Why the Tech Billionaires Are Aligned with Trump

Fueled by profit motives, ideological radicalization, and elite self-victimization, America’s tech barons are aggressively taking the side of authoritarianism. But why now?

By Thomas Zimmer, April 26, 2026

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Perhaps Alexander Karp, the CEO of Palantir, just wanted to remind the world how much he and the company he defines are aligned with the MAGA regime. On April 18, Palantir released a 22-point manifesto (Opens in a new window), basically the abstract version of the book “The Technological Republic” Karp and co-Palantiri Nicholas Zamiska published a year ago. “Look at us!”, it yells, “look how all in we are on America First nationalism and the Trump agenda!”

Palantir was co-founded by Karp and Peter Thiel in 2003. They named the company after the elven-made seeing-stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth saga, magical crystal balls used for telepathic communication and information gathering across vast distances. Palantir offers data analysis software and AI-powered “operational intelligence,” (Opens in a new window) as Karp puts it – especially to the military, law enforcement, and intelligence services. 

Why does a publicly traded tech company need such a manifesto? Because Karp, like so many of today’s tech lords, fancies himself a philosopher-CEO. They are convinced they have some profound insight to offer, and they are determined to make the world listen. And so, we get “The Technological Republic, in brief,” a document that reeks of cultural chauvinism. “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive,” we learn. Palantir, therefore, is deeply opposed to “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism” – makes sense, from a Western supremacist perspective: We must not dilute the “culture”! The manifesto also sprinkles in some revanchism, demanding that “the postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone,” complaining that the “defanging of Germany was an overcorrection.” Why is a company that, above all else, embraces the militant nationalism of America First concerned with such matters? Because the America First mandate includes a commitment to fighting for Western supremacy everywhere and elevating rightwing nationalists abroad. Raging against the “neutering” and “defanging” of Germany as one of history’s great injustices is just standard repertoire for the post-1945 German far right.

In any case, the manifesto calls on America to not get soft. Enough with all the “woke” self-critique and cancel culture: The nation must get back to relishing its own superiority and punish its enemies with “hard power”! And for that, it needs a global surveillance machinery that Palantir is happy to supply. Get rid of the deep state and those pesky civil servants with their outrageous attempts to sabotage that project: In Palantir’s vision, the government and the totally unaccountable tech elite become one – an all-powerful fusion in service of American supremacy and the defense of Western “culture.”

The Palantir manifesto is a stark reminder: The Silicon Valley tech billionaires are fully aligned with Trump.

Remarkably, it wasn’t all that long ago that many of them were cozying up to Obama and the liberal establishment.  After the 2016 election, for instance, the Washington Post, the paper Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had purchased in 2013, famously vowed to stand against the Trumpist assault under the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” (Opens in a new window) Yet when Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, Bezos was right there with him (Opens in a new window) – and officially declared (Opens in a new window) it was time for the Post to stop all this “democracy” talk; a mass exodus of liberal voices (Opens in a new window) from the Post followed quickly thereafter.

Or take Palantir CEO Alex Karp: He was seen as a liberal, a progressive, even a proper leftist until just a few years ago. In 2024, he still supported Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. But then he donated for Trump’s inauguration and is helping to pay for Trump’s bizarre ballroom plans. Karp is now calling Palantir the first company “to be completely anti-woke.” (Opens in a new window)

What happened?

Considering how much power – over our politics and our private lives – these guys are amassing, we better find a proper answer to that question. This is, without a doubt, one of the defining, and most dangerous, stories of our time. Let’s tackle it step by step by investigating:

(1) Why this is not just a story of capitalists attempting to maximize profit by sucking up to the authoritarian regime - but also a tale of political and ideological radicalization

(2) Why it was a mistake to equate technological futurism with social progressivism, as the fundamental worldview in the tech elite circles has always had inherently anti-democratic tendencies, leading so many of them to conclude that “freedom and democracy are incompatible” (Opens in a new window)

(3) The role of extremist thinkers like Curtis Yarvin in intellectualizing the anti-democratic impulses, and the spread of a staunchly authoritarian ideology that is best described as either “reactionary modernism” or tech-fascism

(4) How and why these long-standing anti-democratic impulses and reactionary tendencies are being activated now, and the escalating sense of elite self-victimization that fuels people like Alex Karp and Marc Andreessen who considered themselves “liberals” or even “leftists” until quite recently.

