What drove the tech right’s — and Elon Musk’s — big, failed bet on Trump

I live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I don’t know anyone who says they voted for Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020. I know, on the other hand, quite a few who voted for him in 2024, and quite a few more who — while they didn’t vote for Trump because of his many crippling personal foibles, corruption, penchant for destroying the global economy, etc. — have thoroughly soured on the Democratic Party. It’s not just my professional networks. While tech has generally been very liberal in its political support and giving, the last few years have seen the emergence of a real and influential tech right. Elon Musk, of course, is by far the most famous, but he didn’t start the tech right by himself. And while his break with Trump — which Musk now seems to be backpedaling on — might have changed his role within the tech right, I don’t think this shift will end with him. The rise of the tech right The Bay Area tech scene has always to my mind been best understood as left-libertarian — socially liberal, but suspicious of big government and excited about new things from cryptocurrency to charter cities to mosquito gene drives to genetically engineered superbabies to tooth bacteria. That array of attitudes sometimes puts them at odds with governments (and much of the public, which tends to be much less welcoming of new technology). The tech world valorizes founders and doers, and everyone knows two or three stories about a company that only succeeded because it was willing to break some city regulations. Lots of founders are immigrants; lots are LGBTQ+. For a long time, this set of commitments put tech firmly on the political left — and indeed tech employees overwhelmingly vote and donate to the Democratic Party. But over the last 10 years, I think three things changed. The first was what Vox at the time called the Great Awokening — a sweeping adoption of what had been a bunch of niche liberal social justice ideas, from widespread acceptance of trans people to suspicion of any sex or race disparity in hiring to #MeToo awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace. A lot of this shift at tech companies was employee driven; again, tech employees are mostly on the left. And some of it was good! But some of it was illiberal — rejecting the idea that we can and should work with people we profoundly disagree with — and identitarian, in that it focused more on what demographic categories we belong to than our commonalities. We’re now in the middle of a backlash, which I think is all the more intense in tech because the original woke movement was all the more intense in tech. The second thing that changed was the macroeconomic environment. When I first joined a tech company in 2017, interest rates were low and VC funding was incredibly easy to get. Startups were everywhere, and companies were desperately competing to hire employees. As a result, employees had a lot of power; CEOs were often scared of them. Things started changing when interest rates rose and jobs dried up (relatively speaking). That profoundly changed the dynamics at companies, and I have a suspicion it made a lot of people resentful of immigration levels that they’d been fine with when they, too, were having no trouble getting hired. And in the last few years, the tech world has become convinced that AI is happening very, very soon, and is the biggest economic story of our lives. If you wanted to prevent AI regulation, Silicon Valley reasoned, you should vote Republican. The third was a deliberate effort by many liberals to go after a tech scene they saw as their enemy. The Biden administration ended up staffed by a lot of people ideologically committed to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s view of the world, where big tech was the enemy of liberal democracy and the tools of antitrust should be used to break it up. Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission acted on those convictions, going after big tech companies like Amazon. Whether you think this was the right call in economic terms — I mostly think it was not — it was decidedly self-destructive in political terms. So in 2024, some of tech (still not a majority, but a smaller minority than in the past two Trump elections) went right. The tech world watched with bated breath as Musk announced DOGE: Would the administration bring about the deregulation, tax cuts, and anti-woke wish list they believed that only the administration could? …and the immediate failure The answer so far has been no. (Many people on the tech right are still more optimistic than me, and point at a small handful of victories, but my assessment is that they’re wearing rose-colored glasses to the point of outright blindness.) DOGE was a complete failure at cutting spending. The administration did not actually break from Khan’s populist approach to the FTC. It blew up basic biosciences research, and is scaring off or outright deporting the best international talent, which is badly needed for AI in particular. It’s killing nuclear energy (which is also important to AI boosters) and killing exciting next-gen vaccine research. Musk is out — so is his pick to run NASA. It’s widely rumored that Stephen Miller is running things at the White House, and his one agenda appears to be turning all federal capacity toward deportations at the expense of every single other government priority. Some deregulation has happened, but any beneficial effects it would have had on investment have been more than canceled out by the tariffs’ catastrophic effects on businesses’ ability to plan for the future. They did at least get the tax cuts for the rich, if the “big, beautiful bill” passes, but that’s about all they got — and the ultra-rich will be poorer this year anyway thanks to the unsteady stock market. The Republicans, when out of power, had a critique of the Democrats which spoke to the tech right, the populist right, the white supremacists and moderate Black and Latino voters alike. But it’s much easier to complain about Democrats in a way that all of those disparate interest groups find compelling than to govern in a way that keeps them all happy. Once the Trump administration actually had to choose, it chose basically none of the tech right’s priorities. They took a bad bet — and I think it’d behoove the Democrats to think, as Trump’s coalition fractures, about which of those voters can be won back. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

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What drove the tech right’s — and Elon Musk’s — big, failed bet on Trump