When the high and mighty Silicon Valley took over their privileged perch in swamping President Trump, it was a privileged show of wealth and power as it had been before.
“You could go back to the Gilded Age and have a similar concentration of capital and power. You know, Rockefeller and Carnegie,” said historian Margaret O'Mara, citing two of the richest men to ever defeat Earth. “But they weren't at the inauguration podium.”
The moment was open to different interpretation. Was it Trump that made alpha males most status-conscious and impressively likeable like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg? Or did all those billionaires in the Capitol Rotunda – sitting in front of Trump's Cabinet picks – assert their social, economic and cultural hegemony?
Maybe both.
Regardless, there is no denying the remarkable rise of Silicon Valley and its tech leaders in a single generation from a collection of indifferent and often politically naive entrepreneurs to the lords of the political universe of kings, rising, rising lords of the political universe .
Only in America.
And yes, that is sarcasm you recognize.
The explanation for their propinquity lies not in the creation of a whiz-bang, life-changing, paradigm-bending consumer product or the shining virtues or especially the fertile minds that freeze the fertile plains of Silicon Valley.
“It's one of the oldest truisms in politics,” said Larry Gerston, a professor emeritus of political science who has followed the tech industry from a downtown seat for decades. “Money buys access.”
Bezos' Amazon and Zuckerberg's Meta were among the tech companies that each showed $1 million to pay for Trump's inauguration. Musk invested more than a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Trump.
Given his committed twin closeness to the 47th president, it seems well spent.
Let's flash forward to another lifetime in July 1997, when some of Silicon Valley's top entrepreneurs and executives announced with great fanfare the formation of a company called Technology Network. Based in Palo Alto, it was founded as a one-stop shop to promote political causes, lobby on issues and support preferred candidates. The creation of the organization and its seeding of a $2 million pocket change was a notable departure for the industry, which had until then only been fleetingly and peripherally involved in campaigns and elections.
As Gerston put it at the time, “these guys don’t know anything about politics. Their mentality was always to put every penny they had into R&D and then into the product. “
This head-down insularity began to change with the realization that issues like taxes, tariffs, foreign trade, and legal liability were very important to high-tech prosperity and long-term futures. Industry leaders became more involved in regional affairs, focusing on issues such as permitting and transportation. At the state level, they spent tens of millions to defeat a 1996 ballot measure that would have made it easier to file security poll lawsuits. (High-tech companies have been a particular target of such shareholder suits because of the volatility of their stocks.))
In Washington, President Clinton and his techie vice president, Al Gore, broke ground by carefully courting the industry and seeking to associate themselves with its perceived coolness and cutting-edge cachet.
Back then, the Internet was still in its infancy and Silicon Valley's fledgling companies were seen as a rising star that needed to promote and protect as they faced Goliaths like software giant Microsoft. One upshot was Section 230 of the Communications Recognition Act of 1996, which to this day insulates social media from legal liability for the content – however celluloid or bizarre – that users post. (At the time there was no Google, YouTube, Twitter or anything like that. Zuckerberg was 12 years old.)
“Even though the Internet was commercialized and everyone was excited about the World Wide Web, it was still one thing on your desk that you walked away from,” said O'Mara, a University of Washington professor and author of “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. “
“They didn't have the software, platforms and tools that were made by these companies that were disrupting all kinds of industries from taxis to hotels to politics,” O'Mara said.
As the industry grew – massively, exponentially – and technology became embedded in every fiber of daily life, it moved to increased and less favorable knowledge of Washington. Concerns about privacy, voting mix, exploitative labor practices and the toxic effects of social media scraped much of the shine from the tech industry and its shiny devices, particularly among Democrats.
The Republicans had their own handles. Trump attacked Google, Facebook and other social media companies in his first round in the White House, accusing them of censorship and anti-conservative bias.
Apathy had long since fallen out of fashion. Technology leaders and venture capitalists did what the railroads, steel, oil and gas, and so many other industries had done before, hiring an army of lobbyists and investing heavily in politics and politicians to defend and preserve their interests.
“The guys who wanted to be left alone and stay away from politics realized that their only chance of survival was to get involved in the political process of making policy,” Gerston said.
That's just business sense.
But there is something thingy and gritty, like splotchy drifts of old snow, about the overarching influence of Trump's courtiers and their grubby relationship with a president so obviously enamored of money and flattery. Zuckerberg eliminated third-party fact-checking on Facebook so it wouldn't run afoul of Trump's fact-free outpourings. Amazon paid $40 million to license a Melania Trump documentary.
Worse is the unholy financial influence of the tech moguls. With Midas-sized foundations and a Supreme Court that equates political contributions with free speech, they can scream while most of the rest can only whisper.
Again, it may well prove to be money.
Over the next few years, Trump will have a major impact on antitrust policy, the development and use of artificial intelligence, and the growth and prevalence of cryptocurrency, to name just a few of the issues of vital and determined interest to the technology industry. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is, for now, pursuing cases in which Google Search seeks to end Google's hegemony and Apple's alleged practice of forcing consumers to switch software or hardware.
Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the CEOs of Apple and Google respectively, were among the tech barons who paid homage to Trump. Regardless of their taste in art, you can be sure they weren't there to admire the statues and oil paintings that line the gilded Capitol Rotunda.