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Vox
18-04-2025
- Business
- Vox
Silicon Valley got Trump completely wrong
is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right. Before coming to Vox in 2024, he wrote a column on politics and economics for New York Magazine. Last year, a coterie of tech billionaires rallied behind Donald Trump's candidacy. Many had not been lifelong Republicans. In 2016, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen declared Hillary Clinton the 'obvious choice' for president, saying Trump's immigration agenda 'makes me sick to my stomach.' Elon Musk, meanwhile, had once been an Obama-supporting climate hawk. Yet they, and many others in their circles, found their way to supporting an openly authoritarian insurrectionist in 2024. They offered many explanations for this decision, some of which were unabashedly self-interested — Trump had promised to limit regulatory scrutiny of their companies and taxation of their capital. But right-wing tech moguls generally insisted that their fundamental concern was for the country, not their profits: Trump's pro-business policies would accelerate economic growth and technological progress — thereby ensuring America's prosperity and global supremacy. Three months into his presidency, Trump has delivered on many of the so-called tech right's requests for regulatory relief. Yet, to the extent that their faction genuinely cares about maximizing American economic growth, technological progress, and global standing, their investment in Trump has been an utter disaster. Related Why Big Tech turned right Why the tech right backed Trump It isn't hard to see why right-wing tech moguls believed Trump's election would advance their interests. To some in their circles, the Democratic Party had become a financial threat. Many venture capitalists were heavily invested in the crypto industry, which the Biden White House regarded as 'rife with bad actors.' The Democratic administration therefore discouraged banks from serving many crypto businesses and prosecuted some of its moguls for money laundering. What's more, Joe Biden chilled mergers through vigorous antitrust enforcement, proposed new regulations on AI development, and suggested taxing unrealized capital gains. All this was antithetical to many tech billionaires' material interests. And this financial injury was compounded by cultural insults. In the tech right's view, the 'woke' left seemed to disdain success in general and successful white males in particular. And social justice ideology didn't just irritate the Silicon Valley superrich online; it increasingly fomented insubordination within their workplaces. Donald Trump credibly promised to advance the tech right's interests along all these fronts. But some Silicon Valley moguls weren't content to rest their case for Trumpism on grounds of narrow self-interest or cultural grievance. Rather, Andreessen and his fellow VC Ben Horowitz insisted Trump's election was necessary for safeguarding nothing less than 'the future of America.' In their account, the United States was suffering from a crisis of low economic growth and stagnating productivity. Unwise government policies were not merely stymying crypto's profitability but American innovation writ large. And this posed a threat to liberty both within America's borders and beyond them. After all, 'Low economic growth also means the rise of smashmouth zero-sum politics' in which people come to believe that 'gains for one group of people necessarily require taking things away from other people,' Andreessen and Horowitz wrote in a pre-election manifesto. More critically, the United States would not be able to maintain geopolitical supremacy without retaining economic and technological preeminence. And if America did not reign supreme, the Chinese Communist Party would be able to impose its 'much darker, more totalitarian' view of global governance upon the world. Trump understood how important it was for the US to 'win' in its techno-scientific race against the CCP, according to Andreessen and Horowitz. His election would, therefore, accelerate American economic growth and technological progress while enhancing US power on the global stage. Thus far, Trump has delivered many of the tech right's narrow demands. Crypto and AI startups face little regulatory scrutiny or pressure to implement DEI programming. But Trump has simultaneously sabotaged America's economic growth, scientific prowess, and geopolitical influence. Trump's trade war is undermining American economic growth — in both the short and long term But Trump's trade war has been even more damaging to the tech right's high-minded goals than to its narrow pecuniary ones. Bitcoin is still more valuable today than it was before November's election. The same cannot be said of the S&P 500, which more closely tracks American economic performance. Trump's tariffs have not accelerated US economic growth. Rather, they have likely ground it to a halt. The Atlanta Fed's economic growth tracker currently predicts that GDP will contract by 2.2 percent this quarter. Many analysts believe the US economy is already in recession. Perversely, Trump's trade policies have been especially harmful to American manufacturers, who are more vulnerable to surging input costs than many other businesses. New orders from manufacturers in New York state hit the lowest level on record this month, according to Federal Reserve data. Service-sector businesses have also drastically scaled back capital investment plans in the face of rising costs. Trump's culpability for this downturn is unambiguous. It is his trade war that is depressing consumer confidence and deterring business investment by driving up costs and increasing economic uncertainty. Needless to say, if a politician