The Brooklyn Rail

If Trump were to win back the presidency, how much would he owe his victory to the Techno-MAGA billionaires who are now supporting him and bankrolling his campaign? And how much power would these private sector supporters then have over this President?

In an extensively reported article in the New York Times Magazine,¹ these Techno-MAGA supporters decry democracy as a destructive form of government, and prefer a form of corporate monarchy, run by a CEO/dictator.

Elon Musk is by far the most visible of these Techno-MAGA supporters of Trump. The richest man in the world, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, owner of one of the most influential social media networks in the world, government defense contractor and controller of critical parts of the global satellite communications infrastructure, Musk has mostly avoided direct partisan political involvement until recently, but now he has gone all-in for Trump and Vance. He declared his full support for Trump after he saw him survive the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. Musk was apparently the single individual in the world most affected by the photograph of the bloodied Trump on stage, raising his fist in defiance. As Musk put it later in a post on X, “The martyr lived.”

When Trump appeared at a commemoration rally for the assassination attempt in Butler on October 5, Musk joined Trump onstage and begged Americans to vote for him, “to save civilization.” He also said, “We had one President who couldn’t climb a flight of stairs, and another who was fist-pumping after getting shot! Fight! Fight! Fight! Blood coming down the face!”

Since then, Musk has become a prominent Trump surrogate and media influencer, and a major source of pro-Trump disinformation on X and elsewhere. He’s basically made X a house organ for MAGA, illustrated with a lot of deepfakes made by Musk’s AI image generator, Grok. X is the source for many conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris. In addition to boosting Trump, Musk has used X to suppress bad press and negative information on Trump. Musk is a “free speech absolutist” only in the sense that his speech (and Trump’s) is absolutely sacrosanct, while others not so much, and anybody whose speech runs counter to Trump and Musk is summarily censored. Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital media director in 2016, famously said “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing.” Musk is doing everything he can to make sure X fulfills that role in 2024. This kind of direct influence by billionaires on American elections was made possible by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United in 2010.

Musk has donated $75 million to the Trump campaign in the last three months through his America PAC, and Trump has apparently turned over the operation of much of his ground game in the battleground states to Musk, who has moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania and speaks to Trump almost daily. Having once called Trump a “stone-cold loser,” Musk has now set out to make him a winner in this election, which Musk views as existential. “Unless Trump wins and we get rid of the mountain of smothering regulations, humanity will never reach Mars,” Musk announced in an October post on X that got 18 million views.² He also subscribes to the Trump conspiracy theory that Democrats are intent on letting in a flood of illegal immigrants to vote Democrats into office in perpetuity.

Musk has organized 5500 canvassers to turn out a million new Trump voters across the battleground states, which could be enough to win the election.

The New York Times Magazine article makes it clear that this right-wing movement among tech entrepreneurs has been growing for some time. Peter Thiel worked for Trump in 2016, donating $1.25 million to his campaign, speaking on behalf of Trump at the Republican National Convention, and working alongside Steve Bannon in the transition. But when Trump was convinced to choose JD Vance as his running mate, that brought the Thiel influence into the center of the current campaign. Vance is a Thiel protégé and the ultimate Techno-fascist fan boy. Vance went to a talk by Thiel when Vance was a student at Yale Law School and later wrote, “He saw these two trends—elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society—as connected.” Thiel got Vance his first and only job, in Silicon Valley, and then gave Vance $15 million for his Senate campaign in Ohio in 2022.

Another Thiel protégé is David O. Sacks. Sacks and Thiel wrote a book together attacking multiculturalism in 1995 called The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus. Then they formed a company called PayPal, which they sold to eBay in 2004 for $1.5 billion, making them and their partner Elon Musk very rich.

JD Vance’s views on a post-democracy future have also been significantly shaped by Curtis Yarvin, who rose to prominence in alt-right circles in the 2010s while blogging under the name “Mencius Moldbug.” Yarvin thinks democracy should be replaced by a monarchy, headed by a leader that is more like a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.” Yarvin has said, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”

Tech leaders in Silicon Valley believe that they are visionary geniuses remaking the world, and that they should be making the decisions for the rest of the country, not the politicians, and certainly not “the people.” Because Trump is for sale and can be controlled, they support Trump. They are against Biden and Harris/Walz because they are not for sale, and have and will enforce antitrust laws and regulate the cryptocurrency sector. Biden’s “billionaire’s tax,” requiring billionaires to pay taxes on unrealized capital gains, was the last straw for these Tech billionaires.

On the other hand, Trump has promised to make America “the crypto capital of the planet,” remove all barriers to the development of AI, give more military contracts to the private defense-tech sector, and cut taxes for billionaires. He’s also offered to have Musk join his administration to lead a “government efficiency commission.” This is especially attractive to Musk because his companies are currently under at least 20 federal investigations by various government agencies. These investigations would disappear if Trump is re-elected.

I first wrote about this “unholy alliance between Trump and Silicon Valley” in July 2016, when I saw Peter Thiel address the Republican National Convention (“I build things. So does Donald Trump. And we need to rebuild America.”)³ The alliance of Trump and Musk is a catastrophe for democracy and the rule of law. If it prevails next month, I am convinced we will move much more rapidly into a post-democratic, Techno-fascist twilight.