We need to understand why they are now giving themselves permission to make common cause with the rightwing extremist assault on democracy – because we will all be suffering the consequences.

Capitalists, reactionaries, ideologues

We should probably tackle the elephant in the room right away: Is there really more going on here than business leaders attempting to maximize profit by pandering to the ruling regime? In other words: Isn’t this just capitalists doing capitalism?

At the risk of simplifying what is a thoughtful take: This is the answer New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg arrived at (Opens in a new window) when exploring the reasons why Alex Karp turned to MAGA. “Of all the tech chieftains who’ve learned to love Donald Trump’s authoritarianism,” Goldberg wrote, “Palantir’s Alex Karp seems the most befuddling.“ Ultimately, however, she decided that “vulgar materialism” offered the best explanation for why Karp went from self-identifying as a progressive and supporting the Democratic Party to aligning with Trump: “Ideology often follows self-interest.”

What I appreciate about Goldberg’s take is that she reminds us to look at these tech giants as businesspeople first. Because despite all their self-aggrandizing pretensions, that is what they are. They want to sell stuff. It was a fateful mistake to buy into the mystique Silicon Valley has created around itself, to perpetuate the narrative that these companies were animated by a vision of making the world a better place, that we should worship their leaders as oracles whose wisdom touches all spheres of life. We must stop. It is therefore refreshing when a prominent columnist like Goldberg insists on approaching the tech billionaires as capitalists. And this is unquestionably part of the answer: When Trump was elected a second time, much of America’s elite quickly bought into the myth of a rightward realignment and accepted as gospel the idea that Trump represented the “will of the people.” They publicly declare fealty, try to curry favor. And they have been immensely successful in that endeavor. For Palantir, the biggest government contracts (Opens in a new window) have come under Trump. And more generally, Trump is very happy to elevate the tech barons even further. At the end of March, for instance, he stacked the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (Opens in a new window) with Silicon Valley billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, venture capital titan Marc Andreessen, or Oracle founder Larry Ellison.

However, this is not the whole story. For instance, many tech lords started moving right – or became more vocally anti-“Left” – before Trump returned to power, Elon Musk being the most prominent example. So, the timing doesn’t quite work. More generally, let us not assume a false binary between profit motives and ideology. The fact that there are financial incentives for the rightward turn doesn’t mean that everything else is merely pretext – or that the ideological / political rightward trajectory is entirely downstream from the profit motive. If you listen to Thiel, Musk, Andreessen, Karp, and so many others for a while, it quickly becomes clear that these guys really mean it. The incessant hysterical screeching about being persecuted by “the Left,” the paranoid rantings and frenzied manifestos, the zeal with which they are actively furthering the far-right cause at home and abroad: Their alignment with the rightwing authoritarian political project is, for lack of a better word, sincere.

These guys have undergone a political radicalization to the right – one that requires reflection. The explanation will not be the exact same for all of them. There are idiosyncrasies about each case, the exact mix of greed, cravenness, opportunism, algorithmically-induced brain poisoning, and ideological extremism may differ from person to person. But there are also generalizable elements and dynamics that allow us to establish a framework for how to explain why the tech billionaires are now so openly and aggressively siding against democracy.

Discarding some myths about “liberal” tech

Over the past few years, the mainstream political discourse has struggled mightily to make sense of the trajectory the tech billionaires have been on. But much of that consternation has been based on a profound misunderstanding. The assumption that Silicon Valley was somehow intrinsically linked to a liberal political project mistook the cult of technological progress for socio-political progressivism. 