unilaterally orchestrates a recession through trade policies he can't coherently explain, it is difficult to say that his election was vital for economic growth. But what makes Trump's tariffs truly antithetical to Andreessen and Horowitz's purported goals is that they are jeopardizing America's long-term economic performance and geopolitical stature. One source of American economic might is the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency. And Trump's erratic and belligerent trade policies have shaken global faith in the dollar's safety. Normally, in times of financial volatility, demand for US dollars and Treasury bonds spikes, as investors seek the security of our currency and debt. But during today's crisis, the dollar's value has fallen, while yields on US Treasurys have surged. Many financial analysts believe this could be the beginning of a shift away from the dollar, as global investors rethink the reliability of America's economic and political institutions. If that proves right, America's borrowing costs would durably increase while its consumers' purchasing power would lastingly fall, trends that would undermine the nation's long-term growth. Meanwhile, it is hard to see how anyone preoccupied with enhancing American global power — particularly, relative to China — could be pleased with Trump's first three months. By violating the terms of America's existing trade agreements — including some he personally negotiated — Trump undermined our nation's diplomatic credibility. And by imposing across-the-board tariffs on core US allies, he led European and Asian powers to consider the possibility that China is the more stable and reliable global superpower. In recent days, the Trump administration sought to rally America's allies into a united front against Chinese trade abuses. But it is struggling to mount such an alliance, according to the Wall Street Journal, because 'many European and Asian partners aren't sure to what extent they are still allied with Washington.' Rather than becoming more adversarial to Beijing, some in the EU are calling for the bloc to end its cooperation with American efforts to starve China of cutting-edge technology. Trump is gutting the tech right's favorite kind of government spending Trump's assault on American economic performance and technological progress extends beyond the realm of trade policy. His haphazard cuts to federal funding for both government agencies and private research have been similarly devastating. In their manifesto last year, Andreessen and Horowitz attributed 'American technology leadership' partly to 'our higher education system, and long-term government investment in scientific research.' Yet the Trump administration has sought to choke off funding to these sources of innovation. Since taking office, it has canceled or frozen billions of dollars in federal science funding and choked off further funds to top research universities, such as Harvard. Economists widely believe this general austerity will slow technological progress and economic growth. Research has estimated that every dollar invested in scientific research and development yields $5 in economic gains. What's worse, the Trump administration has specifically targeted some of the most promising lines of medical research. Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines are among the greatest medical breakthroughs of the past decade. They promise to limit the toll of future pandemics and advance treatments for some of the world's worst diseases. One recent study suggested an mRNA-based therapy inhibited the recurrence of pancreatic cancer in some patients. Nevertheless, the Trump administration has discouraged universities from seeking grants for mRNA research, announcing all such grants would be reported to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a staunch critic of mRNA technology — for review. Trump's spending cuts have undermined economic progress on other fronts. For example, the administration has proposed $20 billion in cuts to the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office (LPO), which provides long-term capital to domestic energy projects that advance America's strategic interests. Its lending has successfully promoted nuclear energy (one of Andreessen's avowed causes), mineral mining, and gas infrastructure. Even before Trump, it was already leanly staffed. According to Thomas Hochman of the Foundation for American Innovation, most asset management firms employ roughly 500 employees for every $100 billion in managed assets; LPO has employed closer to 350. In a letter to the administration, 30 think tanks and energy companies suggested that large cuts to LPO's funding could undermine American energy production. Meanwhile, Trump's layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are slowing drug development. With the FDA too short-staffed to fulfill its core functions in a timely manner, companies have been forced to postpone clinical trials and drug testing for new medical treatments. The administration is chasing scientific talent out of the US Finally, the Trump administration is jeopardizing America's access to the most fundamental economic resource: skilled labor. Among the list of pro-growth policies that Andreessen and Horowitz endorsed in their 'Little Tech Agenda' last year was an 'Expansion of high-skilled immigration to encourage foreign graduates of American universities and others to build new companies and industries here.' But Trump has done the very opposite, exiling foreign students and recent graduates from the United States, thereby discouraging others from immigrating to the country. Specifically, his administration has taken to abruptly terminating foreign students' visas and ordering them to leave the country. According to