From left to right: Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk at the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.
© Julia Demaree Nikhinson/UPI Credit: UPI/Alamy Live News
The presence of the tech industry's top executives at Trump's second inauguration signifies more than a tribute to the office of the US president.
The presence of some of the most influential and richest figures from the tech world was arguably the most talked about aspect of Donald Trump’s second inauguration as president of the United States. The most glaring absence was Bill Gates or indeed any senior representative of Microsoft.
These men, known collectively as the Tech Bros or more recently the Broligarchy, took their place in the front row, an honor usually conferred on the president’s family, former presidents, and foreign dignitaries. Not this time though. Given Donald Trump’s affection for transactional relationships and loyalty, this prominence immediately begged the double-headed question: what are they giving and what are they getting in return?
Broadly, the Tech Bros who now support Trump can be divided into opportunists and ideologues. The former are primarily concerned to advance their business interests and, by extension, their personal fortunes. The ideologues also want to maximize their earnings but, in addition, they aim to play the decisive role in the revolutionary change which Trump 2.0 seems determined to pursue.
Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are the best-known representatives of the first group. Their craven bowing and scraping before the altar of the MAGA movement’s agenda since Trump’s election victory has been transparent. In Bezos’s case, his offering came in the shape of a decision to turn the Washington Post’s op-ed page into a booster forum for capitalism and “personal liberties”. Zuckerberg’s desperate measures to please the president are more serious. Since he effectively scrapped Facebook’s system of moderation that aimed to prevent the spread of disinformation, unverified conspiratorial hogwash has drowned out the voices of meticulous research and journalism on the platform.
But for those of us clinging to the idea that rational democratic politics is still possible, it is to the ideologues that we must turn our attention, above all to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. They aim to influence Trump’s political agenda in pursuit of an ideology known in some circles as the Dark Enlightenment and in others as the Network State. Its ideas are not only the driving force behind the rapid dismantling of the American state that Musk and others have engaged in since January 20, they also include seizing the United States’ national security infrastructure in pursuit of a global version of policy first deployed after 9/11 to neutralize terrorist threats: Total Information Awareness. The key financiers and executives of this expansion belong to a community known as the Thielverse—the disciples and executors of Thiel’s almost Calvinist grand vision of an elect of technocratic Übermenschen.
Thiel freely confesses to the influence of the Nazi philosopher, Carl Schmitt, on his political thinking, especially antipathy toward liberal democracy and dismissal of state bureaucracy as a break on technological and economic progress.
To Musk and Thiel, one must add David Sacks, who like them grew up in part in apartheid South Africa—in Russian intelligence circles these three Tech Bros are reportedly referred to as the “South African Babes”. Sacks’s primary agenda has been to persuade Trump of the need to embrace cryptocurrency, seeking to downgrade the dollar as the global reserve currency in alignment with Thiel’s aim of steadily stripping the state of its political power in favor of global (tech) corporations.
To what extent Trump understands the aims and ideologies of the Thielverse is unclear. Musk and Thiel have invested considerable time and money in cultivating the president. As the only major Silicon Valley figure to publicly back Trump in 2016, Thiel seems to enjoy the president’s loyalty. Musk, by contrast, has in the past expressed support for the Democrats. His switch to Trump’s campaign last year was accompanied by huge sums of money.
Loyalty and cash go a long way in Trump’s world. Under their influence, the revolution has devoured the first of its children: Steve Bannon, briefly White House chief of staff during Trump’s first term, and the most senior ideologue of the MAGA movement, and now sidelined by the emperor’s new favorites. The second Trump administration is designed more to pander to billionaires than to disaffected losers of globalization.
But although Musk and Thiel’s influence on Trump has been demonstrated in the policies he has introduced at breakneck speed, their primary cypher is JD Vance. The vice-president has been an acolyte of Thiel since they first met in 2011. Vance has described this encounter at Yale as “the most important moment of my life”. He has been repaying Thiel ever since for his mentorship and his employment in one of Thiel’s venture-capital companies. Thiel masterminded the campaign to persuade Trump to pick Vance as his running mate. We are now a heartbeat away from a Vance presidency and, potentially, the supremacy of the Thielverse.
In Owned, his recently published book on the rise of the Tech Bros, the American journalist, Eoin Higgins, argues that Thiel is the only person to whom Musk defers, intellectually and politically. This is despite some bitter fallings-out early in their relationship as key members of the “PayPal Mafia”. In line with Thiel’s agenda, as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk certainly took to ripping up federal institutions with gusto.
The concept of DOGE was initially based on another acronym, RAGE, for “retire all government employees”. This was thought up by Curtis Yarvin, a disaffected coder in Silicon Valley who has become the revered philosopher of the Dark Enlightenment and was recently selected by the San Francisco Standard as one of the city’s most influential people. Called MAGA’s house philosopher, his long interview with the New York Times earlier this year reveals the paucity of thinking behind the movement.
In April, Musk announced he was pulling back from his role in government in accordance with a pre-arranged 130-day limit. He also said he needed to concentrate on the rapidly declining fortunes of Tesla, his electric-vehicle enterprise. But Musk will remain deeply involved in politics in his pursuit of expanding the role of his other major venture, SpaceX, which incorporates the Starlink satellite communications network. This ambition received a big boost recently when the Federal Communications Commission granted Starlink the right to provide T-Mobile with connectivity for its consumer cell network in the teeth of fierce opposition from the United States’ largest telecoms providers, AT&T and Verizon. The two giants fear that Musk’s intention is to provide complete coverage across every inch of the globe with his satellite network, thus shutting out traditional providers.
Concern about Musk’s potential monopoly over network communications is born out by the dramatic expansion of Starlink, which currently has almost 7,000 satellites in orbit. Its nearest rival, the European conglomerate EutelSat, boasts a mere 634 and has dropped plans to provide coverage to individual phone users. Over half of Starlink’s almost five million subscribers are outside the United States. According to the Australian telecoms consultancy Idem Est, “Starlink’s global satellite coverage is deeply intertwined with geopolitics, highlighting the growing intersection between technology and international relations. Its expansive satellite network raises critical concerns about digital sovereignty, especially due to Elon Musk’s decisive control over its operations.”
Like all Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Starlink have benefited from massive direct and indirect state subsidies. The same is true of Thiel’s major contribution to Total Information Awareness: Palantir. The company manages and processes data for governments and corporations around the world, offering surveillance and digital control over systems and people. Its former employees and advisers have secured several key positions in the Trump administration, including the director of the White House information systems, Gregory Barbaccia.
The immense influence of Starlink and Palantir complements the domination of global network infrastructure by other American companies, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, and the world’s largest cybersecurity companies. They provide the digital infrastructure on which almost the entire economies of Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America depend—except for China, Iran, Russia and North Korea. As we saw with Trump’s decision to switch off US digital intelligence to Ukraine, these companies are prepared to follow instructions from the White House in an instant.
The influence of SpaceX and Palantir have led to much speculation about what Musk’s team of teenage hackers has really been doing with the data that DOGE has—in its own words— been investigating for compliance with Trump’s policies. A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations board has claimed that DOGE members started illegally exfiltrating data from the agency. These materials could contain highly sensitive information on “unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets”.
Private companies like the ones controlled by Musk and Thiel have never had such extraordinary access to classified information. The Thielverse has the ambition to outlast the Trump presidency. Striving to deploy Total Information Awareness around the world and infiltrating every nook and cranny of the United States’ national security infrastructure looks like its chosen path.
Misha Glenny is rector of the IWM
