Silicon Valley is Backing Donald Trump

Paris Marx: Jacob, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Jacob Silverman: Glad to be back in the octagon. PM: It's always great to speak with you, especially when stuff comes up with tech and the right. It's like: Okay, I have to have Jacob back on the show so we can discuss this and dig into it. And of course, people will know what we're talking about this time. There was this attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13th. And that really seems to have prompted a lot of the tech industry that was maybe holding back on fully endorsing Trump or, or at least publicly doing so to really go for it. What was your reaction to seeing how a lot of those people reacted to that assassination attempt on July 13th? JS: Well, I don't think that necessarily any people were surprised as coming out for Trump, but you could see how some of these guys are a little bit impulsive and just creatures of X and the news cycle. They're just like: Alright, now's the time to declare your full throated support and embrace the drama of the moment, I guess, somehow. And some narrative of Trump is a little bit courageous, which seems so silly to say. And, sometimes I'm wondering how much to wait for the psychology of these guys, because of course I don't really know them. I'm sort of interpreting all this at a distance, but there's definitely a desire for some belonging, I think, among them or sort of inclusion. They even talk about how now it's more okay to be pro-Trump from various kind of conservative or right-wing commentators that I don't know, I guess in their circles, it's more socially acceptable or something like that. He is, of course, the presidential candidate, so, in some sense, it is okay to be pro-Trump. However much other people find him objectionable, but they're looking for some kind of validation, I guess, is the simple way to put that. The drama of the Trump assassination attempt, which is in some ways undeniable, it gave them that sort of moment to finally declare themselves the way they do it, which is on X and then with money. So in that sense it kind of made sense. And of course, like a lot of people, they want to kind of connect themselves to the media event of the moment. So this is how they do that. PM: I think that makes a lot of sense. And even when you talk about the feeling it's okay to back Trump now. When you think back to 2016 and a couple of years after that, obviously a lot of these tech billionaires went and met Donald Trump. Peter Thiel was very vocally supportive of him, but it felt like a lot of the other tech billionaires were like: Okay, we'll work with him because we need to help the nation or whatever. And obviously we need to help ourselves and our companies, though they wouldn't always say that so directly and forthrightly. But it seemed like there's this reluctance here, but we'll work with this guy because he's the president of the United States. But now, eight years later or whatever, it seems very much so like, it's not like we're reluctantly supporting this guy. It's rah, rah, we're behind this far right-wing project. We want it to succeed. And we think this is in our interests. JS: And it's true that there isn't that much consequence necessarily. What consequences there for most CEOs for voicing a political opinion? Not a lot. Though, it's interesting, some of these guys, again, on X, have been revisiting old political conflicts. And there's one that I'd forgotten about where I don't remember his name, but the guy who was CEO of Mozilla like 10 years ago had donated to, I think it was a pro proposition eight, basically an anti gay marriage, political lobbying group or campaign. And there was an internal revolt at Mozilla and he resigned. I believe this was during the Obama administration. So, and Mark Andreessen are one of these big names on Twitter recently. They're all just kind of trading. Regrets and he said I wish I'd stuck up for him more and John Carmack used to be at Facebook and Oculus said, "I wish I'd stuck up for Palmer Lucky more," the founder of Anduril, and we know who he is. And you see that I guess happening quite a bit now. They're kind of, regret being more conciliatory or maybe being too soft in their view or some might say they regret their prior political stances and are more comfortable and proud of their current right-wing beliefs. I don't really like the term normalization. I'm not militantly opposed to it, but it's kind of a little overdone and the whole, this, don't normalize this and that. Because, what's normal? It just gets a little annoying because after a while, Trump is a normal or accepted person in the establishment, as he always was. Normalize isn't my favorite term, but, there are ways in which these ideas and these sort of statements and this huge amount of financial support becomes acceptable in a way that wasn't before and also because they have a lot of power now and have a sense of impunity and they're kind of feeling themselves. PM: I think that makes a lot of sense. And when you're talking about that kind of embrace of the right and that that sense of normalization, I feel like quite often we talk about Silicon Valley's shift to the right or or embrace of the right. But do you think that the support of tech billionaires for the political right-wing is really a break from the past or was this idea that tech was always this liberal industry, a bit more PR, or than reality. How do you think about that? JS: I do think it tends towards the latter that, there are different ways you could sort of trace the kind of political arc or whatever of Silicon Valley, but of course it's steeped in the defense industry and still is. And there's a new movement led by Andreessen Horowitz and Anduril and Palmer Luckey and others to build defense tech or build for the defense industry in a way that had been a little bit out of fashion or just not spoken about as much 10 years ago. I think that you have to keep in mind certain kind of truisms. These are large corporations that are inherently financially driven and profit driven and conservative about protecting their interests. So what distinguishes Silicon Valley in some ways is that it's had more sort of utopian or at times progressive and socially beneficial. Goals or claims about its role in the world that has received a lot of pushback and even some self-examination in some quarters about the failure to to live up to those goals. What I think distinguishes a lot of the current crop of kind of right-wing tech guys is that They're a little tired of that pushback or that dialectic between like: Oh, we want to save the world or improve the world versus criticism from people like us or whoever else, they just want to be left unfettered to enact their world changing vision and they feel a lot of resentment towards. Anyone