Fundamental to the business culture of Silicon Valley is the idea of the moonshot, in which a company stakes its capital and its reputation on an idea that could change the world. As in the original Apollo programme, prodigious investment is justified by claiming the competition as a zero-sum game. A successful paradigm shift makes the opponent irrelevant. After the iPod, CDs are finished. After Facebook, local newspapers are finished. For investors in the AI bubble, the idea that such technology could wipe out millions of jobs is not a risk but a promise. That is what it means to be disruptive, and it is central to the offer that technology companies make to the market: invest enough and they will not only outdo their competitors, but eradicate them.
The same appears to be increasingly true of the Republican Party. Donald Trump could not have been clearer that he intends to prosecute or imprison his political opponents. He has said he will do this more than 100 times. His former chief of staff, John Kelly, warned last week that he believes Trump is a fascist who would govern as a dictator (Trump has said his dictatorship would only last for “day one… after that I’m not a dictator”.)
Perhaps this helps to explain the support Silicon Valley has extended to the Trump campaign. Elon Musk has donated $75m to his political action committee, America PAC, which supports the Trump campaign, and aggressively promoted Trump on his social platform, X. Trump’s biggest donors also include the Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who have each given millions to a Trump “super PAC”, the billionaire venture capitalist Douglas Leone, and the cryptocurrency speculators the Winklevoss twins.
Trump also has the implied endorsement of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who reportedly ordered the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post, to spike its endorsement of Kamala Harris, and the health and technology investor Patrick Soon-Shiong, who prevented his newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, from making the case against Trump. Trump has at the very least the tacit consent of Mark Zuckerberg, whose social platforms – Facebook, Instagram and Threads – are refusing to promote content that is “potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics”. Zuckerberg called Trump personally following the assassination attempt in July and publicly complimented the former president’s reaction as “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life”.
These endorsements have been described as cowardice, and in some cases the timing seems apposite. Trump had openly discussed the idea of imprisoning Zuckerberg shortly before the Facebook founder discovered his admiration for the Republican candidate. This probably isn’t the case, though; centi-billionaires have a lot of options when it comes to security. It’s more likely that Silicon Valley, for all its rainbow lanyards and mission statements, likes what Trump has to offer.
After all, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is one of them: Vance was mentored by the libertarian technology investor Peter Thiel and launched his own venture capital fund with support from Thiel, Andreessen and the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
More importantly, Silicon Valley thrives in the absence of regulation. Many technology businesses are just old businesses minus regulation: taxis with fewer permits, shops that pay less tax, casinos that are online and offshore. Trump said he would give his loudest supporter, Musk, a position as head of what the latter called a “Department of Government Efficiency” (the acronym “Doge” refers to a cryptocurrency that Musk promotes at every opportunity). Musk is a friend of the Argentinian president Javier Milei, who has cut 25,000 government jobs and plans to remove around 50,000 more. At the recent Trump rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Musk said he would cut $2trn a year from US public spending, which is more than the US spends on defence and transport combined.
Presumably Musk is not proposing to defund the entire US military or stop mending its roads. Nor did he say whether this programme of extreme austerity would extend to the billions of dollars in contracts his company, SpaceX, has received from the US government, or the billions of dollars in subsidies that his company Tesla has received from the US government.
Musk has, however, openly speculated that he could use a role in the US government to speed up how Tesla is regulated. On a call announcing Tesla’s latest earnings, he told investors that while US regulations currently make it hard to offer the self-driving taxis that he says will provide Tesla’s future earnings growth, power might allow him to change those rules. “If there is a Department of Government Efficiency”, he said, “I will try to make that happen”.
Musk has long-standing disputes with regulatory bodies. He has had run-ins with the US financial market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which he called “bastards” for bringing fraud charges against him in 2018. And the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has this month announced a preliminary investigation into four crashes involving Tesla vehicles using the company’s Full Self Driving mode, and which could affect the 2.4 million vehicles Tesla has sold in the US.
Many of Silicon Valley’s technologists have a similar resistance to regulation, which they see as an obstacle to progress. On stage with Keir Starmer this month, Eric Schmidt told the Prime Minister: “Maybe you need a minister for anti-regulation.”
This is very much what Trump’s supporters have planned for the US government. The Heritage Foundation, the world’s biggest think tank, describes this approach very clearly in articles such as “Our plan to gut the federal bureaucracy”. A group funded by the Heritage Foundation is already publishing “watchlists” of “subversive, leftist bureaucrats” whom it wants removed from government.
The most powerful bureaucrats in America are perhaps the officials of the Federal Reserve, who set the price of money in the world’s largest economy. Silicon Valley was arguably the largest beneficiary of monetary policy over the last 15 years, in which interest rates were pushed to near zero and quantitative easing pushed them through the floor. The result was that government bonds made very low returns, so financial markets went looking for more risk, and Silicon Valley sold it to them. The cheap-money era raised Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and others to fortunes almost without historical precedent.
Trump has said he would like to intervene in the Fed’s decisions on interest rates – he too prefer lower rates, because he would like to devalue the dollar to boost American exports. This is a naive and outdated form of mercantilism that would probably be a disaster for America’s economy – when combined with the import tariffs Trump proposes, it would be a recipe for high inflation – and which could have profound implications for the wider global economy, but it could be a nice boost for the billionaire class.
Underlying Trump’s appeal to Silicon Valley is the possibility that democracy itself could be replaced by something faster and more disruptive. This is what Vladimir Putin did in Russia, when he gave the oligarch class total freedom in exchange for total obedience. It seems to be what the Republican Party is aiming for, having made it clear that they once more intend to claim victory, whatever the result of the election.
This is not just about breaking things, after all, but about moving fast. One does not get to the moon by pausing to weigh the consequences. The moonshot’s guiding principle was first expressed in May 1961, when Alan Shepard, about to become the first American in space, grew tired of waiting for the engineers to be sure that the modified ballistic missile he had been strapped to would not explode. Fix your little problem, he told them. Light this candle. The difference is that Shepard was coolly disregarding the risk to himself; the billionaires of Silicon Valley are ignoring the risk to everyone else.
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