Many tech bros have thrown their weight behind the Trump campaign and it’s not going to end well, says Billy MacInnes
Image: RDNE Stock project via Pexels
25 July 2024
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for tech. Once again, a handful of mega-rich, self-entitled and whiny tech bros have put the wider IT community to shame by reinforcing the stereotype of out of touch, extremely rich white men with minimal empathy and a laser focus on their own interests instead of that of the wider community. This has been brought into sharp relief by their reckless advocacy for minimal regulation for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, based on what appears to be their innate belief that “the government is trying to stop us from making even more money when we should be allowed to do what we want because we know better”.
This has led a number of them to open up their wallets to Donald Trump’s campaign and its platform, built on the foundations of Project 2025, that promises to expand the power of the presidency to bring the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, under his direct presidential control, halt sales of the abortion pill, sack thousands of civil servants, dismantle the Department of Education, ban pornography and shut down those tech and telecoms companies that allow access to it.
Not forgetting the plan to support the development of “vast oil and gas and coal resources” as well as Arctic drilling. A plan articulated by Donald Trump as ‘drill, baby, drill’. The project also proposes breaking up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it has “become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”.
You might think a platform that is also built on restrictions to everyday liberties, especially for the half of the population that isn’t biologically male, might attract the ire of people who set such great store by individual freedom but it would appear not. Apparently, ‘individual’ freedom only applies to those with the XY chromosomes. By a weird coincidence, tech bros (as the name suggests) are in the XY chromosome club.
Oh, did I mention the tax plans that would result in most low and middle-income earners paying more tax but wealthier people paying less? It’s surely only a coincidence that all the tech bros donating to Trump reside in the latter camp. It’s an even greater coincidence when you consider that Biden’s administration has proposed new taxes on multi-millionaires and unrealised capital gains.
Money talks
One of the most public advocates for Trump from the tech bro ranks has been perhaps its most prominent member, Elon Musk, who endorsed the former president this month and, reportedly, pledged to donate $45 million a month to his election campaign. Support has also come from venture capitalists and prominent technology luminaries, including Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and cryptocurrency tycoons the Winklevoss twins.
Perhaps the funniest part of this saga is that after Biden stepped down in favour of Kamala Harris a few days ago, potentially upending Trump’s election prospects, Musk hastily disavowed any suggestions that he had pledged to give $45 million a month to the Republican candidate’s campaign.
Another excruciating moment was when Musk tried to publicly elicit the support of billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla for the Trump/Vance campaign on twitter. Khosla replied: “Hard for me to support someone with no values, lies, cheats, rapes, demeans women, hates immigrants like me. He may cut my taxes or reduce some regulation but that’s no reason to accept depravity in his personal values. Do you want President who will set back climate by a decade in his first year?”
Needless to say, despite Musk’s blandishments, Khosla remains unconverted. When you stop to think about it that sentence – “he may cut my taxes or reduce some regulation but that’s no reason to accept depravity in his personal values” – offers a perfect distillation of just how far some tech bros are prepared to go in pursuit of lower taxes and reduced regulation.
There’s also something unintentionally hilarious about the fact that the man picked as vice president, JD Vance, who has been advanced and funded by tech bro Peter Thiel and backed by others, is turning out to be such a dud that there have been reports of Trump wishing he could change his mind.
Just as Vance’s popularity wanes in direct proportion to his exposure, so too for Project 2025, which becomes more unpopular the more people know about it to the point where Trump is scrambling to distance himself from it (despite the involvement of so many of his former white house staffers and supporters in its creation). A bit like the tech bros, when you stop to think about it.
