Every so often, I get a message on X or LinkedIn from someone in Silicon Valley who wants me to know that they quietly agree with me. They read the essays and think I’m right about Trump, right about Musk, right about what has happened to the industry, but they can’t say so, because of their job, or their equity, or the general mood. I won’t respond to these messages, since the people who send them aren't my allies. They are cowards who need someone who bears the cost of stating it openly to inform them that consenting in private means something. It does not.
I know how the industry used to sound. I spent my entire career in it, helped build Cash App, and noticed the recruiters ceased calling once I began expressing what I thought about the new regime. On January 30, 2017, ten days into Trump’s first term, as many as 2,000 Google employees walked out of their offices to protest his ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries. Sergey Brin, who arrived in this country as a refugee from the Soviet Union, spoke to the crowd. Thus did Sundar Pichai, who informed them “the fight will continue.” Nobody at that gathering appeared concerned that expressing what they believed would cost them anything. It had been that culture. Individuals in tech discussed politics openly, during lunch, on mailing lists, at all-hands meetings, and executives debated alongside them.
Nearly a decade later, Pichai was positioned on the inaugural platform directly behind Trump’s family, and Google had provided $1 million to the inaugural fund. It turned out that the fight would not go on.
The employees hadn’t altered their opinions. In 2024, approximately 95 percent of Apple staff members’ contributions to federal candidates went to Democrats, similarly 91.5 percent at Meta and roughly 83 percent at Amazon. Alphabet staff and their relatives provided Harris nearly 40 times what they provided Trump. Their names and employers are listed in federal filings that anybody can access. They will write a check against him. What they will no longer do is utter a statement against him where their supervisors can hear it. In an industry where virtually everyone freely expressed their political opinions, a culture of apprehension has emerged, and this apprehension did not originate at the lower levels.
Begin with Mark Zuckerberg, as he provided the most clear record. On January 7, 2021, the day after the attack on the Capitol, he wrote that Trump intended “to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power” to his elected successor, and suspended him from Facebook and Instagram. Donald Trump sued. Four years afterward, Meta consented to pay $25 million in order to settle the suit, along with $22 million going to Trump’s presidential library. Meta acknowledged no wrongdoing. Trump signed the agreement in the Oval Office. Nothing had changed regarding what Zuckerberg saw on January 6. Merely Trump’s stance had shifted, and thus Zuckerberg compensated him.
Tim Cook donated $1 million to the inaugural fund out of his own pocket. In August 2025 he was in the Oval Office and gave Trump a disc of Corning glass mounted on a 24-karat gold base that was engraved. “It’s a unique unit of one,” Cook said. At this event, Trump promoted a planned 100 percent tariff on imported chips and stated that “the good news for companies like Apple” was that companies constructing in the United States would pay nothing. I previously wrote about the dinner where they toasted him roughly a month later. The gold served as the overture.
Next came the ballroom. Trump dismantled the East Wing of the White House in October 2025 to construct a ballroom funded by private donors, and this month a list obtained by The Washington Post revealed figures beside the names: $25 million from Apple, $25 million from Nvidia, $10 million each from Microsoft and Palantir, $5 million each from Meta and Amazon. Google‘s stake emerged from the resolution of Trump’s lawsuit against YouTube, which targeted $22 million toward the ballroom’s construction. Richard Painter, the former chief ethics attorney for George W. Bush’s White House, put it simply: “These corporations all want something from the government.”
None of that remained concealed. Those individuals were not sneaking into the court. They declared their arrival, posed in front of the cameras, and submitted the paperwork.
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It is worthwhile examining the company they paid to retain. Sohrab Ahmari, having spent years engaged in discussions with JD Vance and served as an adviser, released a map of the emerging Republican coalition this week. There exist, he noted, five factions: restorationists, tech accelerationists, populists, Christian nationalists, and “common good” advocates. Vance is the sole figure who can unite them, and the issue that unites them is “reversing mass migration.” In the accompanying essay, Ahmari explicitly states that one of the gaps Vance can fill is the one “between populists and Big Tech,” and he cites Vance describing immigration restriction as the “tech-forward” stance.
