The Daily - Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Big Tech’s biggest names are throwing their weight behind Donald J. Trump in the biggest possible way, first as candidate and now as president-elect.Erin Griffith, who covers tech companies and Silicon Valley for The Times, charts the tech billionaire Marc Andreessen’s journey from top-tier democratic donor to Trump adviser, and explains what it reveals about the growing MAGA-fication of Silicon Valley.Guests: Erin Griffith, who covers tech companies and Silicon Valley for The New York Times.Background reading: Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s sprint to remake Meta for the Trump era.The executives of tech’s biggest companies largely ignored Mr. Trump before the 2016 election. This time around, they were far more friendly.Wealthy donors to the president-elect’s campaign anticipate a more business-friendly atmosphere, including the firing of Biden-era regulators.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Big tech's biggest names are throwing their weight behind Donald Trump in the biggest possible way, first as candidate and now as president-elect. Today, what one tech billionaire's journey, from top-tier Democratic donor to Trump advisor, reveals about the growing maugification of Silicon Valley. It's Monday, January 13th. Aaron, welcome back. Thanks for having me.

You have been covering startups and Silicon Valley for a long time. And you know as well as anyone that by reputation, Silicon Valley is seen as a liberal bastion, a place where progressive thinking is nursed and promoted. But over the past year, especially during the presidential campaign, it really did feel like Silicon Valley's conservative self began to emerge. Absolutely. And it's true that Silicon Valley has historically been very liberal and there were plenty of very well-known investors and founders who backed President Biden's campaign and then Vice President Harris. But the thing that was different this time around was that some of the most

prominent and influential people in the tech industry came out in support of Donald Trump. And this includes big name venture capitalists like David Sacks. This includes Elon Musk. And this includes a lot of other people that are very famous in the tech industry, but maybe not household names across the country. And that has a little bit of a trickle down effect where in the past, it may have been taboo or absolutely impossible to say that you supported Trump or even that you're a

Republican. Now, it's kind of a lot more common. You encounter it a lot more frequently, and that's a huge change. And so once Trump won the election, we've seen the industry go even further than merely expressing support for him. They're making changes to their policies and their personnel. Over the past week, Metta, which is Facebook's parent company, said it is pulling back on fact checking and policing disinformation on its platforms. The company is also changing its

board of directors. They added Dana White, who is the CEO of the USC and a big ally of Trump's, to its board. So these are all- We did a whole episode about him. Yeah. So these are all moves that align with the incoming president and his base of support. And Mark Zuckerberg even came out and said directly that he was doing this in response to what he saw as a cultural tipping point that the election represented. Right. Roughly translated, he's saying we are doing this because of Trump's victory. More or less.

And the question that that raises right away is, is this opportunism? Is this Big Tech and Silicon Valley doing what a lot of profitable industries do when there's a new president, which is seek friendly relationships with the new boss? Or is this something deeper? Is this the case of Big Tech's true political identity emerging from behind what may have been a cloak of liberalism? It's kind of both in a way. It's partly a result of Big Tech becoming such a big and powerful industry. They're maturing. They're growing up. They are just like any other industry

that needs to get in good with regulators and push back against regulation that they think will hinder their growth. But at the same time, I think it's also kind of a cultural sea change for the tech industry. And it's being pushed forward by some of these really loud and influential voices that have just been kind of fed up with the direction that our broader culture, but also specifically tech culture, has been moving for the last 15 years. And the tech leader who maybe embodies this transformation the most is a venture capital investor named Mark Andreessen.

Well, tell us about Mark Andreessen and his shift. Yeah. So he's really a titan of Silicon Valley. He is the founder of a venture capital firm called Andreessen Horowitz that manages $44 billion. He has invested in some of the most prominent and successful startups to come out of Silicon Valley, Pinterest, Slack, Airbnb, Coinbase. He's on the board of Facebook.

But more than that, he's kind of just like a VC thought leader who states his opinions very passionately and the industry really follows and is influenced by what he says. He's also called himself a quote unquote normie Democrat for most of his life. He supported all the way going back to Bill Clinton. He supported Gore, Kerry, Obama, Hillary Clinton. And so it was, you know, a little bit of a surprise when in 2024, he came out in support of Trump pretty loudly, donated money to the campaign. And now that Trump's about to take office, he's been kind of a key

advisor in the transition. He's been spending a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago. He's been recommending people from the tech industry to work for the new administration. So how does Andreessen go from reliable, normie Democrat to supporter and now advisor to Donald Trump? For Andreessen, it starts with this concept that he calls the deal.