who would impede that or dare to step in the way of them as innovators. So, and I think that class and that attitude is very ascendant right now. Oh, one thing I was looking at recently like even when you look at the Trump presidency there are things like the meeting at trump tower before he took office But after he was elected, which was a big deal and but it was kind of like: Okay, we're going to have a seat at the table, all these CEOs, and we're going to make nice for a little bit because they hadn't seen the full kind of chaos and horror of Trump yet, but, again, out of self interest and then you kind of cut to now and first of all, both the top guys at Google are all gone. The founders of Google have gone overseas and are living on private islands in like Fiji and elsewhere. And other people have just come out as overly right-wing or Mark Zuckerberg, the other day called Trump a bad ass. He also met with Trump a couple of times secretly during the Trump's administration. So, and there are other people we can cite, but there isn't really anyone who's even sort of feigning towards progressive politics as much these days, I would say. And that's probably for the best because in a lot of ways it was a bit of misdirection and it wasn't sincere if you could call a corporation sincere. PM: Even someone like Eric Schmidt, of course, the former, what was it, CEO of Google or chairman of Google or whatever, supports Democrats with his money, wants to see them elected again, but is one of the leading pushers of this desire to get the military to adopt AI and be investing more in defense tech. And this you talked about Andreessen pushing it. It's very much a bipartisan thing. JS: I've said this before. We live in Eric Schmidt's world in a lot of ways; he has this authoritarian or muscular neoliberalism that's been very infused with tech, of course. And it's just sort of a stone's throw away from the tech fascism being pushed more directly by the right and very much involves Silicon Valley and the State aligned together. Obviously, he sat on a lot of DoD boards and things like that and has all these investments that have military links or are military projects. So he represents that kind of neoliberal, Hillary Clinton's State Department, because he wrote books with Jared Cohen and stuff like that. He wrote books with Kissinger. This union of kind of State Department, DoD and Silicon Valley together as defining politics and foreign affairs and making a lot of money along the way. And in that blob, there's not a lot of room for first of all, non military adventures, but also just like any kind of anything I recognize as progressive politics. PM: You can definitely see that, especially how things have been shifting for years. So I want to go back and talk about this kind of embrace of Trump and what is happening here. And I think there are a number of key figures that are going to come up in this discussion, but I want to start with Peter Thiel because it feels like he is kind of one of these overarching figures who has a lot of influence on this whole thing, even if we don't always directly see his hands and his money kind of moving. In 2016, people will remember Peter Thiel very publicly supported Trump, spoke at the Republican National Convention, donated to him and then became that kind of link between Silicon Valley and the Trump administration. But it seems like now he is certainly taking more of a backseat, but it's other people in his network who are playing a lot more of the cards here. What do you think about Peter Thiel's role and how that has evolved in shaping right-wing politics? JS: I think it's been very influential. He certainly is not the only right-winger or the first. But he is one of the most influential in Silicon Valley and one of the most apologetic. And you can kind of mock some of his interests if you want, but he is a sincere reader of various scholars and intellectuals and has served as this kind of popularizer in Silicon Valley. All these guys like Garry Tan, the head of Y Combinator. Someone sent me a video of him talking about Rene Girard the other day, the Stanford professor and sort of polymath and philosopher who Thiel studied under. I think Thiel has sponsored a conference about him. So he serves as sort of this industry intellectual curator. He's done some writing of course, but I don't think he has any novel ideas of his own. But people kind of follow in the example that he sets. They read what he promotes and they give to where he gives, and he's cultivated the PayPal mafia like no one else and is its kind of its unofficial don, I guess. So he has obviously stepped back because of, what was it, 2016, I believe, he gave a speech to the RNC. And he was in early on Trump, you might say. And then after the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump brags about sexual assault, he gave a $1.25 million donation. That was sort of a show of faith and support and a bit, briefly scandalous, as much as things can be in this sort of rapidly moving news cycle and everything. So his influence is huge. There are a couple sort of notable and pronounced things about this time around, which is that one, Thiel, he's speaking in public all the time for someone who always seems perpetually uncomfortable. He's always speaking in public. And as someone who always says he hates colleges, he's always speaking at colleges. So there are these various interviews that he's given starting with Barton Gellman last year, but other ones that I was just watching at Cambridge from May. There are various ones on CNBC and other places, this guy is still pretty prolific, but he's saying: No, no, I'm not really going to be involved in the 2024 election; I'm not giving, sort of like he has to keep his hand away from the cookie jar. He has talked about how he thought he was a little bit burned by Trump, but mostly in the sense that it was too chaotic and crazy. They couldn't really execute on the right-wing technocratic vision. And, he often does speak in abstractions, I think, and not say like: Oh, these are my policy goals. But in general, he's a right-wing libertarian who wants amazing things for himself and his friends and wants to live forever. So the funny thing, though, is despite his supposed lack of support for Trump, he basically has admitted he would vote if you put a gun to his head for Trump, and would never vote for Biden. But things have worked out for him anyway. So JD Vance, who has been called an extension of Thiel, everything that JD Vance has done since law school, pretty much, except for perhaps his, his first law job, was thanks to Peter Thiel, was bankrolled by him, or arranged by him, or then bankrolled by him. And he has kind of fashioned himself after Thiel in a lot of ways, even his religiosity. Of course, it's influenced some from his Ohio upbringing, but