a database from Inside Higher Ed, the State Department has changed the legal status of more than 1,000 students and recent graduates at over 170 colleges and universities. In some of these cases, no clear rationale for the visa revocation has been articulated. In many, the cause seems to be the most minor legal infractions, such as receiving a speeding ticket. The White House has also seemingly empowered immigration officials to menace legal immigrants, including esteemed scientists. Kseniia Petrova graduated from a renowned Russian physics and technology institute before being recruited by Harvard Medical School. When Trump took office, she had been working on an investigation into slowing cellular damage from aging. But in February, she was detained at Boston Logan International Airport for failing to declare frog embryos she had transported from France at her university's request. Normally, this would incur a small fine. Instead, the customs official terminated her visa on the spot and initiated deportation proceedings. Now, she is stuck in a detention center in Louisiana. All this has sent a very clear message to talented, foreign-born scientists both in the US and abroad. A recent poll by the journal Nature found that 75 percent of US-based scientists say they are considering leaving the country. In response, European countries have been aggressively seeking to lure top scholars out of the United States. There is no high-minded case for Trump There are other ways the Trump administration has subverted the tech right's ostensible ideals. In a post-election podcast, Andreessen and Horowitz complained that, even as the Biden administration had allegedly cracked down on legitimate crypto businesses, it did nothing to combat 'all the crazy, fly-by-night meme coins'; Trump proceeded to launch a shady meme coin of his very own. Andreessen also complained that the Biden administration had undermined the rule of law, pressuring businesses into agreements that 'you voluntarily agree to it but in an atmosphere of coercion.' This would seem like a fitting description of the Trump White House withholding funds and federal contracts from universities and law firms until those entities agreed to implement the administration's ideological priorities or provide it with pro bono legal assistance. But it seems unlikely the tech right was ever under the misimpression that Donald Trump had a deep-seated commitment to ethical business practices or lawful government. They were all sentient on January 6, 2021. It is more plausible though that reactionary tech billionaires genuinely believed the Republican would accelerate economic growth and tech progress through tax cuts and deregulation — this is, after all, what global investors seemed to believe in the immediate wake of Trump's election, if stock market trends are any guide. But Trump has swiftly invalidated the tech right's high-minded reasons for supporting him. What remains is the grubby, self-interested argument that the crypto industry's short-term profits matter more than America's long-term economic health or geopolitical influence. This seems to be a difficult case to make. As Politico has observed, Andreessen's X feed grew quiet in the wake of 'Liberation Day' after he served as one of Trump's loudest tech evangelists on social media for months. As of this writing, the mogul has not published a post on the platform in over a week.
Vox
31-01-2025
- Business
- Vox
How Democrats alienated Big Tech — and why it might not matter
In January 2017, Sergey Brin rallied beside progressive activists at San Francisco International Airport to protest Donald Trump's travel ban. Eight years later, the Google co-founder sat with right-wing nationalists at Trump's second inauguration. Brin is far from the only tech mogul who has (apparently) warmed to Trump in recent years. Mark Zuckerberg once bankrolled liberal causes. Now, the Facebook founder dines with America's favorite insurrectionist at Mar-a-Lago. In 2016, Marc Andreessen argued that Hillary Clinton was the 'obvious choice' for president, and that any proposal to choke off immigration 'makes me sick to my stomach.' Last year, Andreessen endorsed Trump. And, of course, Elon Musk has gone from being an Obama-supporting climate hawk to quite possibly the single most influential advocate for — and patron of — far-right politics in the United States. Silicon Valley's apparent rightward shift was already causing consternation in blue America last year. But Democrats' outrage and anxiety over the red-pilling of Silicon Valley has only increased since Inauguration Day — when Brin, Zuckerberg, Musk, Jeff Bezos, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook all sat with Trump's camp in the Capitol Rotunda. Some Democrats view Big Tech's rightward lurch as a political crisis, one brought on by their own party's policy mistakes. In this account, Democrats needlessly alienated a powerful industry by embracing an anti-corporate economic agenda that is both politically costly and substantively misguided. Others in the party, meanwhile, insist that the Biden administration's attempts to tame Big Tech's power were both good politics and good policy. In their telling, voters hate corporate monopolies and love antitrust enforcement. And the extraordinary wealth and power of large tech companies constitute a threat to democratic government — a reality that Silicon Valley's present chumminess with Trump only underscores. From this vantage, the tech industry's interests and the general public's were always irreconcilable. And as Silicon Valley grew wealthier, it was bound to gravitate toward America's more pro-business party. The Biden administration's error, therefore, was not doing too much to antagonize Big Tech, but too little. This debate collapses