Mark Andreessen, welcome to Honestly. It's great to be here. I'm really happy to have you. And he's talked about this on a number of podcasts, including Barry Weiss's and Joe Rogan's. And what's the deal? The deal was somebody like me basically could start a company.

You can invent a new technology, in this case, web browsers and all the other things that Netscape did. Everybody would think that that was great. The deal is that you could be a successful business person and you get celebrated for your innovations or your business success, you get celebrated for making lots of money and then at the end you give it all away and you are further celebrated for making lots of money. And then at the end, you give it all away and you are further celebrated for that. That washes away all of your sins.

The idea sort of is you will thank us. You get invited to all the great parties. You get invited to Davos. You get invited to Aspen. You get to come in and sit with the New York Times editorial board. And you will mostly leave us alone and let us innovate. And that's the arc and it's all great and wonderful. This is kind of the philosophy that his whole career

has operated by. He found success at a really young age. He was the co-founder of this iconic early internet company called Netscape. He made a lot of money and went on to be a very successful venture capital investor. After that, he was thinking like, this is great. I'm doing great things for the world and the

world is going to thank me for it. His political views kind of reflected that as well. He was a big fan of Obama. He even wrote an op-ed about his choice to support him. And part of it was that he personally liked Obama. He called him smart, normal, curious, not radical, post-boomer. He was a fan. But, you know, in his view, the deal kind of started to break down toward

the end of the Obama years. There's no doubt the sharing economy is disrupting traditional businesses. A little context that's kind of helpful for understanding this, you know, in the middle of the 2010s, tech as an industry was going from this kind of quirky niche thing that was happening to an extremely powerful and bigger than ever part of our lives and our economy. Well it's just hard to compete with the ease of online shopping. I don't even

have to leave my cubicle to find great deals all over the internet. It is a much different experience than actually going to a store. Amazon is disrupting retail. Let's look at Airbnb for one. Startups are disrupting taxis and hotels. Taxi drivers angry and frustrated that Uber and Lyft drivers are taking their business while escaping the expensive regulations taxis face. There are these major changes happening and the tech industry is kind

of ascendant but when that happens you know it brings a lot of criticism too. More and more these large companies and their power is a threat to democracy. And the tech industry was not used to being criticized about privacy, about labor practices. They really didn't like it. And so one moment that really encapsulates that for him is something that happened in 2015 with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, when they announced that they were going to donate most of their net worth to charity. And so they did this thing where they announced and committed

that 99% of their ownership in Facebook was going to go to philanthropic causes. This is, you know, following the classic deal trajectory, right? And they just got hammered with criticism and attacks on that. But instead of getting the praise and adoration that they expected, they actually got a lot of criticism for the structure that they chose to give the money away and the way that they were doing it. People were kind of picking it apart.

And the line of argument was literally, oh, they're just slimy rich people and they're only doing it for the tax break, which is like a basic mathematical problem, which is you don't give away 99% of your money for a tax break. To Andreessen and his telling, this really kind of encapsulated for him the beginning of his shift in perspective on basically everything. Basically what I experienced was they, the people in charge of all this, basically broke the deal.

So basically, every single thing I just said for the last decade has been now held to be presumptively evil. Tech people are held to be this evil class. Anybody who's rich is evil. Philanthropy was being redefined as evil. It's like, okay, every single part of that deal no longer works. And so for me, it then raised the question of like, okay, if none of that is true, then what world am I living in?

What role do I play? So in his mind, the deal had been honored for much of the history of Silicon Valley and much of his own very successful career until suddenly people start to, as you said, pick apart, question, challenge everything about the people who are at the center of the deal, these entrepreneurs, these founders, people like Mark Zuckerberg, and suddenly they can only do wrong. Exactly. He has kind of described this as a little bit of a journey of him asking himself, like, what's happening here? And that was really compounded by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. He talked about how it really took him by surprise and he realized he didn't

understand what was happening in the country and he needed to go on his own kind of political awakening and figure out what was driving this. was happening in the country and he needed to go on his own kind of political awakening and figure out what was driving this. And what does that awakening look like and what does he find? Well you know after the 2016 election the tech companies came under a lot of scrutiny from both sides and so kind of while he's doing this inquiry he's trying to kind of learn about what's actually going on in America. We have these allegations made by US intelligence

that Russia had basically hijacked platforms like Facebook and used them to meddle in the US election. So Andreessen has a front row seat to this. He's on Facebook's board. I went to Hillary's first post-election loss speech, which she gave at Stanford. And the Russiagate stuff is in full, full-blown display. And Hillary gets up there and she says, Trump is only president today because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook and made him the president.

