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.
Why tech moved right
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:
1) Changing economic conditions raised the costs of liberalism for tech companies.
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.
2) The Biden administration’s economic policies threatened big and “little” tech alike.
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.
3) Many Democrats stopped believing that Silicon Valley was a force for good — and started to threaten its social status.
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.
Spurning Silicon Valley is politically costly — but potentially affordable
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.
Democrats can (probably) afford to prioritize good tech policy over optimal politics
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.
The post How Democrats alienated Big Tech — and why it might not matter appeared first on Vox.
