Trump 2.0 and the Allegiance of Tech Leaders

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Katie Drummond, thanks so much for joining us. You have a new copy of WIRED on newsstands, so to speak, and it’s called “All Hail the Technocracy.” You in a, in a article to sort of introduce this series, you said, “One of the most visible changes of 2025, and among the most consequential, is the tech industry’s embrace of President Trump. The industry’s elite have fallen in line, demonstrating their allegiance with increasingly grotesque displays of submission. So what the hell happened to Silicon Valley?” What are you trying to tell readers in this issue?

KATIE DRUMMOND: Well, we at WIRED, you know, have a long history, a 32 year history of, of covering the tech industry and technology more broadly and often of, of championing it, and championing innovation in all forms. And so I think for us, for our publication to come out and, and make this kind of statement should really tell our readers and, and anyone paying any attention, that we see a very serious and very troubling turn in Silicon Valley and in the tech industry. I think you only need to look, you know, at, at images or videos of, you know, tech technology CEOs at dinner with the president sort of going around one, one by one offering him compliments, flattering him. You only need to look at, you know, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, in the Oval Office presenting President Trump with a custom made statue with, you know, a gold base made in Utah.

You know, these are the kinds of, of demonstrations and displays of, of fealty that we have not seen in this country, certainly in my time working as a journalist. But I think looking back to the first Trump administration in 2016, we saw tech executives very often coming out publicly denouncing the president and his statements against immigrants and so on and so forth, and really sort of coming out swinging in many cases. And what’s really notable and what’s really important for readers to recognize today is that we are seeing the industry do almost a 180 from that approach where they are not only sort of working behind the scenes to collaborate with the administration and sort of to find gains for their own corporate interests, but they are doing it overtly, in public. This is sort of not even happening behind the scenes. This is happening in, in plain sight. And it is a very troubling phenomenon.

SREENIVASAN:  The central article is authored by Steven Levy, who’s someone that has covered Silicon Valley for quite literally decades. And one of the things that leapt out at me, “But here’s something that took me by surprise.” This is Steven talking, “how quickly and decisively the visionaries I chronicled align themselves with Trump, a man whose values violently clashed with the egalitarian impulses of the digital revolution.” You know, when you think of the, the first time that I had read Steven Levy’s works decades ago, and he chronicled kind of the beginning of modern day Silicon Valley – the type of entrepreneurs that he profiled then were really almost the counterculture, hippies. I mean, they, they had a rebellious streak in them. And I mean, I’m thinking of the Apple ad, the 1984 ad, “let’s take on big brother.” And here we are now coming to a totally different arc where frankly the biggest Silicon Valley executives, are big brother.

DRUMMOND: That’s exactly right. And you know, Steven was in every possible way, the perfect person to write that piece. He started chronicling the tech industry in the 1980s. He has written several books about several of these companies. He has met people like Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Jobs at, at the earliest moments of their careers and, and then watched them and followed them in the decades that passed. And so for him to make that observation, I think is particularly poignant and I think particularly resonant. But you’re exactly right, the people that he was chronicling in the nineties, in the early two thousands, they were rebels and they did see technology and later, you know, social media and sort of the advent of, of social platforms as a force for good, as a democratizing force, as a force that would bring us all closer together, that would create, you know, a more egalitarian society. That was this sort of rebel Silicon Valley movement fighting the status quo.

The reality is, those same individuals running these companies have become so wealthy and these companies have become so well funded and, and so powerful that they are now very much the status quo. They are the man. They are, if anything, you know, as powerful as, you know, the United States government, certainly as, as governments around the world – that is how much clout they have. And we are now seeing what they’re doing with it. And instead of sort of keeping that rebel spirit alive and well, they are at all costs protecting their business interests and their desire to essentially consolidate power. And that’s exactly why they’re working so closely and so hand in hand with the administration. 

SREENIVASAN: You know, there’s a quote in there that he has from a very prominent technologist and now investor named Marc Andreessen who, who people don’t know, he built this thing called the Netscape browser, which was, now it’s ancient history, but it really was integral into how we perceived the internet and the web at that time. Right. And he has become an incredibly powerful person, and he talks about this kind of, this, this deal that seemed to be, you know, underlying what was the Silicon Valley ethos of how they could work with government. What went wrong with that deal, especially through the Biden administration?