And I'm sitting in the audience and I'm like on the Facebook board and I'm like, that's not true. I know for an absolute fact that that's not true. And he felt like it didn't add up and that people were just scapegoating the tech companies. Right. And so that got me thinking. And then the Russiagate stuff unspooled. And I was like, it was just this litany of, you know, basically excuses and complaints, right?

With no sense of like personal responsibility at all. Ultimately, you know, US intelligence agencies concluded that Russia did interfere by using social media platforms. And Facebook set up an oversight board to start monitoring this stuff. And they're trying to run a business. They're trying to get to the next quarter. They're trying to get the employee base and everybody copacetic. They're trying not to get just completely destroyed by the politicians.

Andreessen is still a little bit concerned about the direction that things are going. He views it as a slippery slope that, you know, tracking things like hate speech, moderating things is a road to censorship. And so he kind of concludes that the oversight is going a little bit too far. And then Joe Biden gets elected, which in his mind accelerates all the problems that he saw already unfolding in the tech industry. How so? Well, especially during the pandemic, the Biden administration put a lot of pressure

on Facebook to suppress things like the lab leak theory of how COVID started. At one point, Biden accused the social media platforms of killing people by allowing disinformation on the vaccines to flourish. Right. of killing people by allowing disinformation on the vaccines to flourish. Right, and I remember Facebook in particular took that very personally, and they were upset about it. Yeah, and just to add a little bit of context, Democrats have historically had a very tight relationship with the tech industry, and Joe Biden did not.

And, you know, among the first things that Biden does is he appoints two people that the tech industry really does not like to key regulatory roles. That's Lena Kahn as the head of FTC, Gary Gensler at the SEC, and, you know, they're going after big tech for antitrust. That hurts mergers and acquisitions and the ability of some of Andreessen's portfolio companies to get bought. Gary Gensler is going after the crypto industry and that hurts a lot of the companies that Andreessen Horowitz has invested in. They're one of the

biggest crypto investors. And so the Biden administration really takes this kind of antagonistic view toward tech and a lot of people in the tech industry bristled at that. So at first he's watching with some alarm as tech companies, primarily from the left, are being pushed toward a form of what he regards as censorship. And then he's watching as a new administration comes in that, based on its appointments, seems outright hostile to big techs business interests. Absolutely.

And this all sort of culminates in this meeting that happened last May. Andreessen and a lot of other tech people met with Biden's people to talk about AI. And he basically comes away with the view that the Democrats are not just trying to control speech, but they're trying to control Silicon Valley. They're trying to control technology. We had meetings in D.C. in May where we talked to them about this and the meetings were absolutely horrifying. And we came out. According to Andreessen, Biden's people basically came in and took a very antagonistic view of AI and how to regulate it. They said look, AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely

control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. They essentially said AI is going to be controlled by the government, don't fund AI startups. This is his characterization. Other people who were there, including Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, disputes that characterization, says maybe it's a little exaggerated.

And then I said, I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much because like the math for AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere. The overall takeaway from Andreessen was that this is going to be a hostile fight between government regulators who want to clamp down on the technology that he and the companies that he invests in want to build. And you have this like incredibly radicalized, you know, set of policies with this young staff that just is like out for blood on all these different fronts. And so this is when he basically concludes that Biden is anti-tech.

He views the administration and by extension Democrats as radical on tech innovation and tech progress, which is kind of his life's work. So all of this together really primes him to be courted by the other side. When you leave a meeting like that, what do you do? You go endorse Donald Trump. We'll be right back. Aaron, talk about this courtship from the other side, because so far what you're describing from Mark Andreessen is really a deepening frustration with the left, with the Biden

administration, rather than any kind of deep kinship with Donald Trump. Yeah. And on July 5th, he posted this manifesto, which is something that he does from time to time. He's got some really famous ones, including Software is Eating the World and It's Time to Build. He posts one that is called The Little Tech Agenda. He basically concludes that, you know, big tech companies have lobbyists that are kind of looking out for them, but no one's sticking up for what he calls little tech. And that includes all the startups and the venture firms that he's working with.

And he basically says, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm is going to support any candidate that supports the little tech agenda. And so that's kind of like opening the door for like, Hey, you know, any presidential candidate, any congressional candidate that, hey, you know, any presidential candidate, any congressional candidate that wants to, you know, kind of win our vote and our support, like, tell us what you got. And they tried to meet with both Biden and Trump. They never ended up meeting with Biden, but Trump invited them to dinner.

