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.
A few days after the assassination attempt, Zuckerberg described Trump’s fist pumping, telegenic “fight, fight, fight” as “one of the most badass things” he had ever seen. Meanwhile, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, spoke at length about why they were supporting Trump on the election episode of their podcast. Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, who is part owner of the NBA team the Golden State Warriors and was a Biden donor during the 2020 election, recently hosted a fundraiser for Trump; along with Thiel, he was reportedly among those who backed Vance as a candidate for vice-president. Palihapitiya co-hosts a podcast with entrepreneur David Sacks, another big Trump supporter.
Harris, who was born in Oakland and worked as a prosecutor in San Francisco, has her connections to Silicon Valley. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, is Uber’s chief legal officer. And while there has been a definitive drift to the right for one cohort of campaign donors in Silicon Valley, others remain steadfast liberals. LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic Party mega-donor Reid Hoffman immediately endorsed Harris for president after Biden announced his withdrawal on 21 July. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has been a big Democratic donor in the past, and Harris also attended the wedding of Napster co-founder Sean Parker.
But the burgeoning Silicon Valley right has extensive beef with the Biden administration on AI, start-ups, crypto, and taxes. They claim that the Biden administration has been uniquely hostile to their interests. Leading figures say the administration’s approach could cost America in its AI arms race with China. They say that the entirety of military doctrine and warfare is about to change, and indeed, is already changing in Ukraine, where Thiel’s Palantir has provided AI-enabled software and landmine-clearing tech. During their most recent podcast, Horowitz and Andreessen said that AI might yield the biggest tech boom of all time, noting that the Department of Defense had already classified AI as the “third offset” – the cornerstone tech for the coming generation. (The first offset was nuclear weapons capability in the 1950s, while the second was the precision weaponry of the 1970s and 1980s.)
Harris, like Biden, has been outspoken about the dangers of AI, calling it an “existential threat” and backing the outgoing president’s sweeping executive order last year that aimed to regulate AI. Proponents of artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley have described the executive order as “a violation of executive authority”. They say that placing too many restrictions on AI at this stage will risk weakening the US military. “You can’t have the world’s leading military if you don’t have the world’s leading technology,” Andreessen said.
The Silicon Valley right is also emphatic that the current administration has been uniquely zealous in its efforts to “crush crypto”, which is championed by many in the libertarian-minded world of tech. Conservatives have characterised Biden’s policies as “Operation Choke Point 2.0”, wherein undue hysteria about crypto’s potential to facilitate illicit activities has been employed as a pretext to place draconian limitations on it. “‘Operation Choke Point 2.0’ refers to the coordinated effort by the Biden administration’s financial regulators to suffocate our domestic crypto economy by de-banking the industry and severing entrepreneurs from the capital necessary to invest here in America,” Republican Senator Bill Hagerty told Bitcoin Magazine in October 2023. (Hagerty was recently floated as a potential Trump cabinet pick.)
Crypto blogs initially didn’t know what to make of Harris, as she hasn’t said much about digital currencies or the blockchain technology. Yet shortly after Biden dropped out, there was a glimmer of hope that she would be more crypto-friendly than the president when it was reported that she would speak at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference. “If Kamala Harris goes to Nashville and actually eloquently can explain how crypto and Bitcoin is the future and lay out a reasonable policy prescription for it, she wins the race,” finance reporter and crypto podcast host Frank Chaparro wrote on X. But it was not to be. On 24 July, it was reported that Harris wouldn’t speak at the conference, triggering a cascade of recriminations from the jilted crypto community. Meanwhile, Trump – who once labelled crypto a “scam” – has now christened himself the “crypto candidate” and will be speaking at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville.
The Silicon Valley right also objects to the Biden administration’s FY2025 budget proposal that would tax unrealised capital gains on individuals worth over $100 million. Andreessen claims that this tax, if imposed, would “kill start-ups and venture capital” and therefore kill the tech industry.
While concerns about AI, crypto and taxes are surely the main drivers behind support for Trump, there are other, wilder ideas now at play. Silicon Valley tech barons have started experimenting with new forms of state-building. Entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, who was once floated as a candidate for head of the Food and Drug Administration during Trump’s term, wrote a book called the Network State: How to Start a New Country (2022), which theorises a way to create new countries free of the liberal pathologies seen in cities like San Francisco. Srinivasan’s “Network State” would see online communities move from the “cloud” world into the corporeal one: in other words, new states would start online, in communities forged according to shared interests and values, and eventually move offline by acquiring crowdfunded territory, where they would create a libertarian Xanadu. The idea may sound like science fiction, but there are already experimental communities up and running; the most advanced among them is the Thiel-backed Prospera on the island of Roatán off the coast of Honduras. The territory already includes an 18-hole golf course, a Bitcoin Education Center, and an experimental biotech clinic.
While some media have described Harris’s relationship with Big Tech as cosy, she has also called the industry to account. As a senator in 2017, she grilled Facebook, Google and Twitter for allowing for the circulation of “Russian disinformation” ahead of the 2016 election. And she has called for the regulation of Big Tech to protect consumer privacy. Some liberal commentators have suggested that she’ll be slightly more tech-friendly than Biden was, more amenable to working with, rather than against, her hometown industry. But it’s unlikely that this will be enough to entice anyone on the Silicon Valley right back to the Democratic Party. The problem, as they see it, is deeper and more structural. As Thiel has theorised, innovation in the United States has been held back for decades by the “zombie centre-left establishment”, which Kamala is very much viewed as part of. According to this line of thinking, the Democrats fear great leaps in scientific advancement, particularly those that might produce “dangerous dual-use technologies” – that is, tech with both civilian and military applications.
In addition to the imposition of crippling regulations and tax policies, the Silicon Valley right also see the Democrats as holding back tech in another way: the rise of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. DEI has become a favourite target for the right. Tech barons like Musk claim that hiring should be conducted according to merit, and that identity considerations should not play a role. They also believe that the perceived privileging of identity over merit has led to a “competency crisis” across many fields. Since Trump was shot, for example, this group has expressed furore over the presence of women Secret Service agents tasked with protecting him.
In Kamala Harris, then, the Silicon Valley right do not see any ordinary opponent. They see an amalgam of their worst fears about diversity-hire female incompetence and overzealous regulation snuffing out a bright future before it can be born.
Lily Lynch is foreign affairs writer and contributor to the New Statesman. A version of this piece originally ran on her Substack.
[See also: Silicon Valley wants to mess with your head]
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