Trump’s techno-libertarian dream team goes to Washington

In the weeks after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, many top tech leaders found themselves at a meeting in Trump Tower, frowning and quite obviously full of dread. Now, the same executives sound enthusiastic when they say they’re looking forward to working with the next president.

After Tuesday’s election, the congratulations from the tech elite to Trump came in fast. The day after he secured the White House, everyone from Tim Cook to Mark Zuckerberg posted their well wishes for Trump’s second term. Even Jeff Bezos weighed in, hailing Trump’s “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.” This, from a man who has been in more than one public feud with Trump.

The newfound praise does not, however, signal a political realignment in all of Silicon Valley. Tech executives as well as rank-and-file workers overwhelmingly supported Kamala Harris in the election, which shouldn’t be too surprising: She’s been involved in Bay Area politics for many years and has deep ties with the tech and venture capital industries. That allegiance continued the trends of the Obama era, which was marked by a bit of a love fest between Washington and Silicon Valley. Barack Obama, who won the White House in 2008 with the help of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, embraced the ethos of startup culture and celebrated tech companies as a positive force in the United States. He developed personal relationships with executives like Zuckerberg and championed tech-friendly policies. 

Now, that era is over. In its place is something darker and dominated by a small but very loud group of techno-libertarian Trump fans whose ranks include not only Elon Musk but also the industry’s most influential investors, most of the PayPal Mafia, and the vice president-elect. 

Does that mean the tech industry has taken a turn to the right? Is Silicon Valley Trump country now?

“It is neither left nor right, Democrat or Republican,” Margaret O’Mara, an American history professor at the University of Washington, told me after the election. She pointed out that the tech industry culture in Silicon Valley has its roots in post-Vietnam baby boomers viewing personal computers as a form of liberation. 

“They didn’t feel like they had anything in common with political conservatives, but they shared a libertarianism that ran its way all the way across the political spectrum,” O’Mara added. “It’s kind of a funny libertarianism.”

You get a sense of Silicon Valley’s anti-bureaucratic worldview in everything from Apple’s famous “1984” ad, which quite literally suggests tearing down the establishment, to Google’s celebrated 20 percent rule, which lets employees work on side projects of their own choosing. There’s also a more extreme version of this philosophy in the tech industry, especially lately, one that leans into anti-establishment thinking, which explains their affinity for crypto. These 21st-century techno-libertarians just want to be left alone to build things and make money. 

The tech executives busy kissing the ring this week are not necessarily part of this crowd. The Tim Cooks of the world are just doing business, and that requires doing business with the president of the United States, whomever it might be. After the tumultuous first Trump administration, these leaders learned that the president-elect responds best to flattery and praise. They’ve actually been sucking up to Trump for months in hopes that they might have some sway in the event of his return to office. 

This would be handy for many reasons. The Biden administration, in a break from Obama, has been tough on Big Tech. He appointed anti-monopoly legal star Lina Khan to chair the Federal Trade Commission, and she mounted multiple antitrust suits against the country’s biggest tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. Now, Khan is currently waiting to see if she’ll keep her job, and the targets of those lawsuits may have an ally in Trump, who gets to decide Khan’s fate. In addition to less intense regulatory scrutiny, tech companies would also enjoy lower corporate taxes, which Trump has promised to provide. 

“​​In my mind, this isn’t a story about Silicon Valley overall and DC overall,” said Robert Lalka, a professor at Tulane University. “Instead, what’s occurring now involves the influence of far fewer people: a very close-knit network of like-minded Trump supporters, especially if we focus on the PayPal Mafia, and the transformation of the Republican Party and its policy agenda.”

The PayPal Mafia refers to a group of entrepreneurs who worked at PayPal in its early days before going on to found or help build hugely influential tech companies. If you had to pick a godfather of the PayPal Mafia — and hence the leader of this pro-Trump techno-libertarian political revolution — it would be Peter Thiel. The PayPal co-founder donated over $1 million to Trump’s campaign back in 2016 and spent $10 million to help JD Vance win a Senate seat in Ohio in 2022. Thiel also helped fund a project to establish autonomous, floating nations in international waters, where they would be free of all laws and regulations — one reason he has been called the “avatar of techno-libertarianism.”

The motivations of the techno-libertarians, also now known as techno-authoritarians, are more twisted. Elon Musk, who was also a PayPal co-founder, emerged this year as Trump’s biggest supporter after donating nearly $119 million to his campaign through his America PAC and has made the promotion of free speech one of his missions. Free speech is also a big part of why, after accusing it of censorship, Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and turned it into X, where the promotion of right-wing propaganda and misinformation may or may not have helped Trump get elected too. 

It’s not hard to see why Musk would benefit from a close relationship with the White House. The billionaire certainly didn’t have much of a rapport with the Biden administration, which snubbed him at an electric vehicle summit, an incident that reportedly led Musk to embrace Trump. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, makes billions of dollars through government contracts, while his car company, Tesla, is lobbying for fewer regulations around self-driving cars as it attempts to launch a robotaxi business. Musk’s company Tesla Energy, formerly SolarCity, has received billions in subsidies over the years and surely looks to benefit from the federal government’s continued investment in the energy transition. Meanwhile, Trump has promised Musk a role in his administration as the “secretary of cost-cutting” — a position that doesn’t yet exist, but one that Trump seems to be seriously entertaining.

The other loud pro-Trump voices in Silicon Valley share a web of connections to each other and to Musk. There’s former PayPal COO and Musk pal David Sacks, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in July; Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir with Peter Thiel and helped launch Musk’s America PAC; and Marc Andreessen, who last year published the 5,200-word Techno-Optimist Manifesto that envisions tech leaders as keepers of the social order. 

It’s worth noting that not every member of the PayPal Mafia has pledged allegiance to Trump. Reid Hoffman, another former PayPal COO and LinkedIn co-founder is a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser. He donated $7 million to pro-Harris and pro-Biden PACs, even though he’s a vocal Lina Khan critic. He was also on a list of more than 100 venture capitalists who threw their support behind Harris leading up to the election.

And then there’s cryptocurrency.

Andreessen’s VC firm announced in 2022 it was going all-in on crypto, a bet that’s starting to pay off after two years of looking very foolish. Trump has promised to create a strategic cryptocurrency stockpile for the US government in his second term. Trump’s general anti-regulation, pro-crypto stance sent Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies soaring to all-time highs after election night, following a widely covered crypto winter that lasted a couple of years. 

You could argue that the crypto vote was vital to helping Trump and a lot of other Republican candidates win, too. The crypto industry has emerged as one of the most powerful lobbying forces in the country, pouring tens of millions of dollars into races against politicians they perceive to be anti-crypto — and it’s working. So far, 48 candidates backed by pro-crypto PACs have won their races this year. Zero have lost. 

When you think of it that way, Trump’s win on the back of techno-authoritarian billionaires seems less like a seismic shift in the politics of the tech industry and more like a bunch of one-issue voters who donated lots of money and got their way.

“I think a lot of it is about crypto,” O’Mara said. “Crypto is also tied in — and always has been tied in — to a broader worldview, which is one of libertarianism, deregulation, or privately regulated markets that are separate from government.” She described this ethos as “escaping the state.”

Now, the techno-libertarians are the state. The day after Trump declared victory, he asked Musk to join him on a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And in the coming months, several more members of the PayPal Mafia get to decide what US tech policy will be for the next four years. 

You have to wonder if they just want to tear it all down. Or maybe they’ll get bored and move to a floating nation in international waters where there are no laws and never have been.