The MAGA tech oligarchy
Everyone used to know which capitalists were the bad guys and which ones were the good guys. Bad: oil, banks, military contractors. They don’t care about climate change, they profit from wars, and they crash the economy. They live in bad places like Florida and Texas and Wall Street. They promote weird right-wing Christian ideas to bamboozle people. They are Republicans. They deserve derision and hostility.
Good: tech. They make clever websites where you can stay in touch with your friends and see pleasant images of beaches and fancy breakfasts. They solve climate change. They live in California. They run Barack Obama’s campaign. They deserve low taxes, deregulation and invitations to special White House parties.
Yet here we are. Many of those enlightened Silicon Valley capitalists now look like a propaganda cartoon from a Communist Party magazine of the 1930s. They embody all that is awful about contemporary life and use all their power to make it worse. They fund, promote, and grovel before the most reactionary and authoritarian US president in living memory. They run media platforms promoting the most twisted and dehumanising racist propaganda. They celebrate the power of “masculine energy” with Joe Rogan. What happened? What do these people actually want? What do they truly believe?
Democrats are searching for answers. There are probably some contingent explanations. The development of AI depends on energy-hungry data centres. That makes immediate access to electricity more important and climate change less of a concern. The economic stagnation of the “second tech boom”, as well as fuelling the crypto and AI crazes, may have made key tech players more interested in direct corruption and state patronage.
Some right-wing Democrats, like commentator Matt Yglesias, have suggested that the Biden administration’s meek pushback against tech industry power, or his largely meaningless pro-union rhetoric, are to blame for “systematically trying to alienate stakeholders in the technology industry”. But that all came pretty late in the piece, once it was obvious that the big tech players were shifting towards Trump.
Contingent, temporary factors play a role. But so do permanent ones. To quote Robert Fitch: “Vulgar Marxism explains 90% of what goes on in the world”.
These people are tech capitalists. But what is a tech capitalist? In a way, nearly all capitalists are “tech” capitalists. Most of the important products in the modern economy require complex technology to produce. That privately owned technology is the capital that makes someone a capitalist. Whether they make steel or spaceships, they have the same basic interests. They want to hold back the progress of competitors, protect their position and win special grants and favours from the state. They need to keep costs down: adopt new production techniques, keep taxes low, remove or disregard irritating regulations and keep their employees cheap.
Moment by moment, they may favour different tactics, and accept different compromises. They might be Democrats one day, Republicans the next, and some unknown horror in the future. In the realm of politics, they follow the principle of Lord Palmerston: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”.
Seen in that light, the Trumpist tech capitalists are rather traditional. They are defence contractors, car manufacturers, finance capitalists and media barons. Who would be surprised that this crew would swing towards a far-right, ultra-racist, highly corrupt political movement once it looked like it could win?
Thiel and Musk began their “tech” careers with an online finance platform. Now they’re both tightly linked to the US defence and espionage industries. Thiel’s main outfit, Palantir, sells a data analysis tool used throughout the US intelligence and military. It purports to be able to reveal important trends concealed in mountains of data, and it receivesd billions of dollars of military and intelligence contracts to do so.
As David Runciman writes: “[Palantir’s] business is dispelling the fog of war—define war any way you like, and personal privacy be damned”. Likewise, Musk’s SpaceX has received US$3.6 billion in Defense Department contracts in the last decade—along with $11.8 billion from NASA. So what’s good for business? Civil liberties and global disarmament? Or a militarised, paranoid world in which the population is tricked or forced to accept spying, violence, ultra-nationalism, and the economic prioritisation of war and its associated machinery?
Musk makes cars. It’s big manufacturing. Production schedules are tight. Wages and conditions need to be constrained. Regulations and unions are a danger for him—as they are for logistics titan Jeff Bezos. So, unsurprisingly, he follows in the tradition of the industry’s modern founder, Henry Ford. For Musk, as for Ford, unions, “communists” (like Kamala Harris), and other forms of subversion need to be undermined; extreme racist propaganda is part of the cure. Musk’s anti-migrant tirades and flirtations with fascism on X are exactly in the tradition of Ford, the Hitler supporter who published his antisemitic conspiracy theories in his own personal media outlet, the Dearborn Independent.
