How the election broke Silicon Valley

The rich and famous are just like us, celebrity gossip magazines love to tell you. When it comes to Silicon Valley's billionaires, though, they are acting a lot more like your politics-obsessed uncle.

With a blizzard of tweets, blog posts, public comments, and podcasts, the tech industry's most powerful business leaders are delivering a running commentary on this year's presidential campaign cycle that's hard to tune out. Bolstered by hubris and net worth, these billionaires have loudly aligned themselves with their preferred candidate, taken potshots at the opposition, and flogged their personal policy prescriptions—often in feisty social media spats with one another.

One day it's Vinod Khosla, the Sun Microsystems cofounder and venture capitalist, sparring with Tesla CEO Elon Musk about Trump's views on NATO and climate change. The next, it's LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman publishing a lengthy post picking apart the rationale espoused by his fellow member of the "PayPal mafia," venture investor David Sacks, for supporting Trump. Even Meta's Mark Zuckerberg got his toes wet, cheering Trump's "badass" fist pump after the former president survived an assassination attempt.

Enormous political contributions from Silicon Valley have meant that Washington is increasingly beholden to these outspoken techies: Since 2022, Hoffman has shelled out $42.8 million to Democratic PACs and state and federal candidates; Keith Rabois, another VC, has put $9.3 million to work for Republican PACs and candidates; and Peter Thiel of Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund gave $15 million to Republican PACs in Ohio and Arizona (and though he says he's sitting out the 2024 election, he was a major influence in the ascension of his protégé J D Vance to be Trump's running mate). In June, Donald Trump attended a fundraiser at Sacks' San Francisco home. And a "VCs for Kamala" Zoom fundraiser in August drew 600 people. (For a more detailed breakdown of donations from prominent figures in Silicon Valley, we have charted them here.)

It's all a rather entertaining spectacle. But aren't the business leaders steering America's economy, and some of its most valuable companies, supposed to rise above the fray? Isn't picking sides in partisan politics bad for business? Corporate influence is hardly new to the policy sausage-making process, of course, but whatever the rulebook is for this sort of thing, the tech industry's honchos have decided it's time to throw it out the window.

A new kind of discourse

Any call for restraint seems quaint today, when so much of what's said on social media centers on culture-war red meat and jubilant provocation. Scroll through Elon Musk's feed on X and you'll read about "far-left fascists" and conspiracy theories about illegal immigration and voter fraud, along with the occasional AI-generated image depicting Kamala Harris in a Soviet-era Communist uniform.

How did it come to this? Musk's particular case is perhaps best left to a trained professional with insight into the inner workings of the Tesla CEO's psyche. On a broader level, it's clear that speaking out about politics, unfiltered, on social media, is no longer taboo among a segment of the business elite. And the ones normalizing this behavior are the tech gurus who created and run these platforms.

The growing influence of Silicon Valley tycoons on American politics is arguably inevitable, given the massive growth of the industry. Tech now represents 10% of the country's GDP and roughly a third of the value of the S&P 500. In other words, the workings of tech companies are no longer just Silicon Valley's business; they're America's business. And that means politics are inextricably woven in.

Big Tech is a political campaign issue in its own right, and not necessarily in a way that looks kindly upon the entrepreneurs and corporations pumping out the nation's latest innovations. Years of controversies over privacy, online misinformation, and crypto fraud have left a stain on tech.

Federal regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission's Gary Gensler, the Federal Trade Commission's Lina Khan, and the Department of Justice's antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter have taken a hard line on crypto and corporate mergers. Generative AI, which triggered tech's latest gold rush, is set to bring more scrutiny and rules, many of which are already moving through state legislatures.

"I think there's a fear of 'What's the government going to do next that's going to cost us something?' " says Floyd Kvamme, a former partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a founder of TechNet, a bipartisan lobbying group for senior executives in the tech industry.

Even Hoffman, the staunch Democrat, has publicly expressed his hope that if Kamala Harris wins the presidency, she'll replace FTC Chair Khan, who Hoffman described to CNN as "waging war on American business."

Evolving views

In his 1,000-word tweet endorsing Trump this summer, former PayPal president and Facebook executive David Marcus, a self-described longtime Democrat, recounted a gradual political conversion caused by everything from "weaponized DEI" and suppression of online discussions about COVID's origin to U.S. policy in Russia and in the Middle East. "It has been an eye-opening process of disenchantment, zerobasing lifelong beliefs, and rebuilding from there," Marcus wrote.