some people don't talk about it as much as that Thiel is religious. He's a Christian and I don't know if he claims to be Catholic or not, but he speaks a lot about religion. He actually did an event at Garry Tan's mansion in San Francisco about something about Catholicism recently, I believe. So Vance has found both a patron and someone he can intellectually fashion himself after. He's into Curtis Yarvin and sort of the Dark Enlightenment stuff that Thiel has also bankrolled and has a few other right-wing Catholic influences, but he is the hand of Thiel, I think it's fair to say. And Thiel was the one who provided entree for him. This time around also, Thiel has seemingly ceded his role as tech GOP Kingmaker to David Sacks. David Sacks was college friends with Thiel; he wrote "The Diversity Myth" with him. They published a lot of op-eds together. They're at PayPal together, and they've been like-minded for many years. I would say that for what it's worth, Thiel is a bit of a smoother operator, even though he can be sometimes of an awkward interview. Sacks is banging the podium all day on X, but he still has a place of great influence right now, by Trump's side, and I would say is one of the main brokers right now between Silicon Valley and the Trump campaign. PM: Which is so odd to see. I don't know. I just don't see Sacks as that important or influential of an individual, but he certainly kind of built that reputation for himself through the All-In podcast, through investing that he's done and things like that. But it still seems odd to see him as the person who is the most vocal kind of Silicon Valley champion doing the RNC speech this time instead of Thiel, organizing major fundraisers with Chamath, of course. But, it still feels odd to see him in that role. JS: I think what you said about him being maybe the loudest cheerleader or something like that. That's part of it. He's very loud. There are a lot of people in tech who have been right-wing or donate to Republicans for many years. People have more money than David Sacks. Larry Ellison is obviously a big one. He's one of the richest people in the country. Or Doug Leone is a major venture capitalist. And this actually goes back to something we said earlier. Musk, when he posted one of those tweets acting like everyone's coming out of the closet for Trump, he listed Doug Leone. Doug Leone is a longtime big Republican donor and you can look this stuff up. It was no secret. He made one tweet or two tweets about Trump this time. Well, what I mean to say is that a lot of this stuff has been there before, and there are people with potentially, who could have more influence, but Sacks just seems to be into the game. He's friendly, reportedly with Donald Trump Jr. He's very loud on social media, he's whispering in Musk's ear. And obviously Musk has his own gravitational field wherever he goes, especially lately in MAGA politics, so, as long as Sacks can continue to sort of be loud, keep the money flowing, both his own and others and be right there next to Musk, it is a place of great influence for him until perhaps, Trump tires of him in some way. The other thing that I thought was sort of revealing, if not surprising, was — I think it was in the Times — Trump went to one of Sacks' mansions in San Francisco had a dinner with a bunch of venture capitalists and Chamath and others. Doug Bergen was there, but he asked all them Who should I appoint as VP? And despite Bergen being there and being a software guy, the kind of a boring software guy from middle America, they all said Vance. And then reportedly Trump was just basically like: Wow, you have a lot of money and a lot of companies. So, this is cool. You're cool. You can, you can picture that in a way. That's how Trump thinks. You have a lot of nice shit. But that's the level we're dealing with. And so that's why I think someone like Sacks was not necessarily the most charismatic speaker or personable operator, but he speaks, of course, in a language of money and this loud reactionary tone that is very much jives with what Trump likes as long as he doesn't try to overshadow him in some way. And I don't think he will. PM: Exactly. As long as he doesn't try to take the spotlight it's all good, right? And can bring in that Silicon Valley money and support, which Trump obviously wants. You mentioned Vance a few times. I want to go back to that you talked about how Vance's career owes so much to Peter Thiel, whether it's from the financing of Narya Capital, his venture capital firm, which received a hundred million dollars from Thiel and his investors. His network, obviously his Senate campaign, which received $15 million from Thiel in 2022, or I guess it was 2021, to run the campaign to win in 2022. What do you make of the fact that now you have this guy who is very much in the Thiel network who has basically been supported by Thiel for most of his adult life now moving into this vice presidential candidate slot, one step away from being the Vice President of the United States and what that says for the influence that Thiel could then have over US politics from that vantage point? JS: I think it's big because whatever break, so to speak, that Thiel has had with Trump, at one point, turned off the money spigot and I think Trump got a little angry. But these kinds of things are easily mended with Trump or with anyone in this pay-to-play world. And it doesn't even necessarily require him to start donating again. Vance and Thiel, I think are on good terms. And Thiel and Vance first met after, again, Thiel went to a college or he went to Yale Law School to speak in 2011. Vance, at least this is how Vance recounts it, he saw him. It was Thiel's typical stuff about we're all competing for these limited rewards. Meanwhile, society is kind of going to shit and we're not achieving technological greatness and stuff anyway. And he was wowed by that and realized: Oh, I've been pursuing this meritocratic sort of reward or striving my whole life to escape Ohio. And I hate it, which is a common enough, or a relevant and decent insight that a lot of people do, in that kind of position, do reach at some point and can be helpful. But, it depends what you do with it. And so after that he contacted Thiel and, again, Thiel sort of being this solicitous guy who seems to take in strays, he told him to come by if he was in California, and then he eventually parachuted him into an executive job at a biotech company that Thiel was an investor in, and at one point he went to Mithril Capital, which was the name of Thiel's VC firm at the time, now he has Founders Fund, And then he had, I think he went to another fund briefly and then he opened his own Narya Capital at which Thiel was a backer, as you said. So everything along the way, including, as we said earlier, the intellectual influences, Thiel has been there the