Elon Musk has made an unabashed political shift to the right since acquiring Twitter, defying the orthodoxy of Silicon Valley as a bastion of wealthy liberals influenced by Democrats. Musk has long been considered ideologically unrecognizable, but his politics are now hard-right as he uses his platform, now known as X, to inflame Fox News, conservative talk radio and throughout the West A theme dear to the far-right movement.
In the latest example, Musk last week reiterated a far-right chat room conspiracy theory that US President Joe Biden was importing immigrants in exchange for votes, setting the stage for “something worse than 9/11.”
But beyond these posts, the question on everyone’s mind is whether the world’s second-richest man will use his influence and wealth to support former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
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Rumors swirled when The New York Times reported that the two men, along with other Republican donors, met in Florida last week.
Trump is lagging badly behind Biden in raising campaign funds even as he is expected to win the Republican nomination to become president of the United States, and Musk could single-handedly make up the shortfall.
Musk turned to X and insisted, “To be very clear, I will not donate to any candidate for president of the United States.”
But funding for U.S. elections is opaque and complex, and Biden supporters worry Musk could change his mind or fund political committees that themselves fund Trump, or find other ways to help Republican causes.
“Technology Optimist”
Musk is not alone: Other Silicon Valley pundits are also championing conservative causes, lending their voices to what remains an electoral stronghold for liberals. In 2020, Trump’s vote share in Silicon Valley was less than 25%.
Some tycoons are seeking to build a political movement that, if not directly support Trump, will embrace conservative causes, cryptocurrencies and defy California traditions.
One of the loudest voices in this shift is early Internet mogul Marc Andreessen, who founded Netscape and now co-runs the respected venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz).
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Once a quintessentially center-left tech mogul who was close to former Vice President Al Gore, Anderson now vehemently opposes left-wing priorities, particularly so-called “woke” considerations around equality or workplace inclusion.
Last year, Anderson laid out a technotopian vision of the future in a 5,200-word “Manifesto of Techno-Optimism,” which listed co-optation of government, regulation and concerns about discrimination or equality as enemies.
Like many right-wing investors, Anderson’s firm has invested heavily in cryptocurrencies and launched a political war chest last year to create trouble for Democratic or Republican lawmakers who want tighter controls on the nascent industry.
For tech analyst Carolina Milanesi, the newfound outspokenness may not be an attempt to emulate Musk but stem from conservative fears that the status quo is disappearing.
“When people talk about wokeness, when you talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, or you talk about sustainability, all of these things are basically threats to the status quo,” she said.
This outrage over Musk’s so-called “clear-thinking virus” fuels a popular podcast called “All-In,” in which four tech honchos, as well as some of Musk’s friends, take stock of the world and the latest expressed their views on the development of science and technology.
Moderators include David Sacks, a member of the PayPal mafia that includes Musk, who worked at the startup in the late ’90s before it became one of Silicon Valley’s smallest But a representative of the growing right-leaning faction.
Another PayPal veteran is investor Peter Thiel, a German-born conservative who associated himself with Trump as he entered the White House.
After the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, Thiel said he would stay away from politics, becoming the right-wing philosopher king of Silicon Valley who always stayed out of the conversation.
-“Leftmost” Artificial Intelligence-
Diversity-conscious tech companies are starting to feel the power of this new guard amid criticism that San Francisco is overrun with drugs and crime, or that generative AI has become too “woke.”
Last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai found himself under criticism and the company’s stock price hit hard after its just-launched Gemini AI application generated ethnically diverse images of Nazi troops during World War II. images and other ahistorical gaffes.
“The people running Google’s AI are smuggling their preferences and biases, and those biases are extremely liberal,” Sacks said in an All-In podcast episode titled “The AI Disaster Google Woke.”
Google’s Pichai calls AI chaos “completely unacceptable” and a sign of growing conservative influence, with founder Sergey Brin saying that in generating such “far left” images, “we It must have been messed up.”
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