For some of those who have found a new, loud political voice, the reception has been mixed. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, two of the industry's most powerful venture capitalists, saw swift blowback after they endorsed Trump in July, with many liberal techies vowing to cut ties with their firm, Andreessen Horowitz.

"I'm going to have a lot of friends who are probably pissed off at me for saying anything nice about President Trump," Horowitz acknowledged at the start of their 90-minute endorsement video. "The last thing I wanted for the firm, for our employees, the companies we invest in, and so forth, was us to be involved in this, because it gets very emotional, and it's tough."

Chart shows political donations by tech business leaders

Politics has of course always had a presence in Silicon Valley. When Andreessen's seminal web browser company Netscape went public in 1995, CEO Jim Barksdale made no secret of his political leanings. A silverhaired business hotshot with a Mississippi drawl, Barksdale was a prominent fundraiser and advisor to Republican George W. Bush's presidential campaign. He was rumored to be in line for "high-tech czar" in the Bush administration, and ultimately was tapped to be on Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

But the tone of the nascent tech industry in that era was less dogmatic and maximalist. During the 2000 presidential election campaign, Barksdale spoke on a panel and was asked how the Republican Party could use the internet to win over techies. Figure out the "hooks" to go viral, he counseled.

Then he offered a word of caution, pointing to GOP positions on the environment and "family values" that didn't play well with the tech set: "Lighten up on some of these other things that these people respond negatively to."

A culture of iconoclasts

Republican or Democrat, a common thread among tech's new breed of political warriors is that they tend to be founders and venture capital investors, rather than professional managers at corporations. As former coders and tech innovators, their backgrounds may better qualify them to discuss Moore's law on microprocessors than the intricacies of taxes and regulation, but founders tend to speak their minds. They have succeeded, often astronomically, by approaching life with zeal, bluntness, and combativeness, qualities that they often can't suppress. (It's the reason every business reporter knows they'll get a much better interview from the CEO who started their own company, rather than the risk-averse hired suit in the C-suite.)

"Carnegie never said he was a genius. Rockefeller never said he was a genius. They all said that they were good businessmen."

David Nasaw, historian and biographer

That passion and idealism offers one potential counterpoint to criticism that the political fervor of Big Tech bigwigs is motivated only by commercial self-interest: Commitment is inherent to the Silicon Valley ethos—it's what compels founders to persevere when everyone tells them their idea is dumb or crazy, to devote themselves so completely to the task that it risks destroying their personal finances, marriage, and health. If a founder truly believes their purpose in life is to make their company, platform, or widget happen, then they will fight to make it a reality, pushing back against any obstacles—whether it's an incumbent in the market or a regulator in a government agency.

This can become a kind of fanaticism: Some in today's tech elite have come to believe that their mission is so important that it trumps everything else. And in many cases they seem to have lost the ability to distinguish between things that fall within their area of expertise and other spheres of public life, from geopolitics to criminal justice.

Case in point: VC Ben Horowitz opened his Trump endorsement video by asserting that "the future of our business, the future of technology… and the future of America is literally at stake."

The cult of the founder

That's the downside of Silicon Valley's reverence for tech innovators, which treats startup founders as not just hardworking and passionate entrepreneurs, but as enlightened beings endowed with a kind of superpower. Marc Andreessen's web browser, Netscape, was a revolutionary product in its time, one that arguably changed the world. Does that mean he has the answers to all America's problems?

This attitude is a big change from that of the business titans of the past. Even the all-powerful "robber baron" industrialists of the late 19th century, Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, tended to stay in their lanes, explained David Nasaw, a historian at City University of New York's Graduate Center who authored a biography of Carnegie.

"Carnegie never said he was a genius," Nasaw notes. "Rockefeller never said he was a genius. They all said that they were good businessmen, that they understood markets." Today's Silicon Valley moguls have more "chutzpah": "They've been convinced that they're gods."

One notable exception from history is the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the subject of another Nasaw biography. Hearst hated President Franklin Roosevelt with a passion, and published scathing signed editorials on the front pages of his newspapers—the most powerful platform of his era.

But Hearst's political activism cost him dearly, causing readership of his newspapers to decline. "Working-class readers felt they had to make a choice," Nasaw says. "They abandoned Hearst."

Techies, take note.

Additional reporting by Jenn Brice

This article appears in the October/November 2024 issue of Fortune with the headline "How the election broke Silicon Valley."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com