whole time. Vance is only 39 and Trump is now officially the oldest person to ever run for president and is sort of made out of Diet Coke and Big Macs. So he could go at any time. This is more than your typical chance at a VP becoming president, I think quite easily. So that puts Thiel right there at the seat of power in whatever way he sort of wants to be. And I'm not trying to sound obtuse or naive, but I don't necessarily know how he wants to flex that or what, what is this guy's goal beyond living forever and accruing more money and power and kind of, and moving government to the right? I guess where I'm saying it right now, I don't know if there's a position he desires or a specific even policy he wants. Because Thiel is not someone who often speaks about specific legislation. He likes to speak more pseudo academically or in abstractions, especially lately when he claims to be out of the 2024 race. So what it might look like, I think you can imagine as choose your right-wing libertarian political program, but what he might specifically push for, I don't know, but he would be right there. PM: Even when we think of the politics of that, obviously, at this point, people are quite familiar with the things that drive Trumpian Republican politics, the desire to make America great again by having more tariffs on other countries and promoting domestic industry, while also being very opposed to immigration and migrants and, really scapegoating them, obviously, the kind of influence from the Christian conservatives and evangelicals with the anti abortion stuff and those sorts of things. What do we know about JD Vance's politics, and in particular, his take on what kind of tech legislation should look like? Because I feel like some of the reporting since he became vice president has been kind of like: Oh, he's opposed to big tech, but likes smaller tech and crypto. And it feels like that is a bit of a deceptive way to frame it. But what do you make of his approach to these things? JS: Deceptive. I think it's hard to take a lot of people on the right seriously when they sort of talk about economic reform or kind of economic populism because it can sometimes be insincere or it serves particular ends. I think there are a couple in JD Vance's case. Andreessen or a lot of other people in tech, like the VC crowd that he hails from. I think you'd be glad to just see less regulation. He has praised Lina Khan, which is a wrinkle in this, but I think what benefits tech and what benefits kind of big tech probably redounds to him in some way. What I think overall we see from Vance on economics is that, like some of these people on the new right, is that he doesn't mind some economic populism or pro-worker policies, but they're in service to this sort of conservative social agenda of a family should be able to survive on one income because it'll be the husband's income and the wife will be at home having kids and in the kitchen. This conservative Catholic vision now that does question some market orthodoxy, but again, always towards this regressive social and cultural end of, of building these patriarchal conservative communities. So there was also more specifically a bill recently going around, apparently that Vance had written or circulated, a crypto regulatory bill that at least according to Politico might be brought up at some point for a vote. There's a quote from a lobbyist where they basically said it was too partisan; it was too friendly to cryptos, too Republican, which is to say, too friendly to crypto. And the slightly bipartisan bill that's going around now would kind of accomplish a lot of their goals. But what that shows is that Vance is a friend to these guys, before he was even chosen as a vice presidential candidate. It was circulating his own pro crypto bill. So I think there's no question that whatever kind of moves he makes are gonna benefit tech broadly and be towards this, the general cause of deregulation. PM: If we take a step back from say Vance's politics specifically, do we have an idea of what Silicon Valley actually wants from Donald Trump by kind of pushing his candidacy, investing in him? Do they have an idea of what they want there or do they just want to see a Republican in power? JS: I think it might depend on who you ask or how seriously you take them. Even someone like David Sacks, he probably has a wishlist related to tech, but he's clearly so motivated by personal animus and this resentment and reactionary instinct that I think is undeniable and very powerful. And a lot of these guys like Ackman or Musk, or a lot of these people are speaking out as pro-Trump, they do tend to be market conservatives in some way, I think. But the Democratic Party has also been friendly to that in some respects over the years; it's more of their cultural resentments. And, in some cases, their resentment towards their children who might be trans or might have become Marxist at Harvard in the case of Ackman's kid that sometimes helps push them to the right. So, I do think some people who maybe are more motivated out of monetary and personal interests and kind of securing a place at the table for their industries, like perhaps a six and Z and others are thinking about they don't want the proposed taxes on unrealized capital gains, which is just a proposal at this point, but because well, for obvious reasons, but anyway, who wants to be taxed more? But that's become a very big deal to some of them. They don't like Lina Khan gain the way of acquisitions and various other reasons like that. They want a lot more defense contracts. Not that many of them are suffering in that regard right now. Even Anduril has said: Oh, we've been doing pretty well under the Biden administration. We'll do, probably do pretty well in the next one, whoever it is. I'm sure he supports Trump, but he still seems to have an attitude that either way he should be fine. And I think that's where we kind of come back to that there is an irrational component to this and there is a personal and emotional component to this, which is that if you look hopefully a little more objectively, at what's going on with tech, and they're doing pretty well. But some of these very rich leaders in tech have such personal disgust for anything that seems like wokeness or social justice, for where they see the infiltration of the woke mind virus into corporate life and into their own lives, that it has helped make them into reactionaries and made them Trump supporters. So it certainly is some of column A and column B, but, and you probably have to judge on a case by case basis, undoubtedly monetary self-interest lies with Trump. PM: Definitely. And I think you see that a lot in, on the one hand, if you look at someone like Elon Musk and the desire to not be taxed more to escape kind of regulation or accountability when he breaks rules, whether