley conservatives. In fact, they were in the valley well before silicon.
But amid the focus on Vance and his Bay Area fanboys, the press has missed something important: Trump not only attracts tech billionaires, he also is one.
The early days of Trump’s campaign in 2016 owes significant thanks to the conservative Stanford tech mogul Peter Thiel, who made a seemingly strange bet to back the former reality TV star. Thiel was a conservative gadfly at Stanford when he was a student, a campus member in the vast right-wing conspiracy that Hillary Clinton later blamed (accurately) for trying to take down her husband. Thiel pulled his Stanford-centric network up with him as he rose in the tech-business world. After hitting it rich with PayPal, Thiel got seats on the board of directors at both Facebook and the Hoover Institution, the latter of which has served as a platform for his political theorizing.
Trump was a long-shot investment of the kind Silicon Valley investors appreciate, and Thiel hit big.
Trump was a long-shot investment of the kind Silicon Valley investors appreciate, and Thiel hit big. He got a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention, but more importantly, he arranged for a meeting between Trump and Silicon Valley’s biggest names. Since the Trump meeting, Silicon Valley companies have been inching their way into the role of primary government contractors, something they previously left to companies such as Verizon and Boeing.
At that meeting early in his administration, Trump promised that he would help the tech industry “go long,” and he did, inflating what the New York Times called “the tech bubble that never burst” to an unheard-of size.
Simply based on past performance, we shouldn’t be surprised to see tech billionaires come out for Trump. That’s what Vanity Fair’s Nick Bilton concluded, writing that pro-Trump Silicon Valley leaders maintain a focus that is “laser-sharp on the policies that directly affect their bottom lines: taxes, regulations, and immigration policies that benefit their companies.”
Then Trump saw how the tech moguls were printing money and decided to get into the game himself, starting with Trump-branded NFTs. The windows were hardly replaced at the Capitol building after the January 6 coup manqué, and the ex-president was already pivoting. Always in tune with which sector would reward him the most with the least amount of work, Trump availed himself of the same financial tools that puffed up the unburstable tech bubble. As the inspiration for and leading shareholder of social media firm Truth Social, he remade himself into a tech entrepreneur. In 2024, with Trump’s political fortunes resurgent, Truth Social jumped onto the public markets. Now, according to Forbes, Trump derives the supermajority of his net worth — $5.6 billion out of $7.5 billion — from founder shares in a social media company, just like Mark Zuckerberg.
As it turns out, Trump fits in perfectly as a tech billionaire. Previously not a fan of cryptocurrency, he has adopted the scam as one of his own, going so far as to headline the recent Bitcoin 2024 conference. There, Thiel assured attendees that bitcoin mining would “flourish” under a second Trump term. This vocal support has encouraged the crypto crowd to back the GOP, led by the famous Facebook-losing Winklevoss twins. Truth Social went public so fast thanks to a stock market trick called the SPAC, which was pioneered and promoted by tech vet and gadfly Chamath Palihapitiya, who has also lined up behind Trump.
Always in tune with which sector would reward him the most with the least amount of work, Trump availed himself of the same financial tools that puffed up the unburstable tech bubble.
To find common purpose with tech oligarchs, Trump didn’t have to learn the difference between silicon and silicone. Though the industry leaders like to portray themselves as a bunch of science geniuses, they’re just as likely to be Trump-style flimflams. One of the nominee’s top tech supporters, Sacks, invested in a digital health startup called Done Global whose executives have been charged with running a glorified Adderall pill mill.
Trump’s deals with overseas authoritarians and oligarchs hardly put him on the outs. Silicon Valley golden boy Sam Altman has been trying to raise no-typo trillions of dollars in Gulf oil money for his newest project off the hype from billions-losing OpenAI — a Trumpy plan if ever there were one.
Even if Trump becomes the first tech billionaire president, with a matching venture capitalist as a running mate, he wouldn’t be the first arch-conservative in the White House with strong connections and support in the Bay Area.
The Santa Clara Valley’s first U.S. president was elected in 1928 and helped turn his alma mater, Stanford University, into a dynamo of American conservatism that continues to power the movement. Herbert Hoover was a mining rather than computer engineer and was so young, successful, and rich that he became a national figure famous for his business exploits. Like Thiel nearly a century later, Hoover brought his Stanford network along with him to implement his pro-business political agenda, first as secretary of commerce and then as president, and he gave back to Stanford in turn. After FDR defeated him in 1932, Hoover built a towering citadel of American conservatism right on campus. The Hoover Institution stands strong as a bastion of far-right thought and strategy to this day.