That misunderstanding has lingered. Remember when, in December 2022, after he had overtaken Twitter, the New York Times infamously declared that Elon Musk’s politics were hard to explain and “tricky to pin down” (Opens in a new window)? At that point, Musk had already been acting as the world’s most powerful vector of far-right conspiracy theories while coddling and amplifying extremists who propagate them, and he had been constantly deriding Democrats, liberals, anyone he perceived as part of “the Left” in an escalating crusade against “wokeism.” If anything, the problem has been even more pronounced on the European side of the Atlantic. The day after the 2024 election, one of the questions I got on a live broadcast on German television was why “a liberal like Musk” would possibly consider joining the Trump government; and when Musk openly supported the German far right in the run-up to the parliamentary elections in the spring of 2025, declaring that “only the AfD can save Germany,” (Opens in a new window) commentators over here were aghast!

The source of confusion – to the extent it ever came from a place of good-faith inquiry – was that Musk’s actions collided with certain assumptions about the supposedly liberal tech world that have dominated across the political spectrum at least until quite recently. On the center-left, this perception of “Silicon Valley” and what it stood for was particularly pronounced in the 1990s. After the end of the Cold War, at the height of neoliberal hegemony, a new generation of center-left political leaders in the “West” fully bought into the idea that the grand ideological struggles of the past had given way to a new era in which capitalist democracy reigned supreme without any serious challengers. In their view, the only way forward was to embrace a techno-utopian globalization without reservation, and all that was left to do for governments in this post-historical, post-ideological age was to manage progress as efficiently as possible. Bill Clinton was all in on this vision – and so were Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Germany, his counterparts across the Atlantic. Blair, who led his (New) Labour Party to victory in 1997, and Schröder, a social democrat who was about to end sixteen years of conservative rule, published their manifesto shortly before the 1998 elections in Germany. It was titled: “Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte.” (Opens in a new window) They focused on the task of “investing in human capital” to get everyone ready for the “knowledge-based economy” in which heroic figures who embodied a “new entrepreneurial spirit” would be developing “new technologies” and lead the world into a glorious new “information age.” Theirs was a vision that the tech titans of Silicon Valley surely share: “We want a society which celebrates successful entrepreneurs just as it does artists and footballers.”

The male-dominated tech world seemed “liberal” and compatible with social-democratic goals only because it was associated with supposedly limitless technological progress – and the tech oligarchs were happy to play along, presenting a culturally permissive image. But the fundamental worldview in these circles was never adequately described as “liberal,” and it certainly wasn’t defined by egalitarian ideals. Rather, it was a type of libertarianism driven by a desire for freedom, understood as the ability to remain unburdened from any kind of politically or ethically motivated restrictions, unhampered from any demands modern society may place upon them. The tech titans believe that the world works best if people like them are in charge and get to do as they please – because they are convinced that their personal interest is identical to the interest of humanity itself. It really is impossible to understand what drives these people, how they perceive of the world around them and their own actions in it, unless we grapple with the fact that they see themselves as pursuing the noblest of endeavors. You see it in Musk’s unhinged futurism, his bizarre insistence that only he can lead the way for humanity to become a “multi-planetary species” (Opens in a new window) (because, didn’t you know, our sun will go supernova billions of years from now…). You see it in Marc Andreessen’s insistence, as laid out in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” (Opens in a new window) for instance, that technological progress will solve any and all problems humanity may ever encounter – but only if society lets these visionaries do their thing and we all focus on cheering them on as they do. It’s all incredibly naive and disingenuous; it is self-serving (the grand futurism is a big reason why that sweet investor money keeps flowing…) and authentic in the sense that these guys truly see themselves as the pioneers of utopia. 

The pervading worldview in these circles is and has always been inherently anti-democratic. It tracks very well with the reactionary political project and the conservative promise: that the world works best if it’s run by wealthy white men – and thus should always be run by wealthy white men. This is what is pulling so many of these people to the right, why so many of them eventually gravitate towards autocratic regimes at home and abroad.

