Long read: I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong

Steven Levy, an American journalist has covered Silicon Valley and the tech industry for almost half a century, in the process authoring books on its icons ranging from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg. So, he has been around long enough to notice the transformation, politically speaking – how a generally left leaning community, at least its honchos are cozying up to Trump having bankrolled his election last year.

He goes back to the origins of Silicon Valley when California was the land of the free spirit, where even the early entrepreneurs wanted to take on the establishment in their own nerdy way, where technology would democratise power against the elites.

“Even Bill Gates started out as a dope-toking rebel of sorts; his partner Paul Allen was a music freak who loved Jimi Hendrix. Apple cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had barely grown out of their shaggy-haired days selling the “blue boxes” that allowed people to make illegal calls. Screw the Phone Company!

…I began a love affair with Silicon Valley. The wizards I met were changing the world with tools designed to uplift us—to give the common person the power of an expert. The electronic spreadsheet was sold as a business tool, but it was ultimately an antiestablishment weapon, because anyone with a low-cost PC could challenge the calculations of the executive suite. 

…When I first met them, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were wide-eyed idealists. Jeff Bezos came on like a buddy, eager to point out that Amazon employees, himself included, set up their computers on repurposed wooden doors instead of pricey desks. After my first conversation with Zuckerberg, he went home to a tiny apartment with no furniture.”

No one more than Zuckerberg of today explains the transformation better:

“This is the Silicon Valley of 2025. Zuckerberg, now 41, had turned into a MAGA-friendly mixed martial arts fan who didn’t worry so much about hate speech on his platforms and complained that corporate America wasn’t masculine enough. He stopped fact-checking and started hanging out at Mar-a-Lago. And it wasn’t only Zuckerberg. A whole cohort of billionaires seemed to place their companies’ fortunes over the well-being of society.

…The community still overwhelmingly leans left. But with few exceptions, its leaders are responding to Donald Trump by either keeping quiet or actively courting the government. One indelible image of this capture is from Trump’s second inauguration, where a decisive quorum of tech’s elite, after dutifully kicking in million-dollar checks, occupied front-row seats.”

Some argue that they don’t have a choice given the vindictive nature of the administration:

“In May, Apple’s CEO took a pass on an 8,000-mile journey to join a presidential entourage in the Middle East. Trump noticed. In Qatar, the president said he had “a little problem” with Cook and the following day threatened a 25 percent tariff on iPhones.”

Then came Musk: “It used to be that when tech’s leaders fell short of their lofty values, employees kept them honest. Google workers famously pressured their executives to fight for diversity and avoid military contracts. Implicit was the threat that the activists could easily find jobs elsewhere.
Then Elon Musk came along and fired 80 percent of X’s employees, and the app didn’t collapse. Across the industry, diversity efforts are down and military contracts are up. In an April 2024 note to Google employees, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees not to “use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.” Free expression is also out of favor inside Meta, where an employee says the environment feels like the ’90s: “When you went to work, you didn’t bring your politics to the office, and you may not like the boss—but you do the job so you get paid,” they tell me. “Good luck finding a company that isn’t like that now.”

…In its own geeky way, tech spoke truth to power. But now, says Stanford professor of social ethics of science and technology Rob Reich, “an extraordinarily tiny number of billionaires who control the information ecosystem have made allyship with the most consequential and fearsome political power in the world. There’s never been a time in history when those things have been combined.”

What’s behind this transformation? First, the ubiquity of software in the world meant that the run-in’s with the political class was inevitable: “Tech leaders could afford to stay out west and avoid politics. But then software products started to break down entire sectors of business. “These products were physically manifesting themselves in taxis, short-term rentals, and food delivery,” Lehane says, “bumping up against existing political systems, beliefs, laws.” Sometimes people died from that incursion. Old, beloved businesses closed. Local politicians got mad. To game the system, Silicon Valley jumped to the swamp. As one technologist in the current administration tells me, “The Valley now realizes it can’t ignore politics, because politics won’t ignore you.”

And as the adage goes, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely”, the powerful tech monopolies seem to succumb: “In a 2024 survey of Silicon Valley residents, three-quarters of respondents felt tech companies have too much power; nearly as many believe they have lost their moral compass.

That’s why, even before Citizen Trump entered the White House in 2017, I found that the narrative in my stories had changed. I used to draw on the tale of David versus Goliath. Now I was writing the Icarus legend. I kept seeing that figure’s hubris in the tech elite. And it led them to Donald Trump.”

But the democrats and Joe Biden in particular seem to have played their part as well in pushing them Trump’s way. The article refers to the Biden administration’s actions in terms of breaking tech monopolies, attacking crypto and regulating AI:

“History might remember Joseph R. Biden as the doddering figure in his last presidential debate. But a shockingly wide range of people in Silicon Valley view him as a progress-hating despot.

…But one of Biden’s biggest, most avoidable errors may have been his failure to invite Elon Musk to a 2021 event for electric vehicle manufacturers. The apparent reason was to keep the United Auto Workers happy, though the White House later claimed it was a fight over electric vehicle provisions that cost him his seat at the table. Even Reid Hoffman, one of the few tech billionaires who’s speaking out against Trump, thinks that was crazy. “You should invite the electric vehicle leader to the electric vehicle summit!” he says. “That was part of the radicalization of Elon.”” He goes on to cite other instances of Biden coming in Elon’s way which got him to back Trump.

“Another Biden blunder, in the eyes of the tech elite, was his administration’s hostility to crypto. According to one top crypto executive I spoke with, the trouble started when one of the Dems’ biggest funders, crypto billionaire Samuel Bankman-Fried, was exposed as a massive fraudster. “It was an enormous embarrassment for the Democrats,” the executive told me. “So what do you do when you’re humiliated? You overreact.”

…The crypto industry funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign….By midsummer 2024, Trump, who had earlier called cryptocurrencies a fraud, was appearing at a Bitcoin conference, … and make the US “the crypto capital of the planet.””

He gives examples of other powerful figures in the valley from the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, all of whom have pivoted to the right and benefitted from it.

“To tech’s power elite, Trump’s tit-for-tat nature is not a bug but a feature. “A lot of these guys find Trump very familiar,” says Clegg. “You go down to Mar-a-Lago, and he goes, ‘Let’s do a deal.’ That charm of Trump is incredibly intoxicating to Silicon Valley tech bros.””

But the problem is that it undermines the very “components of US tech exceptionalism—independent markets and institutions, freedom of speech, intellectual property protections, strong educational institutions, decent immigration policy.…“Trump is doing the opposite of every single one of those things,” he says. “There is definitely potential that he will destroy everything that makes the US economy unique and successful.””

Note: Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (parent company of Google), Meta are part of Marcellus’ Global Compounders Portfolio, a strategy offered by the IFSC branch of Marcellus Investment Managers Private Limited and regulated by IFSCA. Accordingly, Marcellus, its employees, immediate relatives, and clients may hold interests or positions in these stocks. Any references to these companies are made solely for informational and educational purposes, in the context of the article discussed.’

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