it's environmental rules or workers rights, sorts of regulations and things like that, that they really want to escape. But even when you look at, say, the little tech agenda that Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz released recently, where It has many of the things that you were talking about, right? The opposition to the unrealized capital gains tax proposal, the anger at the fact that there's more investigation into mergers and acquisitions, the desire for a lot more defense contracts to go to technology companies as if that's not already happening, like you said, with the example of Anduril. But then the other kind of bigger picture thing, again, when you talk about how it's not always directed at specific policies, but one of the things that really stood out to me in reading that document. And in seeing a lot of what these sorts of figures in the tech industry have been talking about lately, is this real desire to position the tech industry as though it's part of this kind of geopolitical fight that the United States seems to be getting itself into with China in particular and, and Russia to a certain degree. But, this feeling that American power in the world is declining that America is no longer, the global hegemon and now has to deal with these other powers kind of charting their courses in different parts of the world and kind of carving out their own areas of influence and the tech industry is really stepping in there and saying, if you want to maintain geopolitical power into the 21st century, you need a powerful, strong Silicon Valley, which means letting us kind of do what we want, and this is not only in our personal benefit, or they don't really talk about it that way. But allowing the tech industry to thrive, giving it more money, cutting regulations is all in service of American geopolitical power. And it's so interesting to see how we've gone from this era of like Silicon Valley is at least rhetorically opposed to government and blah, blah, blah. To like, we are right alongside you. You need to support us because we are both in this game of like supporting American geopolitical power around the world. JS: Absolutely. It's good you brought that up because the nerds have discovered some kind of muscular foreign policy or something because they all seem very excited now about what a16z calls American dynamism, or just, old-fashioned nationalism and that they're paid up members of the defense industrial base and they like it and that's where they want to be because, America! Rah rah, America is good. Sometimes that's what the comments sound like, almost verbatim. And there's monetary self-interest, but it is sort of generationally I think about feeling good about America again; we're sort of past the War on Terror and we want to build cool stuff and like fighter jets and drones and not feel bad about being American. This is sort of a recurrent theme, even in the post-Bush era, I would say, and they are feeling that, a lot of these guys — and of course it's mostly guys — they want to slam Red Bulls and lift and code or invest or sign the checks and cheer for American dominance and what's good for America is good for them. So, in practice, of course, that takes on a moral valence for certain things. But a lot of these people either don't care or they're untroubled by that. It cuts different ways. One thing I think it was notable that I was recently looking at was 10 plus years ago, you had people at Google protesting Project Maven and the company's work for the U S military. And they actually dropped a contract. And now, the company fired people for having a brief sit in about protesting the Google's work for Israel, which is apparently significant and they have worked for the the US government as well, and I think the DoD again. So like the landscapers or the corporate politics have definitely changed and become intolerant of any kind of real dissent, and any pretense of you can actually voice some pacifist or political opinions here that go against company policy even. And then there is also the China angle, which is that a lot of them are happy with are pretty Sinophobic and are happy to toe the almost bipartisan line of being pretty hawkish on China or saying that people aren't hawkish enough, which is of course a very dangerous road to go down. But, the large parts of our government and political culture are happy to do that. PM: I remember there was even a story a few years ago about Meta, Facebook, whatever it was called at the time helping to push these ideas that TikTok was a threat because it wanted to see the attention go there, but also for this divide to be like: Okay, American social media companies, good Chinese social media companies, bad to kind of take the heat Facebook. And I think we've seen that much more broadly in the tech industry as well, where certainly they want to feel like you're saying this kind of rah, rah, we're happy to be American. We want to promote this sort of stuff. But also by making tech, this key dimension of this geopolitical fight, then all of a sudden, any policy that you're taking is about defending Silicon Valley, defending the American tech industry against this foreign technological competitors to protect global market share, to put more kind of investment into the tech industry. With the CHIPS Act, for example, all the billions of dollars going at the chip fabrication. So you can see that there's a lot of commercial benefits to making this geopolitical fight about tech as well. JS: There is a lot of money at stake, as you just said. And they come across as sort of this like. You don't want America to be successful and, in this industry to thrive. What's wrong with you? Because they are, as you said, trying to make these linkages so tight that what's good for America and what's good for American national security is good for the industry and vice versa. It's a very self-serious posture. It's funny that a lot of these people claim to be kind of independent minded or libertarian or freedom minded when in a lot of ways they are bootlickers extraordinaires because they just want to build stuff for the defense establishment and kind of perpetuate American hegemony in this unquestioning way and this very selfish and self-serving way. And that's disappointing for a lot of people, I think, but it's certainly the tendency now. It's this unapologetic American jingoism. But of course, everything filtered through tech being the kind of standard bearer to facilitate this. One other thing I think mentioning TikTok is important because you see this a lot that they kind of made a choice, like: Do you want to become part of the hawkish bipartisan consensus? You have people like Jacob Helberg, who's advisor at Palantir to the CEO, and he's married to Keith Rabois, who's a VC and part of the PayPal mafia. And he has