When I drove around Silicon Valley in 2017, talking to tech gods for a magazine piece, trying to figure out if A.I. would be friend or foe, Washington barely seemed to be on their radar.
As far as they were concerned, they were the nation’s capital. In D.C., pols merely passed laws. In Silicon Valley, techies were creating a new species, trying to conjure a nonhuman sentient mind. Forget Henry Adams; this was Mary Shelley stuff. Some tech titans were buoyant about the future. Some were wary. Elon Musk warned we might be “summoning the demon.”
Silicon Valley was run by a bunch of boys with toys. Brilliant, quirky young engineers trying to get more toys than the others, better rockets or self-driving cars or robots. They were developing a monopoly on Americans’ attention, learning how to ratchet up the algorithms to create division, distrust and envy, siloing people and spreading angst — all under the innocent guise of connecting us and making our lives better.
Within their own elite circle, the tech billionaires were volatile — sometimes friendly, sometimes feuding, sometimes, in the case of Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, threatening cage matches, sometimes, in the case of Musk, selling off his houses and sleeping on friends’ couches. They were the richest, most potent men in the world, with a visceral high school vibe. They were the bitchiest, weirdest mathletes in history.
Eventually, the digerati gazed east and discovered a fascinating new toy they could fight over: the American president. Suddenly, Democratic Silicon Valley is Trump country. The moment crystallized when Zuckerberg — fed up with Democrats’ sermonizing about his company’s failure to shut down misinformation in 2016 — bought a yacht, put on a gold necklace and got a streetwear makeover, declared that Donald Trump’s response to the assassination attempt was “one of the most bad-ass things I’ve ever seen in my life,” and ended fact-checking at Meta.
Wow, the tech moguls thought: This could be cool, to not only control all communications and manipulate all emotions in the country, but to reprogram the government’s regulatory engine so it runs like we want it to! Just give some puny millions to Trump’s campaign and inauguration, throw some flattery at the unquenchable maw of Trump’s ego, and you were suddenly at his elbow onstage in the Capitol when he swept back into power.
Trump is a 78-year-old Luddite who has a beautiful young woman nicknamed the “human printer” following him around with a petite printer in her backpack. She cranks out positive stories to show him and takes dictation for his social media posts. He still prefers a Sharpie to a keyboard.
Yet suddenly he’s the savior of TikTok teens and crypto bros. King Donald’s court is filled with the lords of the cloud, courtiers who are bringing their chaos and drama to a Trump orbit brimming with chaos and drama. At the inauguration, the tech tycoons outranked most of the political class in the seating placement — sitting on par with former presidents.
It’s a remarkable spectacle watching an entirely new power center flock to Washington, fight for Trump’s attention, jockey to prove their loyalty, post groveling encomiums to Trump, throw money at him, clamor for eight-figure mansions around town.
As the OpenAI chief Sam Altman gushed on X this past week: “watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him,” adding, “i’m not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways.”
Trump, who always wanted elites to love him, relishes the crème de la tech lining up to kiss his ring. If they see him as a new toy to compete over, he sees them the same way.
The returning president wasted no time putting the cat among the pigeons when he held a news conference Tuesday announcing a joint venture among OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle called “Stargate” to generate about $100 billion in computing infrastructure for A.I., with a goal to invest $500 billion by the end of Trump’s term.
Trump, savoring his new image as a champion of Silicon Valley in its bid to beat out China on A.I., showcased Altman at the White House, even though he knows Altman and Musk — who co-founded OpenAI — are in a legal feud. Elon has accused his former pal, Sam, of deserting their original mission when he changed its nonprofit status to for-profit; Altman allies think Musk is just jealous that the young, ragtag crew working in a makeshift office blasted off a few years after he left, ultimately creating ChatGPT.
Musk went bananas (or more bananas) on X, declaring that the troika did not have the money for such an initiative. Altman fired back, saying Musk was wrong, and Musk escalated the brawl by posting old Altman tweets criticizing Trump.
It was an eye-popping crack in the Donald/Elon bromance, which is being watched closely now that Trump has given Musk the power to roam the West Wing, where he is working out of an office on the second floor, and take a hatchet to government.
Furious Trump aides told Politico that the mercurial Musk got over his skis, discrediting a project Trump had just called “tremendous” and “monumental.”
Did Trump think flirting with Musk’s nemesis was a good way to put Elon in his place and remind people that there’s only one star of the Trump show?
Asked by reporters about Musk undermining him, Trump was nonchalant. He knows from digital insults.
The president dismissed it as a personality clash, noting that Musk “hates one of the people,” allowing, “I have certain hatreds of people, too.”
The colliding egos of Silicon Valley have joined the colliding egos on the Potomac, but the president is not perturbed. Mixing it up, stirring conflict for its own sake, this is just how Donald Trump has fun.
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