The Strange Death of the Liberal Silicon Valley I Once Knew

For decades, Mark Lemley’s career as a leading intellectual property lawyer followed a steady, predictable script. A tenured professor at Stanford Law, he counted Amazon, Google, and Meta among his consulting clients, and for years he relished that his field operated largely outside the vicious partisan fray. “I always appreciated that the work I did stayed mostly apolitical,” Lemley explained to me. What’s more, his own progressive democratic values lined up neatly with the public stances of the tech giants that retained him.

But this past January, Lemley made a break few in Silicon Valley’s tight circle dared to copy. “I’ve been grappling with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s descent into toxic masculinity and normalized far-right extremism,” he wrote in a public LinkedIn post. “I have fired Meta as a client.”

This is Silicon Valley in 2025. Zuckerberg, now 41, has remade himself into a MAGA-friendly mixed martial arts enthusiast who has loosened restrictions on hate speech across his platforms, complains that corporate America has grown too unmasculine, abandoned third-party fact-checking for political content, and become a regular guest at Mar-a-Lago. And he is far from alone: a growing cohort of Silicon Valley’s billionaire founders and CEOs now prioritize their companies’ bottom lines over the public good.

When I met Lemley at his Stanford office this past July, he looked ready for a summer getaway in a bright Hawaiian shirt. In the six months since he cut ties with Meta, almost no other influential Silicon Valley figures have followed his lead. Privately, many tell him they applaud the move. Publicly? They vanish. Lemley has even started planning for what could come next if persecution of anti-Trump voices escalates. “Everyone I’ve spoken to has an exit strategy mapped out,” he says. “Could I get citizenship in this country or that? We’re all asking that question.”

This should be the golden age for Silicon Valley, supercharged by the global AI boom that has minted new billionaires and sent valuations soaring. Instead, a dark cloud has settled over the region. The tech community still leans overwhelmingly progressive, but with only a handful of exceptions, its top leaders are responding to Donald Trump’s second term by either staying silent or actively currying favor with the new administration. One indelible image of this capitulation came at Trump’s second inauguration, where a large contingent of tech’s elite, after dutifully writing seven-figure campaign checks, sat front and center for the ceremony.

“Everyone in business fears retaliation, because this administration is openly vindictive,” says venture capitalist David Hornik, one of the few prominent voices willing to speak out against the new alignment. So Silicon Valley’s elite are performing a dangerous dance with an unpredictable White House—or as Michael Moritz, one of Silicon Valley’s most legendary venture capitalists, put it to me: “They’re just doing their best to avoid getting shaken down in a protection racket.”

Take Tim Cook as a case in point. In May, the Apple CEO skipped an 8,000-mile trip to join Trump’s presidential delegation to the Middle East. Trump noticed. Speaking from Qatar, the president said he had “a little problem” with Cook, and threatened a 25 percent tariff on all imported iPhones the very next day.

Unsurprisingly, when I reached out to several of Silicon Valley’s top CEOs this summer to offer them a chance to speak on background, very few took the offer. Vacations stretched on longer than usual. Calendars were supposedly so packed that no open slot could be found for three, four, even six weeks out… when exactly was my deadline again? One CEO famous for talking endlessly to reporters told me he was trying to “decompress” from political talk. “But any time you want to talk AI or AI agents, just let me know!” he said.

It wasn’t always this way. Once, when tech leaders fell short of the industry’s own stated progressive values, rank-and-file employees kept them honest. Google workers famously pressured executives to double down on diversity commitments and walk away from controversial military contracts. The implicit threat was simple: activist employees could easily find work at another firm if leadership refused to bend.

Then Elon Musk bought Twitter (renamed X) and fired 80 percent of its staff—and the app did not collapse. That changed the calculus across the entire industry. Diversity initiatives have been scaled back, while military contracts are on the rise. In an April 2024 memo to Google employees, CEO Sundar Pichai told staff not to “use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.” Inside Meta, open political expression is also out of favor, one current employee told me: the culture feels like it did in the 1990s. “You left your politics at the door when you came to work,” they explained. “You might not like the boss, but you do your job to get your paycheck. Good luck finding a company that isn’t like that now.”

What has happened to Silicon Valley? How did the industry’s once counterculture-rooted leaders end up as Donald Trump’s most eager enablers? How did one of the Valley’s most high-profile venture capitalists publish a manifesto declaring war on “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” and “social responsibility”? What was the point of Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post, as he claimed, to serve the public good, only to gut its planned 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris and reframe the paper’s opinion section around editorials pushing “personal liberties and free markets” right before voters went to the polls? And speaking of Cook: how is it that the head of a $3.4 trillion company’s most effective political move is to walk into the Oval Office and ceremonially present Trump with a gaudy glass-and-gold knickknack?

This is Apple, after all. Who knows what Cook—a man far more aligned with progressive values than MAGA ideology—was thinking as he stood before Trump unboxing one of the most obsequious products in the company’s 50-year history. Would Steve Jobs have done the same? My guess: he would have had his team send over a gold-plated iPod. And marked it COD.

