This piece originally appeared in City Journal.
A sea change is underway in the tech industry. It is increasingly not just permitted, but downright fashionable, for technologists to reside on the political right. Moments after the Trump assassination attempt, Elon Musk “fully endorse[d]” the former president. In the following days, venture capitalist and PayPal alumnus David Sacks spoke at the Republican National Convention, leading venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced their support for Trump, and Trump tapped former venture capitalist J. D. Vance as his running mate. A new Trump super PAC enjoys the backing of Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, the Winklevoss twins of early Facebook notoriety, and Musk himself.
What’s going on? The tech industry, after all, has never exactly been a bastion of conservatism. In recent decades, its political stance has generally ranged from solidly Democratic to an apolitical libertarianism that sought to circumvent the government altogether. Republican megadonor and Vance mentor Peter Thiel, of PayPal and Palantir, has long been the exception proving the rule of tech’s alignment with liberalism. Not anymore. The nascent “tech bros for Trump” movement demands an explanation.
An initial reason for the shift is that the technology industry is still an industry. Technologists’ emerging support for the Republican ticket becomes less surprising if one views tech as an industry like any other, naturally looking out for its own interests. It’s no mystery why oil companies support the GOP and teachers’ unions back Democrats. In announcing their agenda for “Little Tech”—startups—a few weeks before announcing their support for Trump, Andreessen and Horowitz declared that their efforts were about what was good for the tech industry, not any broader political agenda: “We support or oppose politicians regardless of party and regardless of their positions on other issues.”
If anything, it’s surprising that it took the tech industry this long to throw itself into politics in defense of its own interests. For decades, venture capital firms and startup institutions mostly ignored politics, except on a narrow set of issues. It was not even a year ago that Y Combinator, a legendary incubator behind companies such as Dropbox and Airbnb, hired its first head of public policy. Even senior business leaders in the Valley gave less to politicians than mid-tier energy executives, and they tended to focus on national races over important state and local ones.
Surveying the political scene, technologists don’t like what they see on the left. From hysteria over misinformation and AI bias to a long-term hostility to cryptocurrency, Democrats have consistently treated new technologies as a problem to be regulated away, rather than an opportunity to be embraced. As Andreessen and Horowitz put it, “We believe bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech.”
President Biden’s chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, for example, has refused to announce regulations for the crypto industry, instead issuing investigatory Wells notices to crypto firms for not complying with regulations that the SEC refuses to clarify. Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, has sued the SEC for its refusal to comply even with transparency laws over its targeting of crypto firms, including efforts to debank the entire industry. The safety-first approach of Biden’s executive order on AI, meantime, is seen as risking a slowdown in the sector’s progress and imposing onerous compliance requirements that only the biggest AI companies can afford, again tipping the scales against startups.
The Trump-Vance ticket has shown a far greater openness to new technologies. Trump can tout a track record of cutting regulations. He has promised to “Make America First in AI” by, among other things, creating “industry-led” agencies to oversee AI development. He will speak at a major Bitcoin conference later this month. For his part, Vance hails from the venture capital scene, reported owning six figures’ worth of Bitcoin in his public financial filings, and has taken a strong public stance in favor of open-source AI. Through the lens of specific interests of tech startups, the Biden administration has proved preferable only in a handful of technology areas (such as renewable energy). Biden, of course, has now withdrawn from the presidential race; whether a prospective Kamala Harris administration would present a different picture is unclear.
But the tech industry’s opposition to Biden and Harris goes beyond the administration’s position on particular tech concerns, which brings us to a second reason for the shift to the right: venture capitalists are still capitalists.
The tech industry’s specific policy priorities operate in a larger business environment. Here, Republicans are seen as by far the better option. Horowitz has explicitly cited Democrats’ proposed tax on unrealized capital gains as an eye-opening shock. For entrepreneurs and founders (as well as for their backers), such a tax would be extraordinarily punishing, to the point of jeopardizing entire business models and destroying the American innovation system. The tax, in the administration’s proposed 2025 budget, would also require the creation of an annual wealth reporting requirement and open the door to further taxes, including on illiquid assets such as shares in privately held companies—the bread and butter of the startup world.