Stanford came to specialize in rich and famous engineers who straddled the worlds of industry and conservative politics. David Packard, who no doubt prefers to be remembered as one of the co-founders of Hewlett Packard, was deputy secretary of defense under Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1971 during the Vietnam War, and sat on the board of the Hoover Institution, trading letters with the former president about how to combat Marxism.
William Shockley Jr., who grew up in Palo Alto as the son of Stanford mining engineers and Hoover associates, is the man who brought silicon to the valley as the co-inventor of the transistor. He was also a notorious crackpot racist who used his public standing and endowed chair at Stanford to promote the Repository for Germinal Choice, a eugenicist sperm bank for geniuses. Whether he knows it or not, Musk isn’t working with new material, so to speak.
There is no shortage of these figures in California’s short history. Take Alexander M. Poniatoff, who fought Bolsheviks as a pilot for the restorationist White Army in the Russian Civil War and founded the early Silicon Valley star firm Ampex. Poniatoff was still living in the late ’70s when Ampex hired a programmer named Larry Ellison, whose spinoff company Oracle would make him one of the world’s richest men. Among Ellison’s past interests are Japan, yachting, and overturning the 2020 election to reinstall Donald Trump. Oracle has been in the news as the company behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 personnel database, which Heritage has advertised as the key to the next Republican presidency.
It’s not just that today’s conservative techies walk unaware in the steps of Hoover (though they do); Silicon Valley’s leaders are only a connection or two away from the man himself. There have been a few bumps along the road — the Great Depression, the New Deal, the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, losing in Vietnam, the fall of apartheid South Africa, etc. — but Hoover’s plan for a right-wing world led by a right-wing America led by right-wingers at Stanford has been shockingly successful over the past century. And the Hooverites have always known how to recruit a frontman.
Hoover’s plan for a right-wing world led by a right-wing America led by right-wingers at Stanford has been shockingly successful over the past century.
Ronald Reagan sourced dozens of high-ranking officials from the Hoover Institution and the Bay Area business community. When meeting with George Shultz — a Republican grandee who was then secretary of state but is perhaps best known to today’s Americans as the gravitas behind the criminal fraudsters at Theranos — Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev once complained that the Reagan administration was just a front for the Hoover Institution. Schultz was one of the most powerful figures in Republican politics until he died in 2021 at the age of 100, in his compound-style home on the Stanford campus.
George W. Bush looked to the Bay as well when he ran for president in 2000, and his big-name Silicon Valley supporters organized under the label “B2K.” He went to Stanford to get Shultz’s approval, bringing on his mentee, then-Stanford University provost Condoleezza Rice. She would rise under Bush, from foreign policy adviser, to national security adviser, to secretary of state herself. Rice is back in Palo Alto these days, as the director of the Hoover Institution. Among Bush’s other Silicon Valley recruits was the chair of biotech firm Gilead Sciences, whom he named secretary of defense: Donald Rumsfeld.
If we tend to associate one of the parties with the tech industry, it’s probably the Democrats — that’s where all the surprise about Trump’s support comes from. Al Gore and the other “Atari Democrats” took credit for funding the research that led to the internet, and Barack Obama’s administration had a notoriously wide overlap with Silicon Valley, recruiting staffers from tech and sending policymakers back through the revolving door to lobby for the industry. But while it’s true that tech employees tend to support Democrats, their bosses know better.
In Silicon Valley, private economic interest isn’t just private economic interest; for over 100 years, the community has elevated it to a political philosophy. It’s a myth that tech’s right-wing is libertarian; they believe in the state, they’ve just always thought it should work for them. And what better way to make sure the government is working for you than becoming the president?
Donald Trump has taken to tech like a fish to water because it’s an industry led by right-wing warmongers and con men. And now he isn’t just like them; he is them. As much as Thiel or Musk or Altman or anyone else, Trump is the Valley’s avatar — whether or not he’s ever actually used a computer.
The post Tech Billionaires Love Trump Now — Because He’s One of Them appeared first on The Intercept.