Ever since Jobs began selling the first sleek Apple II computers, digital technology has been billed as America’s greatest pride and its future. In its own nerdy, countercultural way, Silicon Valley once prided itself on speaking truth to power. But today, says Rob Reich, Stanford professor of the social ethics of science and technology, “an extraordinarily tiny group of billionaires who control the global information ecosystem have aligned themselves with the most consequential and dangerous political power in the world. There has never been a moment in history where those two forces have been combined like this.”

In one perverse way, this shift is good for me as a reporter who covers this ecosystem and its oligarchs: what could be more compelling than reporting on a historic realignment? But in every other way, it is deeply unsettling. I’ve covered this industry for decades, and my storytelling has evolved alongside it. But one thing caught me completely off guard: how quickly and completely the visionaries I once chronicled aligned themselves with Trump, a man whose values violently contradict the egalitarian spirit that defined the digital revolution. How did I miss this shift? I went back to my old beat, a place that now feels suddenly unrecognizable, to find answers.

For the first 30 years of my life, I never touched a computer. I saw those machines—mostly bulky mainframes clacking away in rooms I never entered—as a dehumanizing force. I linked them to the Vietnam war machine and the soul-crushing monotony of corporate life. That all changed in the early 1980s, when I took an assignment to write about the emerging hacker culture for Rolling Stone.

To my shock and delight, I discovered the burgeoning personal computer industry was a nerdy descendant of the late 1960s political and cultural counterculture. Many of the first computer startups grew out of the Homebrew Computer Club, organized by an antiwar activist. The club’s moderator had led the technology wing of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Even Bill Gates got his start as a sort of cannabis-smoking rebel; his partner Paul Allen was a music obsessive who adored Jimi Hendrix. Apple cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were still fresh out of their shaggy-haired days selling “blue boxes” that let people make free long-distance calls. The mantra was simple: screw the phone company!

I fell in love with Silicon Valley right then. The innovators I met were changing the world with tools built to lift people up—to give ordinary people the same power once reserved for experts. The electronic spreadsheet was sold as a business tool, but it was ultimately an antiestablishment weapon: anyone with a low-cost PC could challenge the calculations of the executive suite. When Mitch Kapor, a former transcendental meditation teacher, founded Lotus Development Corporation, which popularized the spreadsheet in the 1980s, he told his lead investor that he valued people more than profits, and wanted to prioritize investing in his employees. “I was prepared for him to say no,” Kapor told me. Fortunately for Kapor, the investor agreed.

In Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad for the Macintosh, an athlete hurls a hammer at a Big Brother figure on a screen, intent on destroying authoritarian power. The headline of my Rolling Stone story about the Mac said it all: “The Whiz Kids Meet Darth Vader.” (Darth was IBM, for the record.) This was a righteous battle against the old guard.

Of course, Silicon Valley was never all countercultural idealism and psychedelic liberalism. “For all that it likes to flatter itself with counterculture roots, making money and accumulating power has always been the mainstream of this industry,” Kapor says. And it has always had a strong libertarian undercurrent to its politics.

But even venture capitalists caught the revolutionary spirit—it was as if the 1960s radicals had traded bombs for IPO road shows. When the internet arrived, it supercharged that ideological energy. In his iconic 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” my friend John Perry Barlow argued that the internet transcended terrestrial laws and national borders. “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us,” he wrote.

Oh, how we pinned our hopes on the promise of the internet. When I first met Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they were wide-eyed idealists building a better search engine. Jeff Bezos came off as an approachable everyman, eager to point out that Amazon employees, himself included, built their desks out of repurposed wooden doors instead of expensive new office furniture. After my first conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, he went home to a tiny apartment with no furniture at all.

Then the internet giants scaled up, and eventually imposed their own rules of expression, identity, and power on the world. Those once humble founders reaped unimaginable wealth. Today, they can’t flaunt their fortunes enough: multiple mansions, private yachts, private jets.

On a typically mild July day, I met with Russell Hancock, who leads the think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley, in the living room of his Palo Alto home. He bought it during the 2000 tech crash; today, you can’t even buy a small shack in Palo Alto without multi-generational wealth. Page and Zuckerberg, unsatisfied with a single home, have bought up dozens of adjacent properties, turning once quiet, idyllic neighborhoods into gated billionaire compounds.

“The people at the top are doing incredibly well, they’re having a fantastic time,” Hancock says. For everyone else in Silicon Valley, the wealth gap has grown more punishing and absurd by the year. When Apple went public in 1980, Steve Jobs’ net worth hit an almost unheard-of $100 million. Today, Zuckerberg reportedly offers top AI researchers that same sum for a single year of work. Hancock cites the Gini coefficient, the standard measure of income inequality, to put the shift in perspective: since the 1990s, “we went from 30 on the Gini to 83,” he says. “Those are the conditions that led to the French Revolution.”

