Gabriel Gatehouse: What Trump’s tech bros really want

Let us start with the photo: Donald Trump, swearing the oath of office; immediately behind him, the three wealthiest men in America: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

Slightly off to the right of frame, grimacing visibly, sat Joe Biden, the outgoing president who warned in his farewell address of a new oligarchy “taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence, that literally threatens our entire democracy.”

Let us dispense with the obvious: the forces of extreme wealth, power and influence have been embedded within the American system for decades. Their influence has grown under successive administrations, both Republican and Democrat. There is no secret to how it works: big donors give money to a candidate’s election campaign, often anonymously through super-PACs. In return these purveyors of ‘dark money’ gain privileged access to shape policy in their favour, presumably so they can make more money and pump some of that into the next electoral cycle.

Donald Trump did not pioneer this arrangement. Indeed, Democratic presidential candidates have far outspent their Republican rivals in every election going back at least to Obama’s first victory in 2008. And yet, the image of those titans of Silicon Valley mingling with the Trump family at the inauguration on Monday seemed to signal a vibe-shift in America’s increasingly troubled democracy.

Perhaps it was the brazenness of it, a sense that the mask had slipped or – more accurately – been ripped off, by a president whose first term ended in chaos and ignominy and whose improbable second coming appeared like a phoenix rising from the ashes of the old rule book.

There they stood, the CEOs of America’s biggest tech companies, flaunting their fealty to a man whose wild belligerence they had each excoriated in the past. High ideals and principles were always just window dressing, this picture seemed to say. That is past. Time to stop pretending. Time to show the world what America is really made of: the naked projection of pure power, driven by vast amounts of money.

What, then, do they expect to get from the deal, these men of already unimaginable wealth and power? More of the same? Or something different?

Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg are merely the most visible of the tech billionaires now entering Washington on Donald Trump’s coattails. There are others: Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor whose protégé, JD Vance, is now Vice President; David Sacks, appointed as Trump’s AI and crypto czar.

Musk, Thiel and Sacks are members of a hyper-libertarian group known unofficially as the ‘PayPal mafia’, men who helped found the online payments startup in the late 1990s and who went on to shape the culture of Silicon Valley.   

It is a culture shaped by a fervent belief that there is no problem that free markets and unregulated technology cannot solve; a culture infused by ideas that came from the world of science fiction.

In those early, heady days at PayPal, one author was particularly influential. In 1992, Neal Stephenson had written a book called Snow Crash. Set in a post-federal United States, the novel depicts a world in which central government has collapsed; sovereignty has fragmented into ‘burbclaves’, franchised corporate statelets, ruled by CEOs who “control society because they have this semi-mystical ability to speak magic computer languages.” 

In 1999, Stephenson wrote another influential book, Cryptonomicon, in which a group of entrepreneurs set up an off-shore ‘data haven’ in order to put control of money beyond the reach of governments.

At the time, Peter Thiel’s ambition for PayPal was to create a crypto currency of the kind outlined in Stephenson’s work (a decade before Bitcoin appeared.) On his desktop computer, Thiel kept a “world domination index”, a little box that would pop up on screen tracking how many users had signed up that day.

But PayPal was not just about making money. It was also an explicitly political project. Thiel told a reporter he hoped putting money beyond the reach of governments and central banks would lead to “the erosion of the nation state.”

PayPal never quite lived up to Thiel’s subversive dreams (though it made him, Musk and others a lot of money.) But Stephenson’s anarcho-capitalist vision of the future, of a world unencumbered by taxes or government regulations, continued to animate the Silicon Valley elite. (Stephenson coined the word ‘metaverse’ in 1992, when Mark Zuckerberg was still at primary school; in 1999 a then little-known tech entrepreneur named Jeff Bezos hired Stephenson to work at his space company, Blue Origin.)

Fast forward a quarter of a century and Elon Musk is in charge of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, whose remit is to reduce the reach of the federal government. Could Musk use DOGE to usher in the world of Snow Crash?

Elon Musk spent a quarter of a billion dollars on Donald Trump’s election campaign. Trump comes into office with a mandate to take down America’s establishment elite. Some of the people he’s tasked with that mission are from what – until this week – might have been called the ‘anti-establishment elite’: Musk, Thiel, Sacks. But now that they’re in power, what distinguishes them from the elite they’re supposed to take down?

This irony has not gone unnoticed. Steve Bannon, the populist architect of Trump 1.0, has been railing against the “oligarchs” of Silicon Valley, saying their aim is to impose “techno-feudalism on a global scale.” Bannon’s ire has been particularly focused on Elon Musk, whom he called a “truly evil guy,” telling an Italian newspaper he would have the Tesla CEO “run out of here by inauguration day”.

So far, in the civil war between the populist wing of the Maga movement and the billionaire cuckoos-in-the-nest, the latter appear to be winning. At least according to the pictures from the inauguration: Musk is front and centre; Bannon is nowhere to be seen.

There was another picture that caught the eye on 20 January, at a party later in the day: Elon Musk clapping his right palm over his heart, then thrusting his arm out in what some interpreted as a fascist salute. Musk dismissed the accusation as “dirty tricks”, adding: “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

It’s true, the ‘f’ word is over-used. Hannah Arendt defined fascism as the “temporary alliance between the mob and the elite.” Donald Trump’s tens of millions of supporters do not constitute a mob. But as we saw on 6 January four years ago, Trump and his populist allies are capable of inspiring one.

People who voted for Donald Trump because they’re struggling to pay for rent and groceries and don’t trust the Democrats to change anything aren’t fascists. They see that the American political and economic system, in its current form, isn’t working for them. They’re angry. Some of them want to bring the system down. Some members of the PayPal mafia want the same, but for different reasons.

If the alliance between Bannon-Maga and Musk-Maga survives, what might the future look like? A leaner, more slimmed-down federal government, with less corruption and less dysfunction? Or something more like the world of Stephenson’s imagination, an anarcho-capitalist’s utopia in which the CEO is king of his own fiefdom?