So there it is, drawn by a friendly hand, with my former industry on the list as a member. A decrepit alliance of the worst elements of our troubled society: restorationists yearning for an era that never was, theocrats who believe the Constitution is a version of Leviticus, grievance merchants, and accelerationists who want to replace the state with a startup, all united by one common goal, which is to force some of the individuals who already reside here to depart. Ahmari himself moved to this nation from Tehran at thirteen, on a green card, having left a theocracy behind. He currently speaks favorably of a coalition that comprises Christian nationalists and is centered on shutting the door he walked through.
A coalition such as this is something a troubled society generates when the one thing its factions have in common is a list of individuals they want removed. And the men who run the most valuable companies on earth have been writing it checks.
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The thing about cowardice is that it usually appears reasonable from within. The pressure on those men was actually real. Trump had spent years threatening Apple with tariffs and once called for a boycott of its products, and he had sued Meta and YouTube over his suspensions. A nervous investor might explain precisely why Cook brought the gold and Zuckerberg paid the $25 million, and each reason would be a financial reason. That is what cowardice is: the sensible thing to do when you are afraid and someone else will bear the cost of your safety.
The genuine supporters of Ahmari’s coalition, at least, believe in something. Regardless of what you think about a Christian nationalist, he is not involved for a tariff exemption. The executives fare worse, since they do not believe any of it. They joined the dregs for a dismissed lawsuit and a carve-out on chips, and they did it with other people’s money. When an employee keeps their opinion to themselves in order to protect their mortgage, they are a willing serf. When the individual at the head of the company pays homage to safeguard his market capitalization, he becomes a willing vassal, and he makes the decision for everyone below him. I have previously discussed the economic royalists and the individuals who believe a satellite company is too big to nationalize: those who refer to capitalism as the ultimate American ideal and then give the state’s most hazardous occupant whatever he requests, and label the protection money a fundamental principle.
I won’t display empathy towards them. I’ve heard the claim that they had no option, and I don’t accept it, because the individuals with the least power in this story are the ones who still make the decision the executives would not. The engineer that signs a public letter, the employee who posts under their own name, the founder who declines the dinner invitation: each one of them has less to fall back on than Tim Cook.
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Administrations come to an end. Coalitions held together by an enemy turn on each other once the enemy is gone, and when this one does, the executives will be the easiest people in it to blame, because they never believed in any faction’s cause. They possess no principles to fall back on, only their names recorded. There are going to be oversight hearings, depositions, memoirs, and historians, and each one of them will possess the ballroom list. Their children will be able to read it. The record does not lapse, and they input every line of it personally.
When that day arrives, the individuals who attempted to purchase our democracy and establish a permanent oligarchy for themselves and their prostrate followers will be relying heavily on libertarian propaganda to portray themselves as victims of an authoritarian populist mob. Then we’ll display pictures of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Good was a mother of three, shot in her vehicle by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis on January 7. Pretti served as a nurse in intensive care at the city’s VA hospital, shot seventeen days later by a Border Patrol agent. Both were United States citizens, and both were fatally shot by agents of the government whose ballroom these individuals had paid for.
Whether any of these payments violated a law is an issue for investigators and the courts, with evidence and due process, and I want this question asked. The alternative verdict does not require a court. Free people are entitled to decide whose company they keep, whose products they champion, and whose names they are willing to stand beside. This judgment may be given now.
The thing about cowardice is that it gets taught. At that rally in 2017, nobody seemed fearful. The engineer who sends me a personal message today was taught to be fearful by observing the men at the top of his industry lining up behind Trump’s family, settling his lawsuits, and funding his ballroom. He learned the lesson they were imparting: keep your head lowered, and pay whoever holds the position of authority. Cowardice near the top of an industry does not remain there.
Go Deeper into the Circus
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JD is the lynchpin? lol. I do not disagree with the theory at all. I’m just laughing because no one consulted the actual citizens of the United States. I get it. He gave it up to Peter Theil when he was at Yale, and has never stopped, servicing him in some way. But everyone else hates him. That much is bipartisan. Besides, his wife is “brown”. It’s like the gnome underpants theory of fascism.
JD Vance ➡️ ❓ ➡️ global domination
Imagine if those tech giants had just let their stocks go down in value. Trump cares about the stock market. It may have been the kick in the ass he needed to stop at least one of his dumbest economic moves and tamped down some of his excesses. But they saw a vision of humanity and said nah — we need more. If this were the French Revolution, you know exactly where their heads would be. But they know how they have lulled us with all their products into, saying, wait, I won’t have the internet if we rise up. No thanks.