The bullet that grazed Donald Trump’s ear at a Pennsylvania rally on July 14 (NZT) seems to have ignited something in America’s powerful and notoriously liberal-leaning Silicon Valley.
A cadre of influential technology leaders has very publicly endorsed Trump, sensing the momentum the failed assassination attempt and the selection of JD Vance as his running mate have given to the chances of the Republican returning to the White House.
SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk has led the pack. “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” he posted to his 189 million followers on X within hours of the shooting, adding in a later post that the Trump-Vance partnership “resounds with victory”.
Since then, numerous Silicon Valley money men have made similar endorsements, including a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, billionaire investors who have funded dozens of start-ups between them.
Doug Leone, who used to run Sequoia Capital, the most famous Silicon Valley venture capital firm of them all, tweeted last week that he was endorsing Trump due to his increasing concern “about the direction of our country, the state of our broken immigration system, the ballooning deficit and the foreign policy missteps”.
The support from these tech titans is driven by a complex mix of ideological alignment, business interests and a desire to shape the political landscape.
Antitrust action against Big Tech has accelerated under President Joe Biden, who has also taken a hawkish approach to cryptocurrencies. That has angered techno libertarians, who see Bitcoin as the ultimate answer to what they regard as the government meddling in their lives. They hate the idea of its use being regulated.
JD Vance, announced as Trump’s running mate at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, is a former venture capitalist and protégé of Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of tech companies PayPal and Palantir and a New Zealand citizen.
Thiel was one of the few to break from the crowd and publicly endorse Trump in 2016. Vance, who is pro crypto but has also endorsed efforts to rein in the power of Big Tech, received substantial backing from Thiel for his US Senate campaign.
Silicon Valley remains the liberal bastion it has always been, where tech workers will continue to take liberal positions on issues such as abortion, gay rights and immigration. We are unlikely to see the leaders of Microsoft, Google or Meta publicly endorse Trump.
But a group of well-heeled tech titans are lending Trump their influence and are willing to bankroll him in the pivotal months leading up to the election. Musk, one of the richest men in the world, reportedly will commit US$45 million a month to a pro-Trump political action committee [committees that take charge of campaign funds]. Thiel is also a major donor to Trump-aligned committees.
That will make a big difference in a country where billions of dollars are spent on political campaigning.
Musk has had a complex relationship with Trump. He quit two of his advisory councils in 2017 after the-then president’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement. But after acquiring Twitter (now X), Musk reinstated Trump’s account, which had been suspended after the January 2020 storming of the Capitol building in Washington. Critics claim that changes to X’s algorithm under Musk’s leadership have favoured right-wing content, including pro-Trump messaging.
These elites could tip things in Trump’s favour. But they’ll expect to be rewarded with a return to the laissez-faire environment that allowed them to grow so rich and powerful in the first place.
