Getting Too Close to Trump Was a Mistake

Over the past week, following MAGA’s significant losses in the midterms, I have been asked the same questions again and again: How could Silicon Valley have gotten it so wrong? Why did tech leaders not anticipate the consequences of joining themselves at the hip to MAGA straight after Donald Trump won reelection in 2024?

What follows is not a critique of the individual tech leaders themselves—some were more restrained than others—nor is it a personal commentary on Mark Zuckerberg, my former boss. I take it as a given that they all acted in what they saw as the interests of their own companies. Rather, my critique is of a herd mentality in the Valley that, in this important instance, led to such a serious and wholly predictable misjudgment.

It is especially interesting to try and understand why this happened because, measured against their own stated reasons for the great pivot, it has been a near-total failure. Three main reasons were given for it at the time.

[Read: Silicon Valley’s very bad night]

First, tech leaders said that uniting the power of Washington and Silicon Valley would help America in its fight with China for AI supremacy. Yet over the past 18 months, China has been closing the gap with the United States by most objective measures, including model performance and chip development. In some important respects, China has outpaced America altogether, deploying open-weight models faster, developing a more sustainable energy strategy, and training world-class researchers and engineers at a larger scale.

Second, Silicon Valley leaders said that partnering with the government would help assuage public concerns about AI and overcome the “woke” opposition to Big Tech. Yet societal attitudes toward AI in the U.S. are much more negative now than they ever were under President Biden, and worse than almost anywhere else on the planet. Fostering the very backlash they claimed they were trying to confront is a peculiar triumph of hubris and incompetence.

Third, tech executives hoped that earning Trump’s good graces would allow them to avoid unwelcome regulatory incursions outside the U.S., especially in Europe. The Trump administration has undoubtedly helped with this in some ways. For example, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has become an important ally for tech leaders trying to fight a number of European Union enforcement decisions. But by any other meaningful measure the approach has been a disaster: Anti–Big Tech, and (alas) anti-American, sentiment has never been higher in large parts of the world, and most major economies—including Canada’s, India’s, Germany’s, and Brazil’s—are now scrambling to have less, not more, of what Silicon Valley produces.

Since Silicon Valley pivoted to Trump, then, its scorecard has looked something like this: chief rival (China) strengthened; domestic support weakened; global markets infuriated.

Having played a peripheral part in some of the discussions at the time—I announced my (not wholly unrelated) departure from Meta as its head of global affairs a few days before Trump’s 2025 inauguration, when the Valley-MAGA union was consummated—I see several reasons why this extraordinary miscalculation occurred:

FOMO. In 2024, Elon Musk spent Election Night at Mar-a-Lago. The sight of one tech leader—especially someone as intimidating to his peers as Musk—backslapping Trump and his entourage galvanized all the others to do the same. The idea that one of their rivals in the cutthroat race for AI supremacy might be able to strike a deal with the highly transactional clique around Trump was clearly too much for them to bear. They all wanted to be there, so they didn’t get left out.

Payback. Tech leaders had a lot to be angry about in the run-up to Trump’s reelection. Some felt unfairly treated by traditional media, academia, and cultural elites. Conservatives had long felt unwelcome in the Valley’s traditionally liberal milieu. The Biden administration had clumsily vilified tech leaders rather than work with them on policy and regulation. These factors created a large group of powerful, wealthy, and offended individuals. Stepping into the Trump tent seemed like a good way to even the score.

Misunderstanding politics. As someone who spent nearly two decades in elected office and has spent much of my time since working in and around tech, I am always struck by how eagerly smart and wealthy people expound on subjects about which they know very little—especially politics. Their commercial success seems to foster in them a view that politics is easy, if only dim-witted officeholders would listen to them. It is this hubris that makes the Valley such an exhilarating and exasperating place.

Tech hype cycles. One of the most basic mistakes the tech community makes is to apply its own hype-driven perspective to politics. That’s why so many tech leaders interpreted Trump’s 2024 victory—which was narrow in terms of the popular vote—as a mandate to carry out a sweeping ideological agenda. But voters hate when politicians take their support for granted by pursuing zealous policies that they didn’t feel they voted for. The Brexiteers made the same error in the U.K., using a wafer-thin majority in the referendum to impose a hard-line interpretation of it. Now a significant majority of Brits think Brexit was a huge mistake. In the same way, many U.S. voters abhor the self-serving cliquishness and extremism of the second Trump administration, and particularly its apparent indifference to their own economic plight. For them, the government’s cozy relationship with the Valley is a significant part of the problem.

The pendulum always swings. Many of the tech CEOs who wanted to attach themselves to Trump seemed to think that his victory marked a permanent political shift—that the pendulum would never swing back. So they immediately doubled down. Such decisiveness can be an asset when betting on fast-moving technological trends. But in politics, it’s a hindrance to understanding longer-term societal and political realities.

The VC bros. Starting around 2020, an influential set of venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, became protagonists in the American culture wars, focusing on what they saw as a conspiracy between the Biden administration and the big content platforms to censor conservatives, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. Many of them funded pro-crypto campaigns in the 2024 election cycle, and their success in defeating some prominent pro-regulation candidates apparently went to their heads. They thought that success on a single issue (regulation of the crypto industry) about which most voters couldn’t care less was a blueprint for how they—and, crucially, how the tech sector as a whole—should play for bigger stakes in politics. But there is a world of difference between VC leaders acting on their personal ideological proclivities—on both the right and the left—and executives of major tech platforms doing so. The former should be free to promote their views and spend their money on any cause they wish, in part because they are not themselves building consequential companies but simply investing in them. (I work in VC myself nowadays.) But if you are the leader of a company producing technology that you claim is of immense and disruptive societal significance, your partisan political engagement should be much more restrained.

[From the June 2026 issue: The venture-capital populist]

Why does any of this matter? Why should anyone care that a handful of powerful tech executives messed up trying to play politics?

I believe that AI still has the potential to serve humanity’s interests instead of becoming its master. But that potential will be realized only if we have smart, thoughtful people in both Silicon Valley and Washington prepared to work together regardless of partisan allegiance to help spread the technology’s benefits across society. The transactional alliance we have seen over the last couple of years couldn’t be further from that ideal.

The Democrats now have every incentive to make life as uncomfortable as they can for Trump-supporting tech leaders. This might discourage them from seeking to skew future elections to suit their own interests. But it could also lead to a cycle of retribution that would be bad for Silicon Valley, bad for innovation, and ultimately bad for Democrats, too.

Major companies involved in making technologies upon which we all depend are best served by staying out of party politics. Trying to ride the political whiplash from one cycle to the next is a fool’s game. Not long ago, Silicon Valley leaders used to be on the side of individual empowerment regardless of which party was in charge. That was always a more noble calling than opportunistically joining whichever side of the political elite happens to be winning at any one time.

Tech leaders should commit to maintaining open, productive relationships with whoever is in power in the future, regardless of party ideology. For their own sake and ours, they should get out of the game of picking political winners and losers.