So we met with him at his bedminister golf Club in New Jersey, which is like breathtaking, absolutely beautiful. Mark Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz end up at Trump's golf club in New Jersey Bedminster. Yeah, I mean, he's just he's an incredible host. You know, he runs his own private worlds. And they're super impressed by Trump. He said, what do you guys want to eat?

And I just I for some reason I was just like, I know exactly what to eat? And I just, for some reason, I was just like, I know exactly what to say. And I'm like, meat. I want meat. And it was glorious. Andresen talks about how Trump only ordered meat and how he wined and dined them. It's also one of the really interesting,

we'll kind of watch him at work, which is he treats everybody the same and he talks to everybody. He will happily talk to distinguished visitors about like, you know, who the vice president should be, and then he'll ask the caddy. They talk about how Trump talks to everyone, you know, he's really kind of in the mix. His thing with us basically was like, look, I just want America to win.

He's telling them kind of exactly what they want to hear. You know, you guys are in tech, I don't know much about tech, but I don't need to because you guys know a lot about it. You guys should go build tech companies. The American tech companies should win. He wants America to win and he wants tech to win. We should beat China. We should export. We should make the products the world wants. Our economy should be growing a lot faster. We should be creating a lot more jobs.

You know, everybody in America who wants a good job should have one and that will be the result of, you know, American companies succeeding. He wants to do what he can to help tech companies thrive. And he wants government to get out of the way. And he wants American innovation to be exported all around the world. And so, you know, and most of the discussion was just around that. And so they were really taken with Trump and his message to them. Right. It sounds like what he's telling Andreessen, and it sounds like Andreessen wants to hear it, is that Trump is prepared to restore. Right. It sounds like what he's telling Andreessen, and it sounds like Andreessen wants to hear it is that Trump is prepared to restore the deal, as Andreessen would call it.

You do your thing, I'm here to cheer you on and celebrate and help. Exactly. So what ends up happening after this dinner at Bedminster? Shortly after that, Andreessen and Horowitz post a podcast announcing that they are endorsing Trump for president. They went into a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about, you know, the pressure to moderate content online, the regulation, the fact that Trump is eager to see the tech industry innovate and build and do all the things they want to do. And there was one other reason.

I think it's hard for any man to see somebody get shot in the head, bleeding, not knowing how badly he's been injured. They really talked about how impressed they were by the fact that he, you know, raised his fist after the assassination attempt. And put your fist up in the air and say, fight, fight, fight. Like how cool they thought that was. We don't see physical bravery like that. All of these things combined result in their endorsement.

And that's really the start of when a lot of people who were maybe privately supporting Trump in Silicon Valley really started to come out of the woodwork and say so publicly. So Andreessen creates something of a permission structure for others in the valley to say, I too support Trump. Absolutely. Andreessen and Elon Musk and a few other leaders combined. I mean, Elon's endorsement was obviously really influential, but within the tech industry, specifically venture capital and startups, you know, Mark Andreessen, his opinion really carries a lot of weight.

And I think that did open the door for a lot of people to come out as Trump supporters as well. Mm hmm. In thinking about the story that you have told here and the journey that Mark Andreessen has gone on, it's pretty clear that there are two major elements here. One is that in his mind, the Democratic Party failed him and failed tech, both culturally and financially. And the second component is that Trump, in his mind, meets the tech industry where it

is, both culturally and financially. And in that sense, it's just not all that complicated. But what stands out, to me at least, is that this ends up being the story of a Democratic party seeming to forfeit what had been a very long and seemingly fruitful relationship with these innovators and leaders of tech. And when we think about the result of the 2024 election, I think quite naturally, we think about the fact that the vote went to Trump and that once again he made all these gains in various constituencies. I hadn't

really thought of it as an election in which he had also made gains in the constituency of Silicon Valley. But that is clearly one of the places that he made very unexpected inroads. Yeah, I think you're right. And there is a little bit of, I think, maybe soul searching in Silicon Valley now thinking about like which party some people belong to. I mean, the frustration with the Biden administration wasn't just limited to people who were Trump curious or who have supported Trump. I mean, a lot of people were frustrated with the antitrust policies or with some

of the crypto stuff that was happening. So yeah, there is a little bit of an opportunity, I think, for a reset in Silicon Valley and we're seeing that happen just as some of the loudest and most influential voices in tech who support Trump are really on this victory lap. Well, now that we understand the depth of Silicon Valley support for Trump and now that Trump is about to take office, how much sway do we think people like Marc Andreessen, because they were out early and publicly for Trump, will have over him as president?