Much like other predominantly white, predominantly male elites who have been lurching to the right, the acceptance of democracy and pluralism was always conditional and depending largely on whether or not it would be set up in a way that preserved their status and what they insisted was their prerogative to function outside of democratic society’s constraints. As venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, put it in early 2009 (Opens in a new window), shortly after Barack Obama had entered the White House: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He meant his own freedom and that of his fellow tech barons to do as they please.

Reactionary modernism, tech fascism, and the struggle against democracy

Openly taking sides against democracy, like Thiel did, was rather unusual until quite recently. But the pervasive skepticism towards democracy and any kind of “burden” it may entail among the Silicon Valley elite proved to be fertile ground for a more aggressive reactionary ideology. This explains how someone like self-anointed “reactionary monarchist” Curtis Yarvin (Opens in a new window) became the intellectual darling of the tech barons (Opens in a new window) (and, ultimately, acquired significant political influence, as he is among the key intellectual influences (Opens in a new window) on Vice-President JD Vance). Peter Thiel has been funding Yarvin’s work for years, acting as a patron for his extremism, making sure to introduce him and his ideas across the elite networks of business and politics. Yarvin desires an American “Caesar” to come in and wipe away what he argues is a deeply deficient, unnatural democratic system. Yarvin believes that humanity consists of fundamentally unequal races, some superior and some inferior; he has defended the institution of slavery (Opens in a new window); he is also a vile misogynist who insists society should be returned to a pre-democratic era in which women were supposedly better off without the right to vote and equal civil rights. Yarvin seeks to install an aristocracy of white men like him. Society, he claims, should be ordered like a tech company, with a kind of absolutist CEO-monarch at the top. The biggest hurdle to achieving this goal, according to Yarvin, is what he calls “the cathedral” (Opens in a new window): An evil cabal of leftwing-radicals dominating “the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.” The strongest of those institutions are the media and the universities: The power centers of “woke” leftism that need to be either taken over by a comprehensive rightwing “counter-revolution” or destroyed entirely.

It is not particularly difficult to see why a predominantly male, predominantly white tech elite drunken on power and utterly convinced of its own superiority would feel attracted to an ideological program centered around cultural chauvinism, racism, misogyny, and eugenicism.

What is the best concept to describe this toxic mix? John Ganz has – quite convincingly, I believe – insisted for a while that what we are seeing is a form of “reactionary modernism.” (Opens in a new window) The historian Jeffrey Herf (Opens in a new window) coined that term in the 1980s as a way to capture the particular fusion of technological futurism and reactionary politics in Nazi Germany. I find the concept extremely helpful here to capture the fact that we are dealing with tech euphoria not in service of a progressive socio-political vision but aligned with a project that seeks to entrench and re-impose hierarchies.

Speaking of Nazi Germany: When the Palantir manifesto dropped, many observers called it tech fascism – and that included some prominent figures like political scientist Cas Mudde (Opens in a new window) who has generally been opposed to applying the fascism term to the American Right. I believe there are a lot of good arguments for employing this concept and placing the political and intellectual project of the tech barons in that particular historical tradition. Elon Musk may be the shrillest among them (Opens in a new window), but he is by no means alone in his fixation on the decline of “Western civilization,” the fear of “Great Replacement,” the eugenicist obsession with the decline of white birth rates, the paranoid raging against a leftist “enemy within” that is destroying the nation. 

There are, on the other hand, tensions between the tech billionaire vision and what we might call the tenets of European Ur-fascism. Fascist regimes were happy to let private business thrive – as long as they were able to subjugate capital and impose what they insisted were the demands of the nation. Are today’s tech titans on board with such a configuration? Alex Karp envisioning a kind of fusion of big tech and an authoritarian government in service of defending American supremacy suggests they are accommodating.

