The Trump administration has enabled a small network of high-tech oligarchs to determine a vast proportion of federal spending and regulatory policy.
Much of the attention, understandably, has fallen on Elon Musk, but he is not working alone.
Marc Andreessen, a billionaire venture capitalist, cryptocurrency investor and pivotal but unofficial adviser to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, made the case in a recent interview that the entire system of American higher education should be shuttered and abandoned.
There is, Andreessen argued in a Jan. 28 exchange with Lex Fridman, a podcaster and research scientist at M.I.T.:
No way to fix American higher education without replacement, and there is no way to replace them without letting them fail. And in a sense, this is the most obvious conclusion of all time. What happens in the business world when a company does a bad job? It fails and another company takes its place. That’s how you get progress. Below this is the process of evolution.
These places have cut themselves off from evolution at the institutional level and at the individual level, which is shown by the widespread abuse of the tenure system. We have just stalled out, we have built an ossified system, an ossified centralized corrupt system.
Andreessen is a member of a tech elite that stands to benefit from Trump administration policies, which are set to accelerate the ascendance of America’s technology oligarchs still further by lifting government restraints on digital, social media and cryptocurrency companies, allowing the untrammeled pursuit of libertarian goals and control over the flow of information.
Another potential beneficiary is Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor who was a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund, as well the first outside investor in Facebook. Thiel has been Vice President JD Vance’s guardian angel, getting him started in venture capital, arranging an initial meeting with Donald Trump in 2021 and putting $15 million into Vance’s successful senate campaign in Ohio.
Like Andreessen, Thiel is no stranger to controversy.
In 2009, Thiel sent shock waves through Silicon Valley when he published an essay, “The Education of a Libertarian,” in which he declared: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” adding
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
Thiel’s solution: abandon democracy in favor of technology, including the exploration of cyberspace and outer space:
Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.
Since taking office, President Trump and his appointees have supported the interests of conservative tech elites who in 2024 backed Trump and his fellow Republicans with hundreds of millions of dollars.
On his first day in office, Trump rescinded a 2023 Biden executive order that required AI systems developers to share with the government the results of tests determining whether any innovation poses a risk to U.S. national security, the economy, public health or safety.
On the same day, the president issued an executive order prohibiting “government censorship” of social media platforms, declaring “that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
On Feb. 28, Wired reported that “The S.E.C. Is Abandoning Its Biggest Crypto Lawsuits,” pausing its investigations of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange and a separate “case against Justin Sun, the Chinese crypto entrepreneur who recently announced he had invested $75 million in a crypto project with ties to the Trump family.”
On March 10, Mark Uyeda, acting chairman of the S.E.C., told the agency’s staff to initiate the abandonment of a proposal to place all cryptocurrency firms under regulatory provisions governing alternative trading systems.
In other words, it is no wonder that Andreessen was exuberant in his interview with Lex Fridman.
Nonetheless, Andreessen’s commentary raises a question. The American university system commands worldwide respect. What would prompt a call for its abolition?
Henry Farrell, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, described the kind of thinking that frequently prevails among the tech elite in an interview with Paul Waldman:
Is this idea of the world as a place where you have striving individuals, perhaps small teams, who really are the heroes of the story? These are people with — well, they’re men, not entirely but nearly all men, with grand ambitions and grand flaws who set out to remake the world according to their values.
This gives a certain kind of mentality, a certain kind of sense to Silicon Valley people, that they are an elite following in the footsteps of other elites, like Robert Moses, the guy who made modern New York City what it is, like Teddy Roosevelt. And so you get these biographies rubbing shoulders with a biography of Elon Musk, effectively suggesting that Elon Musk is just the latest of a series of world-bestriding colossuses, these fantastically great men who really have grand ambitions, who reshape the world in their ambitions.
Recognition of this kind of thinking among tech C.E.O.s, Farrell argued, is essential to understanding this question.
Why is it that people like Musk, and indeed many other people in Silicon Valley, want to reshape the world? These are the people who are prepared to break apart the systems that don’t work, and create a better world in its stead, albeit certainly cracking massive, massive volumes of eggs and hurting people’s livelihoods.
