Broligarchs Back Trump—For Now

The captains of the tech industry have rapidly warmed to Trump. But are they sincere? Or is the whole thing just a cynical display of fealty to the new leader, only to be reversed as soon as power changes hands? It’s probably a mix of both—not only across the industry, but sometimes even within a single person.

A helpful test is to ask when a given figure’s rightward lurch occurred. Those that happened after the election are much more likely to be transactional. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman of OpenAI—who had previously been openly anti-Trump—seem to epitomize this category. Google’s Sundar Pichai likewise bent the knee, but was giving hostage-video vibes.

The transactional actors seem motivated by some combination of status, greed, and fear. For many, supporting Trump means access to his inner circle and the president’s ear in AI policy deliberations. For others, support for Trump is likely motivated by hopes of getting favorable regulatory treatment and lower taxes. And for what I suspect is the largest group, tech leaders understand that Trump is vastly more powerful than he was the first time around, and that he can ravage their companies if they aren’t in his good graces.

A specific motivator for some is the (so far accurate) perception that Trump will take a much more hands-off approach to government oversight of AI development than Biden and Harris did. Multiple whistleblowers at OpenAI have gone public—including before Congress—with claims that they are cutting corners on safety in pursuit of profits and accelerated productization. By supporting Trump, Altman seemingly hopes to forestall a regulatory crackdown, especially as he tries to raise $500 billion to create digital superintelligence, even as his co-founder-turned-foe Elon Musk attempts to destroy OpenAI. More broadly, the tech world understands that transformative and disruptive AI systems are likely to attract government regulation, and sees Trump as a pliable executive who can be persuaded to let them do as they wish.

AI labs also recognize that some parts of the MAGA movement are anti-AI. Economic populists are worried about AI causing mass unemployment. Christian nationalists associate AI with transhumanism, effective altruism, and other philosophies they find religiously objectionable. Anti-woke culture warriors see AI as a biased tool of leftist Silicon Valley companies. Surveying this landscape, AI leaders feel they must proactively forge a place for themselves in Trump’s coalition. 

Expectations about AI progress timelines are also a key driver of the behavior we now see. Most industry leaders now believe—I believe both sincerely and accurately—that AI systems that match or surpass humans at every cognitive ability will plausibly be created over the next four years. Even if they’re not, the time until this “artificial general intelligence” is likely short enough that the critical investments and policy decisions determining whether superintelligent AI ushers in unprecedented prosperity or causes an existential catastrophe will be made during this presidential term. So even if tech leaders think Trump is terrible, they also think the literal fate of the world may hinge on being able to influence him to make the right decisions about AI, which means swallowing their pride and flying to Mar-a-Lago. 

Other tech kingpins’ MAGA conversions seem ideologically sincere—like venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale, and David Sacks, our new AI and Crypto Czar. All have given subjectively plausible accounts of why they embraced Trump. And while Mark Zuckerberg is likely acting in part to protect himself and Meta from Trump’s wrath, his gold-chain-and-curly-mop “masculine energy” reinvention goes beyond what can be explained by political convenience alone. The most interesting case is Elon Musk, who was once a darling of the Obama Administration, and since veered sharply into far-right activism—in his own account, radicalized by the gender transition of one of his teenage children, which he attributes to the “woke mind virus.” After spending $288 million to help Trump get elected, he is now the most powerful unelected policymaker in American history.

Yet both the transactionalists and true believers may be overestimating their ability to steer the 47th President. Trump isn’t worried about reelection and doesn’t need the “broligarchs’” money anymore. Conversely Trump now has enormous leverage over their AI labs and social media platforms. All the big tech companies have huge government contracts that can be yanked away if they don’t keep the White House happy. All have unrelated antitrust and infrastructure actions pending before Trump-controlled regulators. All have businesses vulnerable to regulations, tariffs, and export controls. All are one Truth Social post away from boycotts and pressure campaigns by the MAGA faithful. For those that bow low enough, though, there’s the prospect that Trump could wield these cudgels against their competitors. And the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Trump v. United States largely immunizes Trump from legal jeopardy even if he did this in nakedly corrupt ways. Even solidly conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett objected that the sweeping ruling would hamstring prosecutors if a president took open bribes.

During his first term, Trump’s critics objected that American politicos and foreign oligarchs could funnel money to him by staying at Trump hotels or buying his luxury real estate at above-market rates. That was small ball. Thousands or at most millions at a time. But the launch of the $TRUMP meme coin on the blockchain just before his inauguration changed the game. Within 48 hours of launch, supporters pouring cash into $TRUMP had ballooned Trump’s theoretical net worth by over $56 billion, though the token has currently shed almost four-fifth of its peak value. Because Trump the man controls an insider stake of 80% of all $TRUMP coins, money used to buy them directly inflates his net worth. This provides a straightforward, scalable, and traceless way for favor-seekers to funnel wealth to the president. If nothing else, it provides the appearance of potential corruption. And Trump has shown no aversion to massive conflicts of interest in his administration—letting Elon Musk and David Sacks waltz into government without having to divest anything and make policy on the industries they’re actively invested in. Self-policing is the order of the day, as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt assured the public that “Elon will excuse himself” from any conflicts that arise.

Thus, even right-leaning tech leaders will have reason for suspicion that rivals are manipulating policy to get special treatment. Such an atmosphere of mistrust would make it easier for Trump to extract concessions from the AI and social media platforms that increasingly mediate how citizens get their information. What might this look like? Trump’s executive order gutting Biden-era AI regulations stated the need for American models to be “free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.” As long as some MAGA TikToker somewhere is getting fewer likes than they think they deserve, the president can be convinced that newsfeed algorithms have a leftist bias. As long as ChatGPT tells users that racism exists anywhere in America, some culture warriors will insist that it’s spewing DEI, CRT gay race communism. This will give Trump a pretext to push for more lenient content moderation policies, for example with regard to trans slurs, public health misinformation, election fraud claims, and deepfakes. He could also demand algorithmic tweaks based on claims that Trump supporters are being shadowbanned, or that anti-Trump posts are being boosted. Since Trump believes almost all platform guardrails constitute unconstitutional censorship, we’re about to be hit by a tsunami of AI-optimized deceptive content unlike anything before in history.

Except for the minority of enthusiastic red-hat-wearers, Silicon Valley’s newly Trump-friendly elite will hate this—but won’t be in much position to resist as long as MAGA remains ascendant. When the political winds shift back leftward, though, this unlikely coalition will probably unravel. Yet this won’t reflect ideological leftism, either. The Right’s perception of Big Tech leaders as “woke” was always skewed. Some big tech employees are indeed on the far-left, but the founder class has always trended toward something like a center-left libertarianism. They’re not culture warriors. They believe in meritocracy and innovation, but not jingoism and nativism. They don’t like political correctness, but they don’t like bigotry and anti-intellectualism either. As long as they perceive conservatism to be beholden to the blood-and-soil factions of Trumpism, this can be no more than a marriage of convenience.

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