The relationship between the Silicon Valley elite and the nativist camp within the MAGA coalition has, at times, been contentious. It feels like ages ago now, but shortly before Trump returned to the White House, there was an early “MAGA civil war” when Steve Bannon went after Musk (Opens in a new window) and MAGA activists like Laura Loomer were raging against the tech oligarchs. In a narrow sense, they quarreled over work visas (Opens in a new window). The tech lords maintained they should have unfettered access to cheap labor – if that brings a few brown people into the country, who cares? Again, the rightwing tech titans are eugenicists who strongly believe in racialized and gendered hierarchies. But they also believe the nation must make allowances for their business interests; they want to combine robust American supremacy with the ability to do as they please across and beyond national boundaries. Musk is not generally opposed to foreigners being here working for him for little money and with little rights; he is opposed to any political project of egalitarianism.

Then again, an important reason why there is no comprehensive, universally accepted definition of fascism is that even in the European interwar period, “fascism” was not one coherent thing: It was full of contradictions, and every fascist movement or regime consisted of different factions and an amalgam of ideological variants. Fascist movements also existed within broader alliances of far-right and reactionary forces – the military, the church, capital, the nobility… As a political reality and regime, fascism was not a monolith, but an alliance, and it is certainly plausible to conceptualize the pro-MAGA tech billionaires as a faction in that alliance. 

Whatever specific label you land on to describe the ideology that is now pervasive among the tech billionaires, here is the key takeaway: Much of the Silicon Valley elite is now firmly aligned with the Far Right. They are genuinely committed to a political project defined by its disdain for egalitarian pluralism and centered around an aggressive opposition to modern democracy.

Why now? A tale of elite self-vicitmization

The tech billionaires who are supporting Trump are now openly aligned with authoritarianism. Their journey to this place of aggressively joining the assault on democracy is not adequately described as a departure or aberration from a previously stable liberal-democratic conviction. It is better understood as the result of an activation and exacerbation of long-standing anti-democratic tendencies and reactionary sensibilities.

But that leaves us with the question: Why now? How and why are these impulses being activated – what, exactly, has triggered this process of radicalization? The best answer to that question we find not so much with Peter Thiel, who has been a hardened rightwing authoritarian for some time, but with the people who have gone from maintaining a low political profile to eagerly joining the reactionary assault, from presenting themselves as “liberal” to publicly changing sides.

Enter Marc Andreessen. That is precisely the trajectory he has been on – and he has been talking nonstop about why he had absolutely no choice, as he sees it, to break right. This is where the almost pathological desire of these tech titans to share their thoughts on any and all matters is helpful. In January 2025, for instance, Andreessen sat down with Ross Douthat, the New York Times’ resident apologist for the Far Right, to talk about, as the interview was titled “How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms.” (Opens in a new window) I would like to implore all of you to read this interview. I will try my best, but I am telling you it is impossible to transport Andreessen’s bizarre view of the world that is, at times, utterly detached from empirical reality. It perfectly captures what is going on in the minds of billionaires who believe they have no other choice – none! – but to support extremism.

Andreessen became famous as a young man when he developed, among other things, the Netscape web browser in the mid-1990s. He was an icon of the early internet age. He is a major venture capitalist today. And until quite recently, he had a track record of supporting the Democratic Party, of considering himself and being considered as a liberal Democrat. Now, he is all in on Trump.

Andreessen’s own account of how he arrived at this point goes something like this: In the 1990s, he claims, there was a Deal – he refers to it constantly: the capital-D “Deal” – between Silicon Valley and the liberal elite / the leaders of the Democratic Party: The tech visionaries were “bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place,” and for that wonderful gift, they not only made tons of money, but had a right to be revered and admired. Over the past ten to fifteen years, however, leftwing radicals in politics and society have abandoned that Deal. Democrats, Andreessen argues, declared war on capitalism at some point over the past decade, the Biden government unleashed an “incredible terror campaign” against business leaders; meanwhile, “woke” radicals infiltrated the companies in an attempt to destroy them from the inside. Andreessen and his fellow billionaires found themselves squeezed and under siege from both above and below: “You’ve got the activists coming at you, and then you’ve got the government coming at you.” In this situation, the tech elites had no alternative but to unite with Trump against “the Left” in an act of utter self-preservation.

