Tech turns right

1/15/25

A few weeks ago, I drove in the rain to a San Francisco Freedom Club holiday party. Eoghan McCabe, CEO of Intercom, and his team released the location an hour before the party’s time - the San Francisco Mint. The dress code was cocktail dresses for women and suits for men. Wine and cocktails overflowed, a giant charcuterie board with mini forks had cubed dragon fruit and cheese, hot dogs were served around 10, and in the midst, I spotted a boy walking around with an American flag and MAGA hat.

The Daily just covered Big Tech’s move to the right, which made me think back to this night. I had no political conversations, but an undertone was in the air, which was acknowledged over free drinks. The club is not promoted to be political, but to celebrate “freedom, America, technology, capitalism, humanity, merit and growth.”

I grew up in the Bay Area, my parents worked in tech, and I didn’t speak to a Republican until college, where they were a minority. My high school principal got fired when he hosted a rally during class hours in our football field to scream “Fuck Trump!” I assumed everyone in a 100-mile radius from me to be a Democrat.

Silicon Valley is also by default left-leaning. A 2019 study found that tech entrepreneurs support many liberal policies - same-sex marriage, abortion, gun control, taxation, redistribution, universal healthcare, climate change - except one: regulation.

While Obama was friends with the tech world, Joe Biden was not. Biden appointed Lina Khan to chair the FTC and Gary Gensler to chair SEC, both aggressive regulators, to crack down on big tech through antitrust and crypto regulations. During his 2020 campaign trail, Biden talked about big tech’s power growing too large and protecting consumers and competition. Biden didn’t invite Elon Musk to a white house summit about the future of electric cars, which soured their relationship. Jeff Skoll, former president of eBay who contributed $645,600 to Biden’s campaign in 2020, wrote a long angry tweet about Biden purposefully excluding Tesla because it wasn’t unionized.

Marc Andreessen, a serious name in tech, coined a concept called “the deal.” A deal between tech entrepreneurs and society. A tech founder would start a company, get rich, create jobs, pay their taxes, and at the end of their life, they would donate all their money to philanthropy. That washes away their sins and reclassifies them as a “suspect business mogul” to a “virtuous philanthropist.” And meanwhile, the press and Warren Buffet loves them, they get invited to Davos, all the dinner parties, and it’s all great. But in the past ten years, Andreessen found that this deal was broken.

He saw that better economic outcomes, technology, and philanthropy became evil. His turning point was when Zuckerberg and Chan pledged 99% of their ownership in Facebook to philanthropy to be met with backlash over doing it to get a tax break. Now that this deal wasn’t working, he had to reconsider his politics and place in society. Which is when he turned to Trump.

Andreessen went golfing with Trump in Jersey, ate meat, wined and dined, and was assured that he would be allowed to do what he wants with startups. He also publicly declared that he will stop the crackdown on cryptocurrency and regulation. Andreessen and Horowitz formally endorsed Trump for his support behind “little tech.”

And it’s not only Andreessen. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Dara Khosrowshahi, and Jeff Bezos are skipping the World Economic Forum summit in Switzerland to attend Trump’s inauguration next Monday. Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, and Sundar Pichai have each donated a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural fund. Ripple donated $5 million, Uber $1 million, Robinhood $2 million, Perplexity AI $1 million, Coinbase $1 million, Intuit $1 million, Goldman Sachs $1 million, just to name a few. We’ll get a full list after 90 days of inauguration (his fund is at $170 million so far, compared to Biden’s $62 million, and 2016 Trump’s $107 million.)

Last week, Facebook stopped fact-checking because as per Zuck, it led to “too much censorship.” The Times wrote that gone are the days when Mark appeared in a suit and tie apologizing in front of Congress. Now he is seen with longer hair, gold chains, and oversized tees hunting.

We can also see the Trump embrace in bro-y podcasts. Trump talked to Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz, Mark Calaway, Theo Von, and Logan Paul, to name a few, about rap beefs, diss tracks, fights, and alcohol addictions before the election. Trump’s granddaughter Kai is a vlogger now and gets questions from Elon Musk in her q&as.

At the party, I spoke to a broken-hearted computer vision PhD student, a husband and wife who worked in cybersecurity, dads, a founder who made a laptop with no blue light, someone from India who told me they were from the “best city” of India but refused to tell me the city, a man in finance who didn’t like his work but realized that “providing” is more important than enjoying work, a German PhD student who I made a hot dog for, and others I can’t remember. No one fit the mold of any political party. I irish-exited the Mint to drive home with low tire pressure in the pouring rain.