When the high and mighty of Silicon Valley assumed their privileged perch at the swearing-in of President Trump, it was an ostentatious show of wealth and power unlike any before.
“You could go back to the Gilded Age and you could have a similar concentration of capital and power. You know, Rockefeller and Carnegie,” said historian Margaret O’Mara, citing two of the richest men who ever bestrode the earth. “But they weren’t on the dais of the inauguration.”
The moment was open to varied interpretation. Was it Trump, that most status-conscious of alpha males, bringing to heel the formidable likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg? Or were all those billionaire potentates in the Capitol Rotunda — seated in front of Trump’s Cabinet picks — asserting their social, economic and cultural hegemony?
Maybe both.
Regardless, there is no denying the remarkable ascendance of Silicon Valley and its tech leaders, in a single generation, from a collection of indifferent and often politically naive entrepreneurs into king-making, proximate-to-power lords of the political universe.
Only in America.
And, yes, that’s sarcasm you detect.
The explanation for their propinquity lies not in the creation of some whiz-bang, life-changing, paradigm-bending consumer product, or the shining virtues or particularly fertile minds that grace Silicon Valley’s fruited plain.
“It’s one of the oldest truisms in politics,” said Larry Gerston, a San José State political science professor emeritus, who’s followed the tech industry from a front-row seat for decades. “Money buys access.”
Bezos’ Amazon and Zuckerberg’s Meta were among the tech firms that tithed $1 million each to help pay for Trump’s inauguration. Musk invested more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump.
Given his conjoined-twin closeness to the 47th president, it appears money well spent.
Let’s travel back to another lifetime, July 1997, when, with great fanfare, some of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs and executives announced formation of a venture dubbed the Technology Network. Based in Palo Alto, it was founded as a one-stop shop to promote political causes, lobby on issues, and support preferred candidates. Creation of the organization and its seeding with $2 million in pocket change was a notable departure for the industry which, up to then, had only fleetingly and peripherally been involved in campaigns and elections.
As Gerston put it at the time, “These guys don’t know from politics. Their mentality has always been to take every dime they had and put it into research and development, and then product.”
That head-down insularity began to change with the realization that issues such as taxes, tariffs, foreign trade and legal liability mattered a great deal to high-tech’s prosperity and long-term future. Industry leaders grew more involved in regional affairs, focusing on subjects such as permitting and transportation. On the state level, they spent tens of millions to defeat a 1996 California ballot measure that would have facilitated the filing of security-fraud lawsuits. (High-tech companies were a particular target of such shareholder suits because of the volatility of their stocks.)
In Washington, President Clinton and his techie vice president, Al Gore, broke ground by assiduously courting the industry, eager to associate themselves with its perceived coolness and cutting-edge cachet.
Back then, the internet was in its infancy and Silicon Valley’s fledgling firms were seen as upstarts in need of nurturing and protection as they faced Goliaths like the software giant Microsoft. One upshot was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which to this day insulates social media from legal liability for the content — however incendiary or scurrilous — that users post. (At the time, there was no such thing as Google, YouTube, Twitter or the like. Zuckerberg was 12 years old.)
“Even though the internet was commercialized and everyone was all excited about the World Wide Web, it was still a thing on your desk that you walked away from,” said O’Mara, a University of Washington professor and author of “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.”
“You didn’t have software, platforms and tools produced by these companies that were disrupting all types of industries from taxis to hotels to politics,” O’Mara said.
As the industry grew — massively, exponentially — and technology embedded itself in every fiber of daily life, it drew increased and much less favorable notice from Washington. Concerns about personal privacy, election interference, exploitative labor practices and the toxic effects of social media scraped much of the sheen off the tech industry and its shiny gadgets, especially among Democrats.
Republicans had their own gripes. Trump, in his first turn in the White House, assailed Google, Facebook and other social media companies, accusing them of censorship and anti-conservative bias.
Apathy had long since fallen out of fashion. Tech leaders and venture capitalists did what the railroad, steel, oil and gas and so many other industries had done before, hiring an army of lobbyists and investing heavily in politics and politicians to defend and preserve their interests.
“The guys who wanted to be left alone and stay away from politics realized their only chance of surviving was inserting themselves into the policymaking process,” Gerston said.
Which is just plain business sense.
But there’s something dingy and gross, like mottled drifts of old snow, about the overweening influence of Trump’s courtiers and their grubbing relationship with a president so obviously enamored of money and flattery. Zuckerberg eliminated third-party fact-checking on Facebook, lest it contravene Trump’s fact-free effusions. Amazon paid $40 million to license a Melania Trump documentary.
Worse is the tech moguls’ unholy financial influence. With Midas-size endowments and a Supreme Court that equates political contributions with free speech, they can shout while most of the rest of us can only whisper.
Once again, it may prove money well spent.
Over the next few years Trump will have major influence over antitrust policy, the development and use of artificial intelligence and the growth and prevalence of cryptocurrency, to name just some of the issues of vital and remunerative interest to the tech industry. Meantime, the Justice Department is pursuing — for now — cases that seek to end Google’s search hegemony and Apple’s alleged practice of making it harder for consumers to switch software or hardware.
Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the chief executives of Apple and Google, respectively, were among the tech barons paying homage to Trump. Whatever their tastes in art, you can be sure they weren’t there to admire the statues and oil paintings lining the gilded Capitol Rotunda.