In the high-tech community, Farrell continued, there is
a lot of tolerance of different lifestyles, but going together with a very definite bias, for example, against unions. And so it’s not entirely surprising that when you see a lot of people’s economic interests come into perspective as really being very important during the Biden era, now you see a bunch of people breaking toward the right and breaking toward those elements around people like Peter Thiel.
Farrell noted that the 2009 Thiel quote about the incompatibility of freedom and democracy “is often mentioned as evidence of what a right-wing weirdo he is. But today that may be the dominant sentiment among Silicon Valley chief executives.”
Trump has evidently adopted the premise that in order to advance, you have to break things.
While it’s not the wholesale evisceration of higher education envisaged by Andreessen, the Trump administration has ordered, or threatened to order, debilitating cuts in funds for universities and colleges.
At Johns Hopkins, the loss of $800 million in U.S.A.I.D. grants has forced the school to lay off 2,200 foreign and domestic workers, including those working at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the School of Medicine.
On March 8, the Trump administration announced that it was cutting $400 million in grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
Graduate schools across the country are cutting the number of students admitted to Ph.D. programs, even rescinding acceptances in some cases, because of administration-ordered reductions in the percentage of federal grants that go to defray university costs.
The scope of economic and political power wielded by a handful of tech giants would be difficult to overestimate. Brian Merchant, a former technology columnist for the Los Angeles Times who produces a newsletter, Blood in the Machine, summed up their influence nicely on Jan. 17:
Google commands 90 percent of the search market. Seven in ten of all Americans use Facebook. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google control two-thirds of the internet’s cloud architecture — if any of it goes down, so does the web. Amazon owns 40 percent of the American e-commerce market.
What’s happening now, in one sense, is that the tech titans who have secured such large swaths of power over the digital world, are increasingly comfortable wielding that power, openly, in the ‘real’ world too; the tech oligarchs are becoming the American oligarchs, period, often using leverage from their digital platforms in tandem with their war chests of old-fashioned cash.
Before Trump won the presidency, Silicon Valley was, with some key exceptions, a Democratic bastion. Starting in 2017, that alliance began to fray.
Farrell’s explanation:
By 2017, the relationship between West Coast technologists and East Coast technocrats began to sour. Many liberals believed that the algorithms powering social media’s business model had helped Trump win.
Journalists stopped deferring automatically to Silicon Valley leaders, while many Democrats, like the dynamic young lawyer Lina Khan, began talking about breaking up tech monopolies.
This divide played out in the workplace too. As liberals warmed to racial and gender equity, many technology funders and senior executives grew cool, resenting employee demands that they reshape their business plans to reflect social justice priorities.
The concerns of high-tech C.E.O.s escalated sharply, Farrell noted, after President Joe Biden appointed Khan chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, and another hard-nosed regulator, Gary Gensler, as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The result was not a full-scale realignment of the tech elite but a major shift in their ranks, with the Republican Party gaining near parity in terms of campaign donations, especially contributions from major donors.
John Robb, a Los Angeles-based internet entrepreneur who produces a blog, Global Guerrillas, replied to my queries by email:
These billionaires are super-empowered individuals. Globalization led to their extreme wealth (it made extreme wealth concentration inevitable) and shaped their independent mind-set beyond nationalistic concerns.
Networking added to this. It amplified their influence and power (X is the best example). These billionaires aren’t able to dominate politics on their own. They need a political network (red-Republican/blue-Democratic) to do it for them.
In the immediate future, Robb does not foresee the end of the democratic election of public officials — “that isn’t going away (yet)” — but added, “What we are seeing is the addition of network decision making to the mix and so far, it appears to be very powerful — it’s already upstream of market-based voting and institutional media.”
Robb asks whether these developments “are a threat” and answers his own question:
To the extent that they want to dictate how networked decision making will be folded into existing decision making, they may be seen as one. The red — Republican — network is in control of this transition because they are the only ones focused on it. Nobody else appears to understand it. The red network IS in power. The Republican Party is a legacy political organization that serves it.
Gil Duran, a former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner, who produces a newsletter covering the tech industry, is sharply critical of recent developments. In an email, Duran wrote:
Having realized that money buys political power, these tech billionaires are now trying to buy the entire U.S. government. This is an unprecedented hostile takeover. With Elon Musk as their avatar, they openly dismantle the government and disregard the Constitution. They pose an existential threat to American democracy, and they see this as their moment to seize power.