DRUMMOND: Well, you know, as far as Mark Andreessen seems to be concerned, you know, the deal was essentially the technology industry is able to operate. They’re able to, to innovate, to do business, you know, effectively and with sort of maybe minimal intervention or at least with, you know, sort of federal support and buy-in. And in exchange they would champion sort of social values of the left, ostensibly. Right. That is the deal as he saw it. And as he and other executives in the valley see it, you know, the Biden administration took a very heavy, very damaging hand vis-a-vis the technology industry, whether it was trying to break up monopolies, whether it was trying to sort of police the conduct of social media companies or sort of, you know, behavior on the internet to hold platforms accountable. They felt that the Biden administration made it very difficult for their businesses to grow and to flourish and to innovate.

And they really took exception to that. I mean, in many instances they found it personally offensive, personally hurtful. This was not just about business being tough, this was about them feeling like their feelings had been hurt. And like some, again, unspoken deal had been violated on the part of the Biden administration. And that is what in many cases seems to have pushed many of these executives to openly embrace the Trump administration because they saw an opportunity to work with an administration and with regulators who would take a more lax approach. And so they have certainly taken every opportunity to ensure that the Trump administration is aligned with their agenda, whether it’s, you know, how social media companies should or should not be policed, how artificial intelligence should or should not be regulated. They see an opportunity in Trump to get what they want. And so they are happy to throw that deal out the window – because they think that the Biden administration already did – they’re happy to throw that deal out the window and just go all in. 

SREENIVASAN: You know, how successful, or I guess for them, how successful has it been? Or just to, you know, from the perspective of WIRED that’s chronicled so many of these things, how different is that regulatory environment now versus say, a year ago?

DRUMMOND: Well, I think in many respects it has been incredibly successful. I mean, I think two key examples, and again, we’re only sort of eight months into this. We’ve, we’ve got more than three years to go to see how this plays out. But I think two really good examples are cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. So obviously the Trump administration has embraced crypto. They have opened the door for crypto companies to grow relatively unfettered and to become much more mainstream and much more sort of established than they were even a year ago when they still sort of skirted very much beneath the radar, below the radar. The Trump administration has made it much easier for crypto companies to operate in this country. 

And then with artificial intelligence, I think what is so interesting to me and so interesting to us at WIRED is in 2023 and 2024, when generative AI was, was really sort of reaching mainstream prominence, it sort of blew up in the mainstream consciousness. You know, you had technology executives like Sam Altman, very publicly on the record, say, we want regulation. This industry needs to be regulated. Bring it on. We want to work with the government to make this happen. Fast forward to the Trump administration unveiling their AI action plan over the summer, which essentially says, go for it guys. We’re going to take a very light hand in regulating you because we need to beat China. So let’s go. And instead of those tech executives saying, hold on a second, what, what happened to all the regulation that we were asking for? They said, we are thrilled to work in such a pro innovation environment. We are thrilled to partner with the Trump administration on building out this industry in the United States of America. So really sort of that, that drastic about face in AI regulation is probably one of the most consequential examples and one of the most visible so far.

SREENIVASAN: You know, one of the quotes that Steven Levy lays out is really just about the consolidation of power too. And he says, “An extraordinarily tiny number of billionaires who control the information ecosystem have made allyship with the most consequential and fearsome political power in the world. There’s never been a time in history when those things have been combined.” I mean, when you, you had a separate piece in the in the magazine about Elon Musk and his control of really an an entire sector, which is space and how much power he has over, say for example, the, the satellites that are floating around right now over war zones establishing reliable communications for frankly both sides of the war in Ukraine and Russia.

DRUMMOND: Absolutely. I mean, Elon Musk is a terrific example of this, and I think there’s no question that, that Elon Musk is, is working very diligently to repair his relationship with the president and with the administration precisely because he has very lucrative government contracts that he needs to maintain in order to essentially build, you know, a space empire that, that now sort of far outstrips NASA and NASA’s abilities to do what Elon Musk is doing at their behest and and with their funding. So I think that’s one great example. 

I think another example that feels really relevant in this very moment is actually what’s happening with Larry Ellison, right? So this is a tech billionaire who skirted beneath the surface for a very long time. He was not someone that we at WIRED paid that much attention to until maybe six months ago when we saw him standing with Sam Altman and President Trump to announce this massive infrastructure investment in AI technology, Stargate. What we are now seeing with Larry Ellison and the Ellison family is potentially a, a really unprecedented consolidation of control over media, over culture, over our data, right? When you look at Paramount and CBS, you look at the possibility of Warner Brothers Discovery, which encompasses CNN. And then of course, now we’re talking about this TikTok deal, which would put the data of 170 million American users in the hands of Larry Ellison and the Ellison family, and Oracle, the company that he controls. So that is a, a startling amount of consolidation of sort of what we consume, how we consume it, the news and information that we obtain and the filters through which we obtain it, right? This TikTok algorithm that we know now will be retrained. We don’t know how it will be retrained, but we know the people in charge of that retraining are very closely aligned with the president.

