The assassination attempt against Donald Trump last Saturday was like an electroshock in the American technology sector. Several wealthy representatives of the industry quickly proclaimed their unwavering support for the Republican candidate. And that was before they learned that JD Vance would be his running mate. Because the Ohio senator was involved for six years in Silicon Valley venture capital, where he notably met the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel.
However, one of the biggest names in the industry is not on this list: Mark Zuckerberg.
The Facebook founder and Meta boss reacted rather lukewarmly to the events of last Saturday, simply saying that he was “praying for President Trump’s speedy recovery.” This is quite a contrast to the reaction of Elon Musk, owner of the social network X, who immediately reiterated his immediate financial support for the Republican candidate’s campaign.
The coldness between the former president and Mark Zuckerberg could cost the latter dearly. Meta, a company with the seventh largest stock market value in the United States, at 1.25 trillion US dollars, is likely to become a prime target for a Donald Trump postponed to the White House next fall.
“Now that I think about it, I’m in favor of TikTok, because we need a little competition. If you don’t have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram, and that, you know, is Zuckerberg,” Donald Trump said in an interview published Wednesday by Businessweek.
Recall that when he was president, Trump tried to ban TikTok and WeChat from the US because of their affiliation with China. The American justice system and his successor as president then put an end to this measure.
In the interview, Trump also focused at length on the situation of what is known as Big Tech — the mainly Californian technology giants Apple, Google and Microsoft — but also on the whole swarm of smaller companies and investment firms that make up Silicon Valley, the financial and cultural epicenter of the North American technology world. “I don’t want to hurt these companies, but I don’t want to see them destroy our youth either. I don’t want to see them influence our elections,” added the Republican billionaire, who sees the digital giants as an essential economic bulwark to compete with other countries.
Donald Trump has also been complimentary about the CEOs of Apple and JPMorgan Chase, Tim Cook and Jamie Dimon. But he finds these Big Tech companies, which include 8 of the 10 largest American companies, “too big” and “too powerful.”
Discontented rich people
Billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and entrepreneur David Sacks are just some of the prominent names in the American tech industry who have declared their support for Donald Trump and his presidential campaign in recent days. In Sacks’ case, it’s quite a turnaround: he had previously claimed that Trump’s role in the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021, should have disqualified him from the 2024 presidential election.
Donald Trump can also count on the support of most entrepreneurs in the cryptocurrency world, who very publicly want him to return to the head of the United States.
All of this may give the impression that Silicon Valley, traditionally closer to the Democratic Party, has gone into a tailspin. But official statistics show no real change in the composition of the electorate in the very large San Francisco suburbs since the 1970s. Just over half of the people of voting age there are members of Joe Biden’s party, and about 15% of voters identify as Republicans.
But in recent years, President Joe Biden has enacted policies that have angered many California tech entrepreneurs: a framework for developing artificial intelligence, another for the cryptocurrency market, and a handful of antitrust lawsuits against flagship companies like Amazon and Google. So those entrepreneurs — billionaires — stepped up and got out their checkbooks. And as in many situations, it’s the disgruntled ones who are heard the most.
In reality, the environment is still very blue: the specialist magazine Wired calculated last week that for every dollar from Silicon Valley that went to fund the Republican Party, two dollars went to the Democratic Party.