together several distinct questions. Some of these are ideological — such as whether the Biden administration's approach to antitrust enforcement was worthwhile on the merits. Today though, I want to focus on two factual questions at the center of the intra-Democratic dispute over Big Tech: How and why did the tech industry's politics change during the Biden era? Would it be politically damaging — or beneficial — for Democrats to maintain (or build upon) Joe Biden's approach to regulating the tech industry? I think the answers to both these questions are more complicated than either progressive or pro-business Democrats allow. To understand why Silicon Valley has moved right in recent years, it's helpful to consider what had previously tethered the industry to the center-left. Many in the tech world argue that Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party were long bound by an implicit 'deal': Democrats would support the development of new technology, celebrate entrepreneurs, and take a light touch approach to regulating the digital sphere — in exchange for tech moguls backing socially liberal causes, progressive taxation, incremental expansions of the welfare state, philanthropies, and Democratic candidates. This was a pretty good bargain for the typical tech founder — since it effectively entailed the Democratic Party embracing nearly all of their preferences. Survey data on the views of Silicon Valley moguls is limited. But a 2017 study of tech entrepreneurs' politics found that they were left-leaning on almost all issues — including taxation and redistribution — but quite right-wing on questions of government regulation and labor unions. This distinct ideological profile has been dubbed 'liberal-tarian.' Given that Democrats have always been the party more supportive of regulating industry and promoting organized labor, the party's alliance with tech was long fraught with some tension. But in recent years, both sides began souring on their supposed contract for a variety of reasons. But three were especially significant: When an industry is enjoying explosive growth, it has less incentive to align with the right. Democrats might nibble into its profits with their relatively high taxes, or inch its compliance costs with their greater regulatory scrutiny. But when your sector is awash in cheap financing and soaring revenues, the price of allying with a left-of-center party can look negligible. As Andreessen put the point to the New York Times earlier this month, back in the days of Clinton and Obama, 'the tax rates didn't really matter because when an internet company worked, it grew so fast and got so valuable that if you worked another three years, say, you'd make another 10 X. Another 5 percent higher tax rate washed out in the numbers.' Silicon Valley enjoyed such favorable conditions for much of the 2010s. But the tech boom faded during Biden's tenure. In 2022, rising interest rates started diverting capital away from the tech sector: With safe assets now offering an attractive guaranteed return, investors grew more reluctant to funnel cash into risky ones. Stock market valuations fell and layoffs spread. At the same time, as Noah Smith notes, tech investors and executives started running up against structural constraints on profit-making. Many venture capitalists looked at Google and Facebook's success in cornering and dominating their respective markets, and bet that they could establish similarly monopolistic businesses in other corners of digital commerce. But by 2022, they'd discovered that achieving such market dominance was harder than they'd thought. Meanwhile, social media companies struggled to combat the inherently finite nature of human attention: Once you've lured roughly 5 billion humans onto social media — and turned a hefty percentage of them into addicts — there's only so much screen time left to monetize. In this context, we would expect tech moguls who'd been only lightly committed to the 'liberal' part of liberal-tarianism to start heeding their own narrow material interests. After all, it was a similar mix of rising interest rates, inflation, and slowing profitability that helped prompt corporate America's right turn in the 1970s. To be sure, the tech industry's fortunes have rebounded since 2022, thanks in no small part to the AI boom. But the experience of a capital crunch and profit squeeze — however temporary — seems to have made a lasting impression on many in tech, whose political contributions began shifting (modestly) toward Republicans in 2022. For the reasons above, it wouldn't have been surprising for the tech industry to have drifted toward Republicans over the past four years, even if Democratic policy remained as friendly to tech as had it been under Barack Obama. In reality, the Biden administration took a much more adversarial stance than its predecessors. Biden's Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department collectively brought antitrust cases against Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft. This blitzkrieg of aggressive antitrust enforcement naturally irritated Silicon Valley's giants. Perhaps less predictably, it also antagonized smaller tech firms and startups. In theory, one might expect 'little tech' would want the government to curb the market power of their gargantuan competitors. In practice, however, many startup founders and investors aspire to either grow their own firms into behemoths, or failing that, get bought up by a larger company. By chilling merger activity, the Biden administration effectively blocked many startups' 'plan B,' while choking off a reliable source of returns for venture capitalists. VCs and startups also took exception to the Biden Securities and Exchange Commission's vigorous regulation of cryptocurrency, as