How, exactly, did Donald Trump win over the technology industry? How did the country’s most future-minded companies — managed and staffed by immigrants, and led by C.E.O.s who had enthusiastically embraced corporate diversity policies — come to embrace a nationalistic, transactional view of power and a president whose scattershot trade war threatens their hugely profitable businesses? Put more simply: What happened to Silicon Valley?
A tempting, and perhaps elegant, answer is Elon Musk. Even as his political activity seems to have cratered his bottom line, the Tesla and SpaceX C.E.O. continues to be idolized by wannabe moguls and studied closely by his peers. Other tech executives appear to ape Musk in all he does, from mass layoffs to bro-y podcast visits, and now, above all else, in supporting Trump.
But three recent books on the relationship between business and government suggest that Musk’s right-wing turn is probably more symptom than cause, the latest manifestation of reactionary forces that have long simmered, mostly unnoticed, within the tech industry, but are now suddenly on display for all to see.
Unit X
by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff
Blessedly, Musk is not the main character in UNIT X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War (Scribner, 319 pp., $30), a chronicle of efforts by the book’s authors — Shah, an entrepreneur, and Kirchhoff, a tech adviser — to persuade Silicon Valley companies to make surveillance and weapons systems for the government, though Musk’s SpaceX hangs in the background as the kind of state-backed capitalism that is good for the Pentagon.
The book reveals how a left-leaning industry became enthusiastic about the military-industrial complex. When rank-and-file Google employees put up an early resistance to weapons work, Amazon and Microsoft saw an opportunity to double down on military contracts. At the same time, some tech leaders at companies like Palantir and Anduril were always on board. In his recent book “The Technological Republic,” for instance, Palantir’s C.E.O. and co-founder, Alex Karp, longs for the days when the Navy’s ballistic missiles were made in the Bay Area and urges stronger ties between the government and Silicon Valley.
Shah and Kirchhoff were hired to run the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (Unit X for short) shortly after its creation under Barack Obama in 2015. Their goal wasn’t to turn Silicon Valley into an arm of the Pentagon, but rather to make inexpensive consumer technologies, like tablets and productivity software, easily available to the military.
But, as “Unit X” shows, it’s not a huge leap to go from using A.I. to analyze drone footage (as the Defense Department proposed in Project Maven, a controversial program that Google withdrew from after employee protest) to using A.I. systems in weapons that are designed to kill (as is the case with the exploding drones developed by Anduril, a Unit X success story). Anduril, backed by another Palantir co-founder, Peter Thiel, and staffed by several of Thiel’s close allies, recently announced that it had agreed to take over an Army contract worth up to $22 billion. Given the company’s close ties with the new administration, and the Musk-inspired political realignment in Silicon Valley, it seems almost certain there will be more money to come.
Owned
by Eoin Higgins
Tech industry reporters tend to view the power of Silicon Valley billionaires as a natural byproduct of their addictive apps. This leaves out a less flattering angle, in which their power is also the result of a sophisticated effort to buy off and bully potential critics.
In OWNED: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left (Bold Type, 293 pp., $30), Higgins, a tech journalist, makes a compelling case that more attention should be paid to the campaign to influence their critics. He also renders tech moguls like Musk and Thiel as supporting players rather than leading men, focusing instead on two of the targets of their political patronage, the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.
Greenwald and Taibbi were seen as leftists early in their careers, before turning to cater to right-wing audiences. Their evolution, Higgins argues, was spurred on by money from conservative sources. Greenwald is paid to produce videos on Rumble, the anti-woke video platform that counts Thiel and Vice President JD Vance as investors; Taibbi’s move to the right coincided with his becoming, in Higgins’s account, essentially an in-house journalist at Elon Musk’s X. (Neither man’s work is monolithic, as their reactions to more recent events have shown. Greenwald has been critical of the Trump administration’s immigration policies; Taibbi ultimately fell out with Musk over his management of X.)
The author approaches his subject with the zeal of a fan who has been disappointed by his heroes. Higgins was inspired to enter journalism, in part, by Greenwald’s reporting on the National Security Agency’s data collection programs and his role as a co-founder of the lefty news site The Intercept, where Higgins became friendly with Greenwald as a freelancer.
Higgins acknowledges having felt the draw of the right-wing dollar himself, especially as a paid contributor to a short-lived podcasting company founded by a Trump-supporting venture capitalist. His account of such personal temptations is easily the best part of the book, showing how the enormous audiences that tend to follow Musk and his peers exert a gravitational pull as powerful as Musk’s money.
Profits & Persecution
by Peter Hayes
When Jeff Bezos revamped The Washington Post’s opinion page and Mark Zuckerberg began tossing out Facebook fact checkers to embrace a system that aligned better with the new administration, it was hard to say whether these moves suggested that Bezos and Zuckerberg had finally revealed their true selves, or whether they had changed tack because it seemed inadvisable to do otherwise. (It’s worth remembering that last summer, while running for president, Trump threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison for life and that Zuckerberg’s company is on trial for alleged antitrust violations.)
Of course, either possibility is grim, as are the parallels one can find in PROFITS & PERSECUTION: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 215 pp., $29.99), by Hayes, a Holocaust scholar. Studying the relationship between the Nazi state and about 100 of the largest German companies, Hayes rebuts familiar narratives that cast the German business elite as either racist true believers or unwitting victims of Nazi aggression. He convincingly shows that German businessmen were skeptical of the Nazis, but tended to approach Hitler’s rise with an eye to the bottom line, seeking to preserve their financial advantages within the regime and, in doing so, slowly acquiescing to its most insidious demands.
His book is both horrifying and riveting, in part because the rationalizations offered by business leaders will sound eerily familiar. Germany’s corporate class was far more concerned by Weimar overregulation of the labor markets than they were by Hitler’s racism. They assumed that with some combination of minimal compliance (pushing a few Jews out of their executive ranks) and a show of political loyalty, they could bring Hitler around to “sane views,” as board members of the chemical conglomerate I.G. Farben put it in the early 1930s. Of course, these impulses ultimately helped prop up a government that eroded the independence of the corporate class and destroyed the free-market capitalism it once sought to protect.
Once the new order was in place, it seemed only natural to respond to the Nazi intimidation of Jewish-owned competitors by offering to buy up those businesses for a tiny percentage of their true worth, or, during the war, to respond to a labor shortage by embracing the Nazi practice of conscripting laborers and working them to death. “In the context created by confiscatory government policy, maneuvering in self-defense easily elided into actions that seemed — and were — cruel and rapacious,” Hayes writes.
This history is a warning less to the moguls than to the rest of us. Germany’s big businesses profited thanks to their collaboration, and after the war most executives essentially escaped blame, keeping much of the plundered wealth even after millions died. In many respects, Hayes makes clear, they won the war, even when Germany lost.
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