Underlying Andreessen’s fantastical tale is a story of real historical change. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, in particular, we have moved past the height of the neoliberal consensus. The Biden government was, for instance, significantly more pro-union than previous Democratic administrations. And compared to the 1990s, Andreessen’s nostalgic golden era when center-left parties and politicians were happily praying at the altar of big tech, the general mood is certainly a little less accommodating today.

For Andreessen, a little less unquestioning worship equals persecution. The government “absolutely tried to kill us,” he declares – “They just killed companies left, right, and center.” And after “killing” crypto, “they” were supposedly gearing up to “kill A.I.” That was the final straw for Andreessen, personally. Here is a man who is convinced he has been victimized so much that he just couldn’t take it anymore. This sort of elite self-vicitimization is everywhere: Victims of the “woke mind-virus,” as Musk keeps yelling; victims of the “pagan religion” of “wokeism,” as Alex Karp puts it (Opens in a new window): “Who’s the sacrifice? Me, I’m the sacrifice.”

You would think that if the government actually waged such as brutal “terror campaign” against the tech billionaires, Andreessen might be able to cite one actual law, one specific regulation… but he cannot. Similarly, when he rages against the “social revolution” among his employees caused by the “Great Awokening,” the empirical evidence he presents is rather lacking. It is certainly true that tech companies have faced increased scrutiny from within. Tesla, for instance, has been criticized for an internal culture of racism and sexual harassment (Opens in a new window). But, again, through the bizarro-prism of Andreessen’s tale, you’d think there was a full-on pogrom against business elites. “Multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees,” Andreessen tells Douthat – only he can’t name a single concrete example. What actually happened is that Andreessen got in hot water with his own HR departments for elevating white men only: “These extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team.” For someone like Andreessen, that sort of insolence must not be tolerated! 

Why was all this happening inside his own companies all of a sudden? Andreessen blames the universities for “radicalizing” young people, for turning them into “radical Marxists,” for teaching them “how to be America-hating communists.” Young people arriving at his companies from Harvard, Andreessen claims, were only interested in revolution – their mindset was, as he puts it: “We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

It’s hard to read this and not think of the German industrialists of the 1930s justifying their decision to make common cause with Hitler. In their minds, they had no other choice – or so they wanted to claim. In Andreessen’s words: “The left wants revolution, and the right wants not the left.” That’s it.

There is no Communist revolution brewing in the United States today, of course – no Bolshevik government threatening the lives and livelihoods of private capital. But our tech elites are working hard to intellectualize their paranoid rantings and convince themselves that they are actually the noble defenders of freedom against tyranny. That is why James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (Opens in a new window) has become dogma among them. Published in 1941 by a famous former-Marxist-turned-conservative-intellectual, the book warned of capitalism’s imminent demise as a “managerial class” was about to take power across society and business. Burnham diagnosed the rise of a caste of educated experts and bureaucrats who dominated in company management and state institutions. Driven by a desire to rule, they would ultimately nationalize major industries and establish a totalitarian political regime. That, Burnham declared, was what had already happened in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. 

No one, in the United States today, is nationalizing industry. And yet, a quasi-totalitarian “woke” managerial class is precisely what Andreessen claims to be facing; Burnham has strongly influenced Curtis Yarvin’s conception of the “cathedral”; Yarvin’s ideas have been pushed by Peter Thiel’s networks and billions; and this is where we have come full circle, as Andreessen is now convinced he should have listened to Thiel much earlier, as his good friend Peter recognized the dangers of modern democracy a long time ago.

As we are discussing how to handle the latest technological innovations, perhaps the question we should be focusing on is not what the newest generation of AI can and cannot do, or how good the latest LLM is. The key question is: How much power can we allow the billionaires behind these technologies to accumulate as they are aggressively siding against modern democracy?  

Thank you for reading and thank you for listening – and please know that I am deeply grateful for your support and your generosity!