well as the administration's executive order on AI safety. In November 2023, a contingent of startup founders and investors denounced the latter, arguing that the order's reporting requirements put small AI firms at a competitive disadvantage, as they could less comfortably shoulder regulatory compliance costs than their larger rivals. Finally, Biden proposed a new tax on the unrealized capital gains of Americans with more than $100 million in wealth. This would mean that when a megamillionaire investor's stock portfolio or real estate holdings gained $5 million in value, they would need to pay a tax on that amount, even if they did not sell those assets. Tax policy wonks like this idea. But super-rich tech investors very much do not. And when Kamala Harris announced her support for Biden's plan last summer, Silicon Valley's venture capitalists had a conniption. Super-rich tech moguls care about making money. But they are often at least as covetous of social status. Past a certain point, accumulating more wealth has little practical impact on your living standards (or those of your children, or your children's children). But a person's appetite for greater prestige tends to be less exhaustible than their desire for beach homes, Porsches, or private jets. Thus, if Democrats had spent the past decade exalting tech investors and founders, it's possible that the party's increasingly adversarial policies would have caused less rancor in Silicon Valley. But Democrats became increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry over the course of the 2010s. And this culminated in a Democratic administration that undermined tech billionaires' sense of self-importance. 'At the core level, both Barack Obama and the modal Democrat thought the average Silicon Valley company was really good and cool in 2009,' Marc Aidinoff, a historian and policy adviser in both the Obama and Biden administrations, told me. 'Obama would go to Silicon Valley and have dinner with the CEOs and call them champions of change. What these people really wanted from the president was the sense that they were loved.' But by 2021, things had changed, according to Aidinoff. 'Joe Biden distrusts these people, thinks they are hurting Americans, and has the sense that they aren't actually making much of real value,' he said. The Democrats' disenchantment with tech wasn't attributable to Biden's personal skepticism of Silicon Valley alone. After the financial crisis, the party's progressive wing grew more influential. And its ascent increased the salience of both inequality and labor issues in Democratic politics. For a party increasingly concerned with wealth concentration and workers' rights, tech giants that generated vast fortunes off 'winner-take-all' markets — while, in many cases, committing labor violations or undermining traditional employment — did not look like engines of progress. As importantly, the notion that social media platforms promoted democracy and social reform fell into disrepute. In the wake of Obama's election and the Arab Spring — both of which were widely credited to novel media technologies — many liberals bought into the idea that Facebook and Twitter would abet a more egalitarian politics. But authoritarian regimes proved adept at restricting online speech. And if social media's potential to facilitate rightwing extremism wasn't clear to liberals before 2016, it was apparent to them afterward. Following Trump's victory, many Democrats blamed their party's defeat on Facebook's dissemination of 'fake news.' Around the same time, research suggesting that social media could have adverse mental health effects started to accumulate. All this — combined with tech platforms' adverse impact on traditional journalism — led the mainstream media to view Silicon Valley more critically. Between 2012 and 2019, the New York Times' coverage of Facebook turned sharply negative, according to one prominent data analysis. Add in Silicon Valley's growing enthusiasm for crypto — a technology that appeared to be good for little beyond scams and speculation — and it isn't hard to see why Democrats soured on Big Tech. The party's newfound skepticism of the industry didn't just translate into greater regulatory scrutiny, but also, a withholding of both praise and access. According to some in tech, the sector's leading lights felt themselves shunned and slighted by the Biden White House. 'I think the fundamental problem, and I heard this from many, was that former President Biden was unwilling to meet with tech CEOs and entrepreneurs,' the billionaire investor Mark Cuban told me. 'It was that simple.' One former Biden official echoed this assessment, saying that tech companies 'couldn't get meetings with a lot of the key regulators. Certainly [FTC commissioner] Lina [Khan] wouldn't meet with people — she liked to say, 'We're enforcement, you can't really meet with us.'' Andreessen recently reminisced that Bill Clinton's Democratic Party had 'celebrated' and 'loved' tech companies. Biden's Democratic Party, by contrast, often refused Andreessen's ilk the time of day. It's clear then that Silicon Valley's rightward turn was precipitated, at least in part, by a change in the Democratic Party's attitudes and policies toward the tech industry. And there's reason to think that the party's anti-tech turn is politically costly on net. Were other tech billionaires to emulate Musk's political giving — or other social media companies to imitate X's boosting of right-wing content — the damage to Democrats could be considerable. And the Trump administration's manifest openness to trading political power for financial support makes this a live possibility, especially if Democrats promise to reprise the Biden administration's policies toward the industry. Meanwhile, it's