"How the ‘PayPal Mafia’ Paved Trump's Path in Silicon Valley | Vanity Fair"

It used to be that Silicon Valley was considered a blue bastion, and supported social causes like education, public health, and climate action. But, if that perception wasn’t already crumbling, then it has been utterly shattered in 2024. This past month has seen countless tech elites flock behind Donald Trump as their candidate of choice in the presidential election, leaving many in the media scratching their heads and wringing their hands. But not Roger McNamee, the veteran venture capital investor, who, on the latest episode of Inside the Hive, unpacks why tech leaders seem to suddenly be “abandoning” the values they once held dear. “Their belief in cryptocurrency and their belief that low taxes and lack of regulation are essential to the prosperity of the tech industry,” he says, noting that Trump could deliver on all of this. “As a corporate executive, one of your jobs is to protect yourself from political change.”

Meanwhile, from the perspective of Big Tech, President Joe Biden has been uniquely tough on tech monopolies compared to past administrations. “It [has] everything to do with corporate power…whether it’s Reid Hoffman or any of the others arguing for getting rid of [FTC Chair] Lina Khan,” McNamee says. “Think of it as a pendulum: The pendulum for 40 years swung to the benefits of capital, of shareholders, of the wealthy. The pendulum under President Biden began to swing back.”

Later in the episode, McNamee argues that Silicon Valley’s pivot to Trump reveals just how uncoupled its own needs have become from the public’s. “Technology is no longer something you can trust automatically…you have to actually recognize that the incentives in the tech world today are misaligned with the needs of America. And there’s nothing wrong with that legally, but there sure is a lot wrong with that both politically and economically,” he says. “Right now, the economic incentives are to do nonsense apps like generative AI or crypto, where they can profit at the expense of everybody else, as opposed to profiting by empowering everybody else…I think you can make a case that there literally hasn’t been a tech product since 2009 that increased productivity. And I think generative AI is going to decrease it by a lot.”