SREENIVASAN: You know, are there longer term costs for the lack of regulatory environment right now on AI? And I’m thinking back to how during the Obama administration, the social networks were essentially allowed a free hand. 

DRUMMOND: The fact that we are not looking at social media as a cautionary tale that cannot be repeated is, is deeply, deeply unfortunate. And to your point, incredibly consequential. You know, I think one of the most salient examples here is exactly that, it’s, it’s children, right? Social media has had an extremely detrimental effect on a generation of children and teenagers. And we are now seeing that exact same phenomenon play out with artificial intelligence and how it is impacting children’s ability to learn, to socialize, to engage in romantic relationships, to safeguard their mental health. And there is conversation about that. There is media coverage, there are alarm bells being sounded, but will there be regulation in time to protect this next generation of children? I think the potential damage that we are doing on an environmental level with the data centers, with the infrastructure that’s being built with sort of the massive, massive amounts of energy that are, are required to fuel this, this artificial intelligence boom. I mean, the fact that that is happening with little to no oversight or regulation or desire to sort of put standards in place for how these companies ought to operate, what does efficiency look like in the context of AI? What does it need to look like? The fact that that is not a conversation that is happening on a daily basis right now should be incredibly concerning, especially when you’re talking about an administration that already doesn’t seem particularly inclined to accept climate change as a fact, which it is.

SREENIVASAN: You know, just recently we had news that affected the tech industry, which was the H1B Visa program, having an additional $100,000 fee put onto it for all the highly skilled workers. And I wonder what’s the ripple effect going to be on tech? And, and, and I, and I see that kind of breaking in my own head differently for Amazon, which is the largest employer of H1Bs that might have the money to pay the a hundred thousand dollars versus a smaller company that might be using some of this highly skilled labor and just can’t afford to tack on an extra a hundred thousand dollars on whatever the salary would be.

DRUMMOND: Yeah. And, and look, it, it, it seems like that’s exactly the point. I think first of all, it’s important to know that not only is Amazon the, the top most sponsor of H1B visas, but right after Amazon come, essentially every other big tech company in this country. I mean, H1B visas are vital to this industry, and they have been for a very long time. Now, yes, Could these companies pay that fee? Absolutely. Will, They have to, that’s less clear. What we know about this president and what we have seen from him many, many times is that he’s happy to do a deal if he gets something out of it. So it’ll be interesting to see sort of what kinds of deals are brokered that perhaps create exemptions for certain companies. 

Now, it’s also quite easy to extrapolate from all of this or sort of hypothesize that the companies that will not get those kinds of exemptions, the companies that regardless of what Trump decides to do will be vulnerable to those fees, are the startups, they’re the disruptors. They are, you know, in some ways we hope, right, the new rebels, the new renegades of the industry who are building something new, something fresh, something exciting. All of that has the potential to be stomped out. And what we will then see is greater and greater consolidation of power, of clout of might among this big tech cohort who are aligning themselves with the president. So the prospect of sort of stifling innovation and stifling these smaller companies is exactly the risk that we’re looking at and that benefits big tech. And of course the administration seems ambivalent about that.

SREENIVASAN: Is this a ideological shift in Silicon Valley or is it transactional? And I mean, if it’s transactional because some of the tech leaders have kind of said things and done things and you’re just like, well, if there’s somebody, a new sheriff in town so to speak in four years, are you gonna walk some of this back? 

DRUMMOND: You know, when I think about sort of this, this cadre of tech executive and whether we are looking at something ideological or we, we are looking at something purely transactional, I really do think it depends on the executive, right? So they are not sort of a monolith. Ultimately though, when I take them all in aggregate, what we are looking at is strategic behavior. I mean, this is, this is all about business transaction and opportunity and opportunism. But I think that that in and of itself represents its own ideology, right? I mean, it is the ideology of sort of pure, unfettered, capitalistic gain that is ultimately, I think now sadly maybe the ideal, the ideology of Silicon Valley. It is profit at all costs, even if that means presenting President Trump with a custom made statue in the Oval Office. That’s part of the deal. And that is ultimately what Silicon Valley is now. 

SREENIVASAN: This special issue of WIRED is called “All Hail the Technocracy.” Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond, thanks so much for joining us.

DRUMMOND: Thank you for having me.