Many of the tech billionaires who have merged with Trump believe democracy is an outdated software system that must be replaced. They want a future in which tech elites, armed with all-powerful AI systems, are the primary governing force of the planet.
The tech oligarchs, Duran argued,
are an existential threat to democracy. Look at the news. It makes no sense that a presidential administration would seek to crash the economy while allowing an unelected foreign-born billionaire to rip apart the government. This goes against every rule in politics. Trump’s poll numbers are sinking yet he’s taking no steps to correct the course. This is the logic of a suicide bomber.
These billionaires, Duran argued, “are fully in control of Trump’s MAGA Party,” but their ambitions go beyond that. “The Republican Party is simply a host organism for the parasite of tech fascism,” Duran wrote, but “it’s not just the Republican Party that’s lost its soul. The tech authoritarians are also moving to co-opt leaders in the Democratic Party.”
Duran pointed to newly elected Democratic Senators Elissa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego who, Duran wrote,
were elected with massive help from the Fairshake PAC, which was funded by Big Crypto to the tune of nearly $200 million in 2024. This is the same PAC that took out Sherrod Brown and Katie Porter.
The top strategists of Fairshake are Democrats, not Republicans. Now that Big Crypto has helped take control of the Republican Party, it is making a play to co-opt the Democratic Party. It’s crucial to realize that any Democrat who supports crypto has taken the side of the tech billionaires.
Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T., who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, wrote by email:
I find it a little disingenuous that Democrats and the Democratic-leaning press are now talking of oligarchy. There has been a tech oligarchy that was already hugely powerful before Trump’s second term and Obama was the president that played the most important role in their empowerment.
At the same time, in Acemoglu’s view,
Elon Musk’s influence is very problematic, and it goes beyond oligarchy. Most concerningly, he has become personally involved in data collection/capture and policy design and implementation. This is very very problematic. There I completely agree with Democrats and the liberal press.
Acemoglu argued that far more important than what Musk and DOGE are doing, is the fact that
There is a real, mortal threat from Trump against U.S. institutions. It is about setting up Trump’s personal rule, taking control of the F.B.I., D.O.J., O.M.B., G.A.O., and all other agencies that are supposed to be independent of executive power and turning them into tools of his own aggrandizement, corruption and empowerment. What Musk is doing pales in comparison in terms of threat.
Margaret Levi, a political scientist at Stanford and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, agreed in an email that Musk’s activities undermine democracy, but she too argued that the problem of excessive power exercised by tech executives is bipartisan.
“There is no doubt that the tech billionaires have extraordinary political power, particularly in Trump’s second administration,” she wrote. “Musk, of course, exercises that power directly, albeit unaccountably, through DOGE. It is unaccountable and, in some instances, illegal power; it is also irresponsible.”
The billionaires are also exercising indirect power, Levi argued, “through PACs, positions on boards of universities, their nonprofits, social media platforms and in multiple other ways.”
“Some are Republicans, some are Democrats,” Levi wrote:
The problem is not the political and scientific positions of these billionaires. The problem is that they are establishing an oligarchy in which great wealth also ensures great power. The guardrails that used to protect us and inhibit such oligarchical tendencies in the U.S. are degrading fast.
A significant contribution to the problems of high-tech influence over politics and policy is that much of the power exercised by tech oligarchs is invisible to the regular voter.
Let’s return once again to Henry Farrell, who wrote on Jan. 7 about
the problems you get when large swathes of the public sphere are exclusively owned by wannabe God-Emperors.
Elon Musk owns X outright. Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta through a system in which he is C.E.O., chairman and effective majority owner, all at the same time.
What purports to be a collective phenomenon — the “voice of the people” — is actually in private hands; to a very great extent shaped by two extremely powerful individuals.
None of this is brainwashing, but it is reshaping public debate, not just in the U.S., but in the U.K., Europe and other places too. People’s sense of the contours of politics — what is legitimate and what is out of bounds; what others think and are likely to do and how they ought to respond — is visibly changing around us.
Farrell may be right that this is not brainwashing, but it’s not democracy, either.
The post It May Not Be Brainwashing, but It’s Not Democracy, Either appeared first on New York Times.
