The Republican Convention that just ended in Milwaukee was accompanied by a parade of endorsements by high-profile, outspoken tech billionaires backing Donald Trump for president.
The headliner hands down was Elon Musk, CEO of both Tesla and social media platform X, who has pledged to give $45 million a month to a Trump-aligned super PAC.
Other big tech names on the Trump train include venture capitalists David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. There’s also Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and former boss — at his Silicon Valley VC firm — of Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance.
The flood of big tech names coming out publicly for Trump and the GOP is a sharp departure from Silicon Valley’s past political practices.
“In the 2010s the industry didn’t have a huge presence, they were happy to stay out of politics,” said Princeton political historian Julian Zelizer. That changed as the sector grew, and faced more political pushback from legislators and consumers.
By 2020, tech was a big player, backing mostly Democrats. But this election cycle, Republicans are getting a big piece of the action, says Zelizer.
“To spread [the tech industry’s] money everywhere, have more of a bipartisan presence so that everyone’s in favor of them,” he said.
Support for Republicans from figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel comes from a strong libertarian, hands-off-my-business ideology.
But Zelizer says even CEOs who lean Democratic on social and environmental issues might back Trump for what they think he’ll do for their bottom line.
“Cutting taxes, deregulating for industry and courting finance,” he said.
Still, tech CEOs rushing to the right aren’t likely to bring their more liberal workers with them, says Sarah Bryner at OpenSecrets.
“Rank-and-file Silicon Valley I don’t think is necessarily in the same pool as venture capitalist leader Silicon Valley,” she said. “When you look at donations by people who aren’t giving a million dollars, they still heavily favor Democrats.”
Endorsements by Musk and other celebrity CEOs could still influence the wider electorate.
Political scientist Casey Dominguez at the University of San Diego remembers a key endorsement Barack Obama got in 2008.
“Oprah Winfrey — we’re talking about an astronomical level of celebrity,” she said. “The tech CEOs I don’t think reach those levels of celebrity or adoration.”
Another thing to keep in mind: voters are also consumers, who vote with their wallets.
“There is a contingent attracted to someone like Elon Musk and his products — Teslas and things like that — but don’t really like all of this other stuff that comes with it,” said Americus Reed, a marketing professor at the Wharton School.
“For someone to say, ‘well, I’m not going to buy these products because they are soiled with political points of view that I don’t agree with?'”
Reed thinks it’ll take a lot more than conservative political endorsements and super PAC donations for that to happen.