Because so far, it feels like it's the tech industry in some of its policy announcements and its donations to Trump's inauguration that have been making the concessions to Trump rather than Trump necessarily making any concessions to Silicon Valley. I Mean the tech industry right now is jockeying for a lot of influence in the future Trump administration with Andreessen specifically, two Andreessen Horowitz partners have already been appointed to join the administration and lots of tech workers are trying to get involved in DOGE,

which is the Department of Government Efficiency. Its goal is to reduce government spending. You see a new post on social media every day of some prominent tech person heading over to Mar-a-Lago to meet and try and get on one of these advisory boards or involved in the transition team. There is a lot of crossover. It kind of reminds me of the Obama administration a little bit when you had all these people from Apple, Airbnb, Facebook, kind of a rotating door in and out of that administration.

That's now happening in the Trump transition. Fascinating. Yeah, it's been fascinating to see. It's different people, obviously, from different sides of the aisle. But yeah, there's a lot of enthusiasm among certain groups in the tech industry to seize this opportunity and potentially get to influence what they see as a whole new regulatory regime. get to influence what they see as a whole new regulatory regime. You know, it strikes me, Aaron, that Andresen's animating premise here, and really the heart of his political evolution, is his belief that this deal he articulated makes sense,

still makes sense. But the reality, I think, for many is that the deal he wants to bring back, the one he felt Biden walked away from, the one he thinks Trump will honor, was from a different era, right? When tech was small, it was the underdog. You could argue it needed a long leash to grow and thrive. But that's not the story of tech now. It is huge and hugely powerful. It affects all of us.

In many cases, for good, and many for bad. Take kids' social media or the anti-competitive behavior of tech giants that's laid out in federal antitrust lawsuits. Or take the risks of artificial intelligence or crypto. We watch the biggest crypto exchange explode and billions of dollars just disappear. And therefore, many would argue, tech does require some kind of meaningful government oversight. And so what he's asking for seems to be a world where the government's approach to tech, the deal, no longer really matches what tech is today.

And yet what he seems to want from Trump, and people like Andreessen seem to want from this administration, is a world where the terms of this deal don't change, even though the industry quite obviously has. Yeah, exactly. The tech industry has amassed so much power and influence over the last 10, 20 years, and they love that power, but there's a lot of accountability, responsibility that comes along with that. And there's been some trust lost along the way.

So none of this regulatory stuff, none of this criticism has come out of nowhere. There are plenty of people that believe that big tech power stifling innovation, that's why we need antitrust enforcement. There's strong case to be made that a lot of these emerging technologies like AI and crypto can cause real harms and that's why they need to be regulated. But right now, that is not the vibe that is coursing around Silicon Valley. The vibe is that this is a time to put our foot on the gas. One thing that Andreessen said that really struck me, he had a quote that

it felt like a boot off the throat for the tech industry the day that Trump was elected. Wow, that's vivid. Yeah. And so that sentiment, while a little dramatic, is kind of shared amongst the Trump supporting techies, you know, just to be clear, like nothing has happened yet. And Trump is unpredictable. So who knows how this is actually going to shake out. But that's the sentiment in this world that for years they supported

Democrats and what they got in return was criticism and attacks. That's the view. They were vilified. And regulated. Yes, exactly. And now they feel like they're going to get what they want, which is a lack of regulation, a lack of criticism, and in their minds, free rein to innovate at will. Well, Erin, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

On Friday, Silicon Valley's alienation from Biden and growing fondness for Trump continued to be on vivid display. At a news conference, Biden denounced the decision by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to end the company's system of fact-checking, calling it, quote, really shameful. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg traveled to Mar-a-Lago for his second in-person meeting with Trump since the election. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Over the weekend, the death toll from the wildfires across greater Los Angeles reached

24 people, with many more still missing. As winds briefly calmed, firefighters made some progress in fighting two of the biggest fires. As of Sunday night, they have contained 11% of the Palisades fire and 27% of the Eaton fire. But forecasters expect another round of strong winds to return today and tomorrow, which may only intensify and spread the fires and force the planes that are fighting them from the sky to be grounded.

And Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two federal prosecutions against President-elect Trump, has resigned. Smith was forced to drop both of his cases, one charging Trump with mishandling classified documents, both of his cases, one charging Trump with mishandling classified documents, the other of plotting to overturn the 2020 election under a Justice Department policy that bars the pursuit of prosecutions against a sitting president. Today's episode was produced by Jessica Chung, Mood Sadie, and Nina Feldman, with help from Eric Krupke and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Lisa Chow, Patricia Willans, and Mark George, and fact-checked by Susan Lee.

It contains original music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsvark of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobauro. See you tomorrow.