If the tax on unrealized capital gains is a prospective horror, the macroeconomic climate over which the Biden administration has presided is a living nightmare. Under Lina Khan’s leadership, the Federal Trade Commission has aggressively opposed mergers and acquisitions, not only of major players but also of small startups. Yet, the possibility of acquisition by a bigger firm is central to the VC business model. If startups can’t aspire to acquisition by a bigger player, they must stay in for the long haul and struggle to become major firms in their own right. The prospects for this option have worsened under the Biden administration: rising interest rates have made large institutional investors less interested in risky tech investments compared with rising, safer returns in other asset classes. The aggregate result is a tough economic environment with depressed activity. Last year saw the lowest number of “exits” of venture-backed firms—which includes public listings, mergers, and acquisitions—in a decade.
Not all conservatives are solicitous of the tech economy. Vance has broken with most of his Republican colleagues in expressing admiration for Khan, a potential point of tension between the Republican presidential ticket and its new tech supporters. But the Democrats can’t pretend to offer a better alternative.
In any event, tech leaders’ feeling of betrayal goes deeper than their bank accounts. Compared with Manhattan financiers or heartland business titans, successful Silicon Valley technologists (a few die-hard libertarians excepted) have tended to accept government intervention in the economy. Many benefited from muscular federal investment in scientific research and know that the Internet might not even exist had it not been for the government’s own research and development. But the Clinton Democrat consensus—cooperation with business, federal spending on science, and moderate taxes—has given way to a more adversarial approach.
Tech elites may be less sensitive to generic criticisms of capitalism or oligarchy than traditional business Republicans. But industry culture worships audacious founders, successful entrepreneurs, and the ambition to build world-changing technologies. If Obama-era Democrats celebrated Silicon Valley innovation, the “techlash” that started after 2016 has spurred media and political criticism of the industry. When Musk recently announced his intention to leave California and move SpaceX’s headquarters to Texas, prominent state senator Scott Wiener retorted that “California literally made you,” echoing Barack Obama’s much-maligned comment, “You didn’t build that.” Wealthy technologists, remembering the sacrifices they made to build great companies, feel indignation at this attitude, and the backlash toward what their wealth has brought California and America. Compare this with the RNC platform, which promises to “champion innovation” and “pave the way for future Economic Greatness by leading the World in Emerging Industries.” For all its populist fulminations, the Right is still seen as the stronger ally of business.
Republicans also have plenty to offer the tech industry on the most salient cultural topics of the moment, revealing a third reason for the shift to the right : entrepreneurs are Americans, too.
Covid-19 pushed Silicon Valley in a radical new direction. Many in San Francisco, including Y Combinator’s Garry Tan and Mike Solana, founder of industry media company Pirate Wires, have become vocal critics of the city’s leniency on crime and drugs, which they see as having reduced the tech hub to squalor. Other entrepreneurs found themselves, as parents, fighting with teachers’ unions that sought to keep schools closed for months or years, imposed masks on toddlers well after the science had proved this unnecessary, and promised to lie to the parents of children with gender dysphoria. It was this last item that proved the “final straw” for Musk in his decision to leave California.
This hardly means that the tech industry is full of social conservatives. Democratic polling guru David Shor has popularized social science research finding that, given a mix of agreement and disagreement with candidates’ positions, voters will support the candidate with whom they agree most on the issues that seem most politically active or “salient” at the time. In Silicon Valley, as in much of the rest of America, the issues where social liberals and libertarians most disagreed with the George W. Bush-era GOP (for example, gay marriage, stem cell research, and abortion rights) have fallen in salience, while affirmative action, critical race theory, and gender ideology have risen.
If the GOP pushed hard for, say, a federal ban on abortions or the overturning of gay marriage, it would alienate many otherwise curious tech founders. But under Trump, the party is, if anything, moving in the opposite direction (to the consternation of traditional social conservatives). Forced to choose between highly theoretical and hysterical claims about the GOP threat to gay marriage and the very real actions of progressive politicians to enshrine extremely unpopular woke ideas in schools and government, many in the tech industry have become more concerned about the latter. And this shift, already underway before, went into overdrive after October 7 and the revelation of substantial sympathies for Hamas and anti-Semitic forces on the left.
