The photo of Silicon Valley centi-billionaires at Donald Trump’s inauguration – Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, front row and side by side – now looks like a hitlist for a blue Congress hellbent on making life difficult for billionaires.
The picture symbolized at the time the bending of the knee by the richest men in the world to its most powerful, a symbiosis of the ultra-rich. Already unfathomably wealthy, Silicon Valley tycoons believed a Maga-sized public shift to the right would enrich them even more. It did. For several years, while Trump seemed an everlasting kingmaker and AI’s expansion seemed unstoppable, their fortunes ballooned to values beyond comprehension. Elon Musk’s surpassed $1tn.
In the harsh blue light of Tuesday’s midterms, though, going all-in on Maga seems an unwisely unhedged bet. Democrats took decisive control of the US Congress, flipping seats right and left that in previous years seemed like given wins for Republicans. Governors’ mansions across the country likewise lit up blue as Democrats ascended even in the reddest of states, such as Texas.
Voters concerned about corruption expressed their displeasure at oligarchs’ blatant attempts to create a political environment to their liking. Voting against technocrats drove people into the hands of Democrats and away from Republicans. Tech oligarchs themselves, along with anger over the AI boom, datacenters and Flock surveillance cameras, shifted the tides.
“Voters rejected Republicans in part because they were bought and paid for by AI billionaires. Democrats must hold them accountable instead of cashing their checks,” wrote Texas Democratic representative Greg Casar.
Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff, who won re-election to the Senate, summed up the prevailing attitude towards the tech industry in his victory speech.
“The titans of Silicon Valley dig bunkers for themselves and warn that the artificial intelligence they’re creating risks human extinction,” he said. He pledged to bring “big tech to heel”.
Others were more bellicose. Ed Markey, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, tweeted late on Tuesday: “They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing.”
Democrats have both promised congressional investigations into tech companies and moratoriums on datacenters, which may hamstring compute-hungry AI companies.
In the past year, the major AI firms have been competing in a fierce race to buy or build massive, noisy, resource-intensive facilities full of semiconductor chips that will supply their growing needs for computing power. Americans hate them . Democrats stand firmly in the way of that arms race. Democrats took governors’ mansions by promising to institute moratoriums on hyperscale datacenter construction.
Gina Hinojosa of Texas, Amy Acton of Ohio, and Keisha Lance Bottoms of Georgia have all pledged pauses .
Then there are the promised investigations. Letters to preserve records for future investigations have already gone out to Nvidia and Amazon. Tech was the villain of the midterms . Angry constituents want to see it penalized. Elon Musk presents a meaty target as the billionaire most closely allied with the Trump administration and the richest man in the world. Investigating his conduct with the “department of government efficiency”, which laid waste to the humanitarian agency USAID and wide swaths of the US government, will be a political lay-up for Democrats newly in control and desiring a public spectacle.
Musk had the worst night of anyone but Trump on Tuesday. The world’s richest man gave $450m in support of Republican candidates, most of all to Ken Paxton in Texas, but he reaped little, if any, reward. Paxton lost by a major margin. Musk remained silent for some eight hours as results poured in, each piece of news more disastrous for his right-wing project than the last. In what seemed like capitulation, he deleted a Tuesday tweet that read: “Vote red today!”
By Wednesday morning, the SpaceX CEO wanted off the planet. “Datacenters in space are looking pretty good right now,” he wrote.
He may not get the chance to set up his orbital computers. Democrats may likewise investigate or attempt to unwind the multibillion dollar merger of SpaceX and Musk’s AI company, xAI, which makes the Nazi-friendly nudification bot Grok. xAI has a $200m contract with the US military, which likewise seems like an easy win for Democrats to meddle with.
Mark Zuckerberg may feel deja vu when he finds himself sitting across the table from an inquisition, as he repeatedly did at the end of the 2010s. The Meta CEO made a nakedly political pivot under Trump 2.0 with his shift to the right. He appeared at Mar-a-Lago to show off Meta’s camera-equipped glasses to Trump and axed his company’s vaunted diversity, equity, and inclusion program as the president waged war on DEI.
Already the most disliked man in America, Zuckerberg will show with his next era whether he believes in anything as much as he does power. Was his interest in jiu-jitsu mixed martial arts authentic or a way to ingratiate himself with the manosphere’s podcast hosts? We may know by the time he faces his first inquest. Perhaps he’ll return to the liberal roots of his former public image like founding a pro-immigration nonprofit , as he did a decade ago.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, himself seen at Mar-a-Lago, appears in damage control mode on Tuesday. His tweet on Tuesday night read like a Bernie Sanders talking point: “People should not cede control of the future to superintelligence, and that requirement should ultimately constrain AI progress.” Inviting human-first regulation, Altman appeared to be trying to distance himself from Trump’s free-for-all stance, and the president’s recent efforts to rebrand IA as “superintelligence”.
But the billionaires of Silicon Valley seem unlikely to rehabilitate their public images overnight after years of pandering only to power brokers. They have little to say on the issues of the day: affordability and corruption. The majority of Americans see them as avatars of extreme wealth inequality and cynical, pay-to-play politics. What can a billionaire offer a populace angry about prices?