far from clear that aggressively regulating Silicon Valley can gain Democrats meaningful support elsewhere. This is not because voters oppose that general goal: In fact, in a 2024 Pew Research poll, a slight majority expressed support for increasing regulation of the tech industry, while a supermajority said that social media has had a 'mostly negative' effect on the United States. The problem is that voters have ambivalent feelings about Big Tech writ large, and do not consider regulating the companies a priority. When Gallup asked Americans what their country's most important problem was this month, only 1 percent named 'corporate corruption' while 0 percent picked 'technology.' In a post-election survey from Morning Consult and the Chamber of Progress (a trade group of companies allied with the Democratic Party), voters were presented with a list of 12 issues, and asked to name the two that were most important to their vote. Only 2 percent of respondents picked 'regulating technology companies' as one of their priorities, making it the single least prioritized objective on the list (by contrast, 49 percent selected 'controlling inflation and strengthening the economy'). Meanwhile, in YouGov's polling, Amazon's approval rating sits at 74 percent, Google's at 70 percent, Apple's at 69 percent, and Facebook at 59 percent. Given all this, it's plausible that Democrats have more to lose than gain politically from taking on Big Tech. Yet it's also true that the political costs of the party's anti-tech turn have been routinely overstated. In truth, Silicon Valley's rightward shift — while real — has been remarkably modest, whether measured in votes or donations. In 2020, Biden won Santa Clara County, which includes much of Silicon Valley, by 48 points. Four years later, he won it by 40 points. There's some evidence that tech workers and executives became more likely to donate to Republicans during the Biden era. But 83 percent of Amazon employees' donations to federal candidates went to Democrats in 2024; for Meta, that figure was 91.5 percent; for Apple, it was 95 percent. At the megadonor level, the story is a bit more complicated. Trump received more money from tech donors who spent over $1 million on the 2024 race than Harris did — but that's mostly thanks to Musk's prodigious giving. Musk spent $242.6 million on the 2024 election, nearly five times as much as Silicon Valley's second-largest political spender, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, a Democrat. And yet, it's hard to attribute Musk's political evolution to recent changes in Democratic policy. The Tesla CEO appears to have been undergoing a process of online radicalization even before Biden took office (in March 2020, Musk allegedly bet the writer Sam Harris $1 million that there would be fewer than 35,000 cases of Covid-19 in the United States, a conviction that seems symptomatic of his immersion in right-wing social media). If we deem Musk a special case and put him to the side, then Democrats retained their advantage with large tech donors in 2024: Combined, all other tech megadonors spent $30.6 million on Trump, and $120.9 million on Harris, according to an analysis from The Guardian. In any case, money was not the Democrats' problem in 2024. The party and its allied groups outraised the GOP by $1.1 billion during last year's campaign. To be sure, many Silicon Valley billionaires waited until after Election Day to cozy up to Trump, so their newfound support for the GOP would not be captured by this data. But those who only started currying Trump's favor once he secured the presidency are likely motivated less by antipathy for Democratic policy than awareness of Republican corruption: Trump has made it quite clear that his friends can expect favorable treatment by his government while his foes can anticipate the opposite. 'A number of people in tech led with vinegar during Trump's first term and learned that it was better with Trump to lead with honey,' Adam Kovacevich, a former Google executive and chair of the Chamber of Progress, told me. 'It's not so much that they expect a lot, but they really don't want their companies to be hurt by Trump. If your competitors are building a close relationship with Trump, you don't want them to screw you.' All of which is to say: The Democrats have paid a price for their crusade against Big Tech, but not a prohibitively expensive one. None of this settles the debate over whether Democrats were right to take a more adversarial posture toward the tech industry under Biden. Moderate Democrats can look at this pattern of facts and conclude that Biden's agenda alienated a powerful industry and did little to increase their party's popular support, all while discouraging growth and innovation. Progressives, meanwhile, can counter that Democrats just proved they can take on concentrated corporate power and still retain an overwhelming financial advantage over the GOP — and thus, the party has no excuse not to prioritize the interests of ordinary Americans over those of tech billionaires. Ultimately though, the important disagreement here is the substantive one. If Democrats can ingratiate themselves to tech billionaires in ways that have little substantive cost — such as giving them face time or rhetorical encouragement — they might be well-advised to do so. But the party as of yet faces no imperative to abandon policies that benefit the general public, for the sake of appeasing Silicon Valley titans. You've read 1 article in the last month Here at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country. Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change. We rely on readers like you — join us. Swati Sharma Vox Editor-in-Chief See More: Big Tech Donald Trump Elon Musk Influence Policy Politics Technology