Something else, more inchoate, explains the tech turn beyond retail politics or recent events. When Solana identified the beginnings of a “vibe shift” in February 2023, he had his finger on a deeper cultural pulse: a rising desire to cast off timidity and compliance in the name of freedom.
This points to a final reason for tech’s move rightward: the Right has become the more dynamic political camp. When Trump stated in his RNC acceptance speech, “Ambition is our heritage. Greatness is our birthright,” many in the tech industry nodded along. In a similar vein, Mark Zuckerberg could praise Trump’s response to being shot as “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.” Trump and the rise of the “New Right” have made it possible to rethink old ideas, propose crazy new ones, and offer bold, ambitious plans for revitalizing America. These plans, coalescing around an America First pursuit of the national interest, align well with an industry full of entrepreneurs and builders eager to accomplish something unprecedented, if only to prove that it’s possible.
Consider some of the hottest tech companies today: chip maker Nvidia, defense tech firm Anduril, and spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX are doing work of straightforward significance to America’s status on the world stage. Andreessen and Horowitz’s firm has a portfolio for “American Dynamism” companies that exemplify “the spirit of innovation, progress, and resilience that drives the United States forward.”
The Left offers no equivalent vision. It has been increasingly seen as the side of senescence, stagnation, and decay—typified, of course, in President Biden. Biden’s departure from the race may offer the Left a chance to make a new start, but that remains to be seen. What had been abundantly clear, before the president’s withdrawal announcement, was the stark contrast in public perceptions of Biden and Trump following Biden’s disastrous debate performance and Trump’s triumphant response to the assassination attempt. True, optimism and dynamism aren’t inherently right-wing; Obama’s first campaign rode on a spirited vision of hope and change, and tech leaders responded accordingly by largely supporting him. But unlike the Obama administration, the Biden-Harris administration offered not grand visions but only irritable mental gestures. The spirit of ambition is fully on the right; the tech industry has adjusted its politics accordingly.
The shift extends to each side’s approach to governance. Consider another chic leftist cause, one with major effects on organizational competence: DEI. Many technologists who were drawn to the industry by its promises of breaking through stale conventions and toppling lazy corporate giants have found themselves instead subjected to corporate loyalty oaths, ridiculous HR regulations, and promotions of patently unqualified employees. A right-wing tech industry offers something different. For example, last month, the startup Scale AI, whose team includes former Trump official Michael Kratsios, announced an alternative “merit, excellence, and intelligence” (MEI) hiring policy, earning the applause of many right-adjacent tech leaders. (Kratsios and Solana are both on the board of our organization.) Similarly, the hope of reversing modernity’s fertility collapse unites more conventional conservatives, anxious to revive civilization, with pro-natalist technologists seeking the next audacious challenge, in common cause against the Left’s apocalyptic climate visions. In deciding between the party of conformity and pessimism and the party of verve and achievement, many in tech see an easy choice.
The tech industry is undergoing an “availability cascade.” That is, a rapid shift in people’s professed beliefs is underway, as each person’s public disclosure of his views increases the acceptability, and therefore the likelihood, of the next person’s like-minded disclosure. No one wants to be the first to out himself as a Republican. But once a few people signal that it’s okay to admit it, others suddenly realize that they can come out, too. Thus Sacks could append his recent catalog of pro-Trump technologists with the invitation, “Come on in, the water’s warm,” knowing that the very publishing of that list is likely to make the list grow.
With Trump favored (at least for now) to win the election, one might charge tech figures with betting on the strong horse. But the deeper alignment between the ambitions and élan of the tech industry and a newly galvanized GOP suggest that Silicon Valley will be an increasingly supportive friend of the Right in the years ahead. Just look at Politico’s recent article on “The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview,” where the affinity is hiding in plain sight. The majority of thinkers listed had one thing in common: they’re Californians.
