A shocking partisan switch is underway in the stratosphere of the tech titans: The industry known for its wokeness is betting big bucks on a Republican.
Last week former President Donald Trump gave a thumbs up to the notion of teaming up with billionaire innovator Elon Musk if he wins in November. Hours later, Musk posted a message on X: “I am willing to serve.”
Elon Musk for commerce secretary? Or perhaps for the newly created position of free speech czar?
Whether or not Musk actually joins a Trump administration — Trump himself said Sunday that the mogul is likely too busy to do so but could “consult” — his bold steps to back the Republican signal a turnaround.
Musk voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. Yet last month he launched a pro-Trump super PAC, which he and several other tech moguls are funding — even though Trump would likely remove federal subsidies for electric vehicles, a major Musk industry, if he wins a second term.
Investor and “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban called the phenomenon of tech bosses boosting Trump “insane.”
Not really: While Democrats strove mightily last week to push “freedom” as the theme of their convention, tech leaders are betting that freedom of speech, freedom to innovate and freedom from crushing government regulations and confiscatory taxes are more likely in a Trump reign than in a Kamala Harris administration.
Among those Silicon Valley heavyweights is Nicole Shanahan, who was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate.
“I would say that I trust the future of this country more under the leadership of Trump … than I do of the Harrises,” Shanahan said last week as Kennedy weighed his decision to back Trump in the race.
Harris’ economic plans, Shanahan warned — “particularly her flawed ideas about price caps on food” — echo “the very policies that caused the famine my family suffered through in Mao’s Communist China.”
The Republican National Committee’s platform, dictated largely by Trump himself, pledges lower taxes and deregulation, and describes innovators as national treasures.
In contrast, the Democrats’ 2024 platform vilifies businesses as greedy profiteers who don’t pay “their fair share” and proposes hiking corporate taxes to 28% and raising taxes on capital gains.
Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, said in December that it would decide which presidential ticket to support based on one issue: “If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.”
The firm called “bad government policies” the No. 1 threat to their industry.
Trump has expressed his enthusiasm for new technologies, even promising to “make America first in AI.”
By July, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the investment firm’s principals, had changed sides and endorsed Trump, saying the Republican will reduce regulation and lower taxes.
When Trump chose running mate J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist with Silicon Valley experience, tech entrepreneurs applauded.
PayPal founder David Sacks is throwing his support to Trump and even spoke at the Republican National Convention. Palantir Technologies cofounder Joe Lonsdale and cryptocurrency kings Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are donating to Musk’s America PAC to back Trump.
Of course, tech is an industry like any other, concerned with what government can do to damage the business environment.
Expect more tech leaders to change sides if Harris and running mate Tim Walz roll out policy proposals as misguided as those we’ve seen so far, like price controls.
Big tech reacts to bad economic policies at every level, not just federal.
The same political metamorphosis bringing tech figures to Trump is also causing thousands of firms to flee California’s high taxes and overbearing regulations, and relocate to Texas. They’re trading woke for business-friendly.
Austin, the state capital, has become a tech hub dubbed Silicon Hills. Musk recently moved his company SpaceX to Texas and announced that X’s headquarters will soon follow.
Yet Musk is more than a Silicon Valley titan — he is also a crusader for free speech.
Last month he stared down a European Union bureaucrat who objected that Musk’s uncensored two-hour conversation with Trump on X could result in “disinformation.”
“Take a big step back,” Musk responded via a cheeky meme, after blasting the bureaucrat for his “alarming disregard for freedom of expression,” as a letter from several free speech groups put it.
Musk recently closed X in Brazil rather than comply with government censors there. X is suspended in Venezuela for refusing to take down posts challenging dictator Nicolas Maduro’s phony victory claims.
Ending government censorship is a top Republican priority. The Biden-Harris administration has used agencies from the FBI to the Department of Health and Human Services to pressure social media to do the administration’s bidding. The RNC platform pledges that federal interference will stop.
Musk wants “to promote the principles that made America great in the first place,” naming meritocracy and free speech among the core ideas his America PAC is pushing.
They’re not on Harris’ agenda — more reasons tech money is moving to Trump.
You don’t need AI to figure that out.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey. To find out more about Betsy McCaughey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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They’re not on Harris’ agenda — more reasons tech money is moving to Trump.
They clearly understand the difference between capitalism and communism.
There IS only one choice…. TRUMP.
These Dem fools’ idea of a wealth producing American Titan, is when the Democrat party crackheads let loose the Kamala Kraken, who will smash the economies of what is now left of every Democrat run city/state to pieces. If the Colossus of Rhodes were still standing today, like our own statue of Liberty, any ship sailing under its spread legs and looked up, would find no frigging thing that a fig leaf would need to have covered, only lots of Kevorkian scalpel removed scar tissue of a gender decapitated Capitalist.
I have never understood how anyone can claim dems are ‘all for freedom’.
THEY WANTED TO LIMIT who could do stuff during all the lockdowns
THEY WANTED TO control where you would be required to wear masks
THEY WANTED to control who would be forced to get the shots etc…
WHERE WAS THE freedom in any of that!?
“In contrast, the Democrats’ 2024 platform vilifies businesses as greedy profiteers who don’t pay “their fair share” and proposes hiking corporate taxes to 28% and raising taxes on capital gains”,,,,unlike those Democrat party fake righteous socially dependent blood sucking parasites that vote for Kamala whose fair share in the minds of the mentally ill who run that party is to pay nothing with no skin other than color in the game of economic and political survival,,,,,who just show up with hand out, if they happen to survive the abortion gauntlet their moms were Kamala talked into. No pain, no Capital gains, and it is THE PEOPLE of hard work and excellence who are experiencing the growth pains of creating economic surpluses that the social parasites swarm into from the democrat party to devour. The fools should understand and welcome wealth creating men for the benefactors that they are to society, not kneecap and cripple them to the point there are no surpluses left to share, nor enough for even the democrat dwindled producers to live off of. Had Biden’s FBI hotel raids been redirected into the illegal democrat built alien roach motels, we would be rid of these parasites when American sanity again checks into government as the democrat locusts and cockroaches get checked out.
One wonders, how many of the libtard hollywood elite pay “THEIR FAIR share”??