I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong

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One Silicon Valley figure suggested, “It could be as simple as 10 Republican senators discovering they actually have backbones.”

Or 10 big-time CEOs, I might add. They can unbend their knees and perhaps revive some of the Valley’s soul. Or at least stop ripping it apart. And while they’re at it, stop making it so easy for the government to usher in... See more

I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong

everyone is looking forward to being saved by someone else

“I see Mark as a political shape-shifter whose number one goal is the survival and thriving of the company,” a Meta executive tells me. “Trump is so transactional that you can fight him and get fucked, or you can try to work with him and get a percentage of what you want.”

To tech’s power elite, Trump’s tit-for-tat nature is not a bug but a feature.

I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong

By daring to challenge the tech industry, Biden threatened the moguls’ business plans. Even worse, he hurt their feelings . “It’s impossible to exaggerate how offended they were,” says Nick Clegg, who was Meta’s president of global affairs until early this year. In July 2024, Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz announced that they would be... See more

I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong

Tech leaders could afford to stay out west and avoid politics. But then software products started to break down entire sectors of business. “These products were physically manifesting themselves in taxis, short-term rentals, and food delivery,” Lehane says, “bumping up against existing political systems, beliefs, laws.” Sometimes people died from that incursion. Old, beloved businesses closed. Local politicians got mad. To game the system, Silicon Valley jumped to the swamp. As one technologist in the current administration tells me, “The Valley now realizes it can’t ignore politics, because politics won’t ignore you.”

says Stanford professor of social ethics of science and technology Rob Reich, “an extraordinarily tiny number of billionaires who control the information ecosystem have made allyship with the most consequential and fearsome political power in the world. There’s never been a time in history when those things have been combined.”