one of the most influential figures kind of bridging this tech national security divide where some of these guys are increasingly comfortable in that kind of role. And he was very much pushing this hawkish line on China. And after he was successful on that, on TikTok, you see him now donating a lot of money to Trump. He was profiled for his donation because he once donated to Hillary. And he's now he's a gay MAGA supporter. Sometimes I think it's giving these guys a little too much credit for just throwing some money around or whatever or becoming reactionaries. But, you can see how this kind of type is being developed, in the Eric Schmidt mold perhaps, but with a more reactionary veneer and kind of very publicly hawkish and angry about the status quo. PM: It's worrying to see that, I think. And when you talk about the donations, I wanted to bring that up as well, because we talked about Elon Musk a few times, but never really got into it. I think we've seen these growing links between Musk and Trump, where he met him back in March, and apparently they've spoken or met a few times since then. On July 13th, of course, Musk clearly said that he was endorsing Donald Trump, and there were these stories that came out afterward that he was going to be donating $45 million a month to a PAC, a super PAC to support the Trump campaign. He's since disputed that. We'll see what's true and what's not. But there are a lot of other people in tech who seem to be putting money into this America PAC, a pro-Trump super PAC where Musk's money is reportedly going. What do we see there in the financial support that we're seeing from these people in Silicon Valley for the Trump campaign? JS: It's a hell of a lot of money. I don't know how it'll wait out in the end in terms of the Democrats are capable of raising a lot of money to right now, Trump, I think does have some between various sources, the campaign, the RNC and elsewhere, something like 50 ahead. Anyway, before even JD Vance was announced before Biden dropped out or anything like that, the crypto industry was by far the biggest donor this cycle versus any other industry. Molly White has a new website whose URL I'm forgetting, but it's something like follow the crypto, I think. PM: Follow the Crypto. I'll put a link to it in the show notes for people. JS: Cool. That's great. That presents it in a nice form, tracking campaign finance data from the crypto industry where the money is going who it's going to. But the crypto industry actually isn't that big though A lot of big time VCs and Silicon Valley players have an interest in it. But they are punching well above their weight in terms of donations like this Fair Shake PAC, which is just money from Coinbase and Jump and the Winklevoss twins and a16z. They have pretty much the same amount, it's like a million dollars less than the Make America Great Again PAC. It's like something like $177 million, as of the last reporting date. So that's an unbelievable amount of money. It's pretty much all going to Republicans or to anti-Democrat causes. There are some Democrats who are pro-crypto who they're willing to throw their money behind in a House elections and things like that. But Jamal Bowman, Katie Porter, who both lost their elections already were opposed by this PAC. So there's a ton of money going in from the crypto industry. Now you add these huge amounts and these very public displays of donations from all these VCs and Silicon Valley executives and Musk with $45 million a month. It's a pretty astonishing amount. And I think it'll end up being a very expensive election. And then you have to remember, look, there are all these sort of traditional Republican donors, billionaires we don't think about as much or some, we do like Ken Griffin or, or some of these other financiers, but also people like the ULINE packaging couple, or there was a report in the New York times about Timothy Mellon, who is not unknown, but he's basically doesn't do much. And I think he's a multi-generational heir to the Mellon banking fortune and somewhat of a recluse, but he gave a hundred million dollars. The people who pollute rivers and oceans are still giving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump. The difference this time around is there's undoubtedly just this huge influx of Silicon Valley money and the crypto money because in the case of crypto, they see their regulatory priorities as being pretty close. They've resurrected the Sam Bankman-Fried playbook of a couple years ago and hopefully doing it a little more legally this time, but it's basically the same stuff of lots of open lobbying on Capitol Hill, lots of posting about it and and rallying their user base, especially Coinbase and fashioning legislation, shepherding along legislation that Is going to take power away from the SEC and towards the CFTC and basically legalize the casino a little bit and bring it on shore from the Caribbean and elsewhere. And that may happen whether Trump wins or loses. So, I think that's important to note that they want those bills to be passed, but also the money in general is going to go to Republicans and to Trump this fall. PM: Is there anything surprising in the scale of the crypto industry's kind of campaign finance donations? Because we often talk about how, of course, there was this crypto bubble early in the pandemic that started collapsing in 2021, I believe it was, and, then people were like: Okay, the crypto moment is over; we're moving on to metaverse and now AI and blah, blah, blah. But crypto is still around and I think some people would be surprised to hear that so much money is still coming from the crypto industry to try to influence government policy. JS: I think that's what is a little surprising and what kind of caught my eye recently — molly White wrote about this also on her new site, but it's hard to quantify how big the crypto industry is — entire revenue or the worth of these tokens. They're all inflated and you can never sell them for, for that amount. So the market cap of all these tokens, that doesn't really make sense. But anyway, it's a small industry. It's much smaller than even other parts of tech. It's just a subset of FinTech. But somehow, this mostly unprofitable industry has rejuvenated the value of a lot of crypto over the last year, obviously led by Bitcoin and have a phenomenal amount of money to directly donate to PACs and candidates when you would think, like in the summer of 2022 that they don't have all this money. Where is it coming from? That is a worthwhile question. But you also sometimes just see like now that these coins are worth more again, you see things like Multicoin Capital, which is a crypto hedge fund, basically an investment firm is donating Solana tokens to a PAC, which is headed by a former Heritage Foundation staffer. And they're matching all Solana token