With Joe Biden out and Kamala Harris in, the Californiasation of the 2024 election looks complete. If the 2016 election that pitted Donald Trump against Senator Hillary Clinton was a New York affair, this year’s election belongs to the Bay Area.
The vibe shift has been pronounced. Silicon Valley’s embrace of Trump, along with the selection of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel’s chosen candidate JD Vance as his running mate, already signalled that the home of Big Tech (and “Little Tech”, meaning start-ups) would play a much bigger role in this election than it ever had. Shortly after the fateful bullet grazed Trump’s ear in Butler, Pennsylvania, on 13 July, Elon Musk took to X to announce that he was endorsing the former president. In the days that followed, Trump told a cheering crowd at a campaign rally that Musk was showering his campaign with $45 million in donations per month. But in an interview with Jordan Peterson broadcast on X on 22 July, Musk denied the claim. Instead, he clarified that he had established a Super PAC (political action committee), called the America PAC, to raise money to help pay for the Trump campaign. (The distinction is negligible: Super PACs can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals or groups to pay for a campaign’s expenditures, such as ads, but they cannot contribute to a campaign directly.) Other Silicon Valley heavyweights have also contributed to the America PAC, including former PayPal executive and Trump’s ambassador to Sweden, Ken Howery, along with the Winklevoss twins, who sued Mark Zuckerberg for purportedly stealing their idea for Facebook.
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