It seems likely that Musk’s manufacturing interest first set him on the path to his current interest in fascist politics. In 2020, his Tesla plants were affected by pandemic lockdown protocols. Musk’s profits were temporarily threatened by government regulations aiming to save lives.
“It will cause great harm, not just to Tesla, but to many companies”, he complained on a Tesla earnings call. He began furiously promoting medical conspiracy theories, tweeting against “fascist” lockdowns, campaigning against “unelected and ignorant” public health officials, and tweeting the “FREE AMERICA NOW” slogans of the conspiracy-addled far right. He ultimately reopened his factory in defiance of a lockdown order. Trump offered him public support.
Thatis seems to have been the year of Musk’s political awakening, as it was for so many pandemic-era capitalists frustrated by public obsession with health affecting their profits. Musk learned that he could undermine and destroy inconvenient regulations if he promoted demagogic conspiracy-theory politics in an alliance with Donald Trump. Now, unelected and ignorant, he is the president’s “first buddy” and a guest speaker at European far-right party conferences.
Among the capitalist class, the owners of media outlets act as a kind of political vanguard. They try to shape the ideas and set the terms of debate for their co-thinkers. They have their own party-like rivalries and disagreements. Trump’s first rise to power was dependent on an alliance with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which had spent decades promoting anti-migrant politics to its TV audience of millions in the US.
Now, in a way, the torch has been passed. By purchasing Twitter, Musk became a media baron. He quickly converted X into a decisively important outlet for racist conspiracy theories: taking advantage of his rigged algorithm, Musk himself became the platform’s “biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories”, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Technology. Mark Zuckerberg, always trying to mimic his bolder rivals, would soon adjust Facebook and Instagram to resemble Musk’s outlet more closely.
Old-school “legacy media” could present right-wing propaganda with an air of spurious authority based on traditional signifiers: a suit and tie, hair and make-up, a trained voice with a posh accent or a folksy one, depending on the audience.
The social media outlets controlled by Musk and Zuckerberg play a similar trick with different methods. They are full of some of the most extreme racist, misogynist and anti-democratic right-wing propaganda you could imagine. But it’s presented as an organic representation of mass opinion. You forget the enormous data centres shaping your feed under the oversight of utterly secret algorithms shaped and guided by Musk, Zuckerberg, and their co-thinkers. The gusher of propaganda is delivered to you as a direct and authentic act of self-expression from people just like yourself.
So a set of ultra-powerful, quasi-monopolistic military contractors and manufacturers are using their influence over media outlets to promote far-right politics. Should anyone be surprised?
Maybe the Democrats. They spent years incubating this group of monsters. Their decades-long alliance with the tech industry, just like their alliance with Wall Street, would make a joke of Biden’s later attempts at populist, pro-union posturing. It’s part of what made people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama vulnerable to the (basically accurate) attack from Trump that they represented an oligarchy of wealthy elites. But Trump has now made those elites a better offer.
The offer has not been universally accepted. Subtracting the donations of Musk, who spent $246 million in the 2024 elections, the biggest donors still broadly favoured the Democrats in 2024. As a group, the major tech industry donors gave Harris $121 million compared to $31 for Trump; overall, the Democrats out-raised the Republicans by more than a billion dollars during the 2024 campaign. This may be some comfort to Democrats., Bbut it is no good to the rest of us. After Trump proved he could defeat Harris, many more capitalists switched sides. And the fact that so many remain willing to finance the Democrats simply proves that the Democrats continue to act as loyal and trusted servants of the US oligarchy—not some anti-corporate opposition that can confront the power of Musk and the rest.
The MAGA tech capitalists have evolved in tandem with Trump, as he has proven his ability over time to capture and defuse anti-corporate sentiment more effectively than the Democrats. In 2016, Trump and his supporters raged demagogically against entrenched corporate interests that controlled their rivals. “Across the country, wages are flat”, Peter Thiel said at the 2016 Republican convention. “But health care and college tuition cost more every year. Meanwhile, Wall Street bankers inflate bubbles in everything from government bonds to Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees.”
Little remains of this anti-corporate posturing. Through years of propaganda, Trump captured this energy and converted it into pure, miserable bigotry. But Trump was never more anti-corporate than the Democrats are pro-worker. And the tech industry was never interested in social progress—only profits and power. It would be foolish to expect any better of these forces: the Democrats, the Republicans or the big business interests whose support they crave.