donations from the public. They may have ended this sort of promotion, but they were doing that just as recently as a week or two ago. And now multi coin is also an investor in Solana in the company behind the token. So, and so was FTX or slash Alameda, Sam Bankman-Fried and others like, and then in turn, David Sacks and Craft Ventures, his VC firm, are investors in Multicoin like. It's kind of like this vertically integrated grift in some way. And especially when you're using fake money to match donations and some of the campaign, I believe can accept donations in a few tokens or some of these packs can too. So it has the air of financial engineering kind of bubble. Driven economics, but it is happening. PM: One of the things I noticed recently reading Andreessen's little tech agenda was that they were referring to crypto as blockchain now. So I don't know if that's like a wider industry thing or if it's just them. I was i nterested in asking you, back in 2016, there was a lot of talk about the role that Facebook played in influencing the election, particularly after the Cambridge Analytica revelations a couple of years later. And, I think most people recognize now overinflated claims about the role that Russia played in kind of manipulating things on social media. But now we're in this environment where obviously we have Mark Zuckerberg who thinks Trump is a badass, but says he's not going to officially endorse any candidate and has recently. Over the past couple of years, tried to reduce the amount of like news content and political content that seems to be circulating on Facebook and Instagram, the Meta platforms. And then on the other side, we have Twitter, which has declined in influence, but it's still an important site for political and journalistic discussion, which is now controlled by Elon Musk and shaped by his certain ideas and politics and what have you. Do you have any thoughts about the role that social media might play in this cycle or do we have any idea of that? JS: So far definitely in the narrative slop era of AI and social media kind of intersecting together with just a lot of junk out there, of course. So, I don't want to succumb to 2016 level thinking about disinformation and misinformation, but there certainly is a lot of that. And I think it's hard to deny that with X, they've tinkered with the site and with algorithms and with just the way the site is designed from blue checks and, and various other features you can point to, to promote a lot of unreliable information and to promote the Elon Musk worldview, which tends to of course be conspiratorial right-wing and often just fly out wrong. And even this week, what's kind of interesting is, over the last few days, since the assassination, you have Bill Ackman posting second shooter conspiracy theories, and then now saying Biden didn't actually step aside, it was done by a staffer who posted on Twitter. Look, conspiracies do exist, but you can see that these very rich people and these people who are in control of some of this stuff don't have very good media literacy or don't want to. So I think that has an influence, but people perhaps more versed in this stuff than I can figure out how to quantify that or to what degree that influence really matters. It does exist in a way that we weren't really dealing with, I think, in prior elections. I think that kind of thing about the large amount of slop out there and very convincing misleading information at times where videos or audio is something genuinely new would no matter the source of it and will be in abundance in a way that we've never dealt with before. And then you have again, these billionaire figures who are perpetuating that same kind of propaganda. And then beyond that, I don't know. I think Zuckerberg is speaking very much out of self-interest and very much wounded by past elections when he's saying that we are dialing down the political content. He's almost unabashed about that at some point that might have prompted some reflection or even criticism, but it's his site, so he chooses to do that and really try hard to reclaim that neutral arbiter role that he once sort of stood behind. And so, beyond that, I don't know if there'll be a Hunter Biden laptop censorship situation or something like that. That could prove significant in some way if there are individual sort of October surprise type events that run up against the policies or mandates of social media companies. But the broad trends I think are kind of unstable ownership and billionaire influencers and some form of just slop and inability to sift through information for a lot of normie, median voters. PM: That makes a lot of sense. We often talk about Silicon Valley, especially recently as turning to the right, being very right-wing. Obviously, we see all this support for Donald Trump, these donations to super PACs supporting him. Is there still a big group of tech billionaires in the Valley who are supportive of Democrats, or has that evaporated a lot? JS: There are some, and the more vocal ones tend to be like Reid Hoffman. I have my own critiques of him. He's done a lot of strange things. Speaking of disinformation, he funded, the New York Times had a piece about this a few years ago, this sort of disinformation operation in fake news, in the South Carolina Senate election. You can look that up. Recently, this guy Dmitri Mehlhorn, who's very rich, but also kind of Reid Hoffman's political consigliere, wrote an email to a bunch of journalists after the Trump shooting about how it was some kind of false flag or staged. It's just not a great idea when you're in that kind of position. Reid Hoffman is also the guy who donated to Nikki Haley in a sort of misguided attempt, I think, to try to beat Trump. I think billionaires, no matter what supposed political orientation they occupy are not reliable or trustworthy political actors and have far too much influence. But, he is donating a lot. There's Vinod Khosla, whose greatest hits include buying a beachfront mansion and then closing off access to the public beach, and there are all these lawsuits about it. Or just look up his corporate history. These are authoritarian personalities. But there are some, of course, that are still donating to Democrats and are going to be vocal about it. Also with Kamala Harris probably being the nominee, there's going to be a little bit of energy and they're already, I'm sure, turning the taps back on for some of the big time donors, whether in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, certainly in Hollywood and kind of other liberalist redoubts. But it's gonna help, and I think there'll be a little bit of kind of pop culture social media energy like Charlie xcx already said that Kamala Harris is brat and then the Kamala Harris Twitter account put the brat color or the green color on there. There's going