I co-founded Facebook in college 20 years ago, but I left California and start-up culture behind long ago for public policy and economics.
As we sat over scrambled eggs, chicken sausage and whole-wheat toast, I was struck by how many of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in Silicon Valley — including some I knew — were now loudly backing Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump claims that Mark Zuckerberg called him to say that he wouldn’t support a Democrat in November, although Mr. Zuckerberg’s spokesperson denied the claim.
It would be easy to write off tech’s rightward drift as nothing more than the rich acting in their economic self-interest, but Silicon Valley has always been driven by profit, and it hasn’t tilted Republican since the 1980s.
Even now, it remains largely Democratic, even though even some of Kamala Harris’s strongest Valley supporters worry about how she might approach tech policy.
Persons:
Donald Trump, Trump, —, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg’s, Kamala Harris’s
Organizations:
Facebook
Locations:
Flatiron, Manhattan, California, Silicon Valley