to be a lot of that kind of stuff and i think people in Silicon Valley, including some of these very rich people, who don't want the darkness and negativity and reactionary kind of anti-liberal sentiment of the Trump campaign will gravitate towards that, I think. And it will always be kind of safe for Silicon Valley people to come out as pro-Democrat. PM: And one of the other ones I would just add to the list you were making there was Reed Hastings, who was formerly of Netflix, who is also a democratic funder and was also one of the ones who said until Biden is removed, I'm going to pause my donations to the party, the campaign, whatever. And you mentioned Kamala Harris there. That is where I wanted to end this conversation. I feel like if we were talking a week, a week and a half ago about the state of the campaign, it kind of felt like: Okay, there was this attempted assassination attempt, a lot of these people are coming out in support of Donald Trump. He was getting a lot of money into his campaign. He was already doing well in the polls and it looked like this was just going to give him a further bump and it kind of felt like: Okay, everything is done now unless something happens on the Democratic side, this is kind of sorted. Trump is going to win in November, but of course now we've had Joe Biden remove himself from contention for the Democratic candidacy. It looks like at the time that we're talking, things are coalescing around Kamala Harris as the person who's going to be the nominee. At the time we talk, we don't know who her vice presidential pick would be. Do you think that this shift with the Democrats or with Biden moving to the side, leaving it open for Kamala Harris, does this change the nature of the dynamic here? Does it shift the way that tech is approaching politics? Does it disrupt the energy that some of these Trump supporters had trying to push his campaign? What do you see as kind of the broader dynamics there? JS: I think it is somewhat disruptive to the whatever momentum kind of MAGA tech might have had you even saw over the weekend, Musk and Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist I mentioned earlier, arguing on Twitter about Trump and Khosla saying, again bracketing all the things I said about him earlier, he's saying: Look, I believe in climate change, and Trump's obviously not going to do anything on that, and just, I think, speaking generally about bigotry, perhaps. And Musk doesn't really have anything to say to that. And he had things to say, but they weren't actual replies to the substance of what Khosla was saying. And, and this is stuff that most of America does care about, actually. And before a lot of these right-wing Silicon Valley guys can make credible arguments, perhaps, or at least to some of their peers about the sort of stagnation and decay and corruption of the Biden administration as is supposedly exemplified by this doddering old man whose son was about to go to prison, there was an air of the old Ancien Regime, in a way that represented things that tech, trying to move fast and break things, or the e/acc guys really are against, and think it needs to be cleared out of the way. Well, that has been cleared out of the way to some extent. Of course, it's going to be a new kind of regime or presidency that is still more pro-labor and things like that than tech would prefer. But it takes a lot of steam out of the MAGA arguments, I think. Kamala Harris is more appealing to some of the donors who had pulled their donations. And so I think you'll see that. I don't know if there'll be any great surprise about who comes out of the woodwork, but I don't think there'll be that many tech people who withhold their donations because it's Kamala. There have been a couple prominent or rich liberal donors who have said that for whatever reason they won't donate for Kamala. But, I think most of them, she's from California, she's very much kind of part, a California creature in that sort of California neoliberal consensus or however you want to define it. But, unless you're overtly racist or, or call everything DEI or woke, which some of these right-wing Silicon Valley people do, I don't think that I don't think you're going to see much opposition from mainstream Silicon Valley. And the fact, this is a reason for people to get back in and say another way as possible and something a little more cheerful and optimistic, which might sound kind of shallow, but, we're speaking about people who are very comfortable and they don't sense the urgency of the moment, perhaps, or their material concerns are at a much higher tax bracket, of course, than you or I. So for them, that goes back to the sense that it'll be a much more welcoming environment for them to start donating again. PM: And I feel like you talked about Elon Musk not having very many comments or actual arguments to make politically. I think you saw that Sunday evening after Joe Biden announced that he wouldn't be running for the candidacy any longer when Musk was just replying to a bunch of tweets with Trump Vance: LFG (let's fucking go) and couldn't really make an argument more than that, just like: Let's do this. And it was pretty pathetic. JS: So I write part time, I share with Corey Pein, duties of this newsletter for the Majority Report, and I was looking last night to write it for today. And looking at different early attacks that various Republicans and MAGA people were using. There was: She doesn't have biological children. She has a step kid. So, she has no skin in the game or whatever. There is this strong natalist stream that's going on here among these people. Or that she laughs too much, was the libs of TikTok thing. Or: DEI woke, Look, if you actually want to talk about issues, of course, there are things to criticize Kamala Harris for, especially from the left. But these people don't seem interested in that and it will be a little more difficult for them to actually be taken seriously in any way, if you want to talk about any kind of issue. And then it comes down to: Okay, well, what do you actually want from Trump? And what they want is either the reactionary anti-trans stuff or their way on Ukraine if you're David Sacks or just money in defense contracts and capital gains taxes. And that may convince some, a lot of rich people, but at some point it's a less convincing argument than, look at Joe Biden stumbling across the stage again today. Again, as I said earlier in the conversation, now Trump is the old doddering guy in the race and, and that's really unavoidable for these guys and they're going to have to face that. PM: I think that's a really good point. Jacob, it's always great to talk to you to get your insights on what tech is doing in right-wing politics. I'm sure we'll be talking again before the election. Thanks so much for taking the time. JS: Thank you.