Another massive shift has unfolded over the past two decades. For most of its history, says Chris Lehane, a former Bill Clinton White House staffer who has worked for companies including Airbnb and OpenAI, software “was almost like a fourth dimension.” Tech leaders could stay out west and stay out of national politics. But then software products started upending entire sectors of the economy. “These products became physically present in taxis, short-term rentals, and food delivery,” Lehane says, “and they kept bumping up against existing political systems, values, and laws.” Sometimes that disruption killed people. Longstanding local businesses closed. Local politicians got angry. To navigate the new landscape, Silicon Valley waded straight into Washington’s political swamp. As one technologist who now works in the Trump administration told me: “The Valley finally figured out it can’t ignore politics, because politics won’t ignore you.”

It is no wonder the public grew cynical about the apps they couldn’t stop using. By the mid-2010s, protesters were attacking the private shuttle buses that carried tech workers from San Francisco to their offices in Mountain View and Menlo Park, where employees sipped lattes in office micro-kitchens, got midday massages, and debated provocative left-wing politics.

Perhaps the original pioneers of the PC and internet were just too successful for their own good. “We overdid it,” says Andy Hertzfeld, a programming legend who helped build the original Macintosh. “We were so idealistic: we thought everyone should have a computer, and we should make them lovable and fun.” The result, he laments, is a dystopia of phone-addicted teenagers and even the death of the traditional homework essay.

In the end, the big tech companies became exactly what the original countercultural rebels hated: the new Phone Company—pernicious behemoths that deliberately degrade their products to squeeze out more profit. You can’t even get a human customer service representative on the line these days. In a 2024 survey of Silicon Valley residents, three-quarters of respondents said tech companies hold too much power; nearly as many said the industry has lost its moral compass.

That’s why, even before Donald Trump first entered the White House in 2017, I noticed the narrative of my coverage had shifted. I used to tell the story of David versus Goliath, of plucky innovators taking on the old guard. Now I was writing the legend of Icarus. I kept seeing the same hubris in the tech elite, and that hubris led them straight to Donald Trump.

History may remember Joe Biden as the frail, stumbling incumbent in his final presidential debate. But a shockingly large share of Silicon Valley’s elite view him as a progress-hating tyrant. I was stunned by the sheer intensity of their hatred for Biden.

Lehane, the former Clinton White House spokesperson, says the Biden administration and its agencies neither understood the tech industry nor cared much about it, “other than potentially trying to stop new technology from being developed.” The top villains of the Biden era for tech leaders were FTC chair Lina Khan and DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter, who systematically filed antitrust suits against Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta. Khan blocked even modest mergers, threatening the entire startup ecosystem, where smaller companies rely on acquisitions to deliver returns to founders and investors.

Biden’s team makes a reasonable case: those companies do hold monopoly power, after all. And look at what happened to design platform Figma after the FTC scrutinized its planned merger with Adobe: two years later, it pulled off a blockbuster IPO.

But one of Biden’s biggest, most avoidable mistakes may have been his failure to invite Elon Musk to a 2021 summit for electric vehicle manufacturers. The widely cited reason was to keep the United Auto Workers happy, though the White House later claimed a dispute over EV policy cost Musk his seat at the table. Even Reid Hoffman, one of the few tech billionaires who openly opposes Trump, calls that decision insane. “You should invite the electric vehicle leader to the electric vehicle summit!” he says. “That was part of what radicalized Elon.”

That was at least part of the public story of how Musk, who had previously donated to Democratic candidates, shifted to full MAGA. Other theories include radicalization during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the state of California forced his Tesla plant to shut down; radicalization via Twitter, surrounded by too many sycophantic followers; or simply that he was always prone to extreme views. Regardless, he got to work boosting right-wing content on X (especially his own posts), loudly supporting Trump, and donating nearly $300 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign. It used to be that “if you were Republican, or you said you were anti-tax, you had to go into hiding,” says Ryan Petersen, CEO of logistics firm Flexport. “Elon made it safe for everyone to come out.”

Another Biden mistake, in the eyes of tech leaders, was his administration’s hard line on crypto. According to one top crypto executive I spoke to, the trouble started after one of the Democrats’ biggest funders, crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, was exposed as a massive fraudster. “It was an enormous embarrassment for the Democrats,” the executive told me. “So what do you do when you’re humiliated? You overreact.”

Before the FTX scandal, the industry and regulators had been having a constructive debate about regulation. But the SBF affair reinforced the hard line that SEC chair Gary Gensler chose to take. (Gensler declined to be interviewed, though he did tell me to “keep up the good work at WIRED!”) Crypto leaders also blame Senator Elizabeth Warren, who they see as a key backer of Gensler’s crackdown. The crypto industry poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s 2024 campaign. By mid-2024, Trump—who once called cryptocurrency a fraud—was speaking at a major Bitcoin conference, promising to fire Gensler and turn the U.S. into “the crypto capital of the planet.”

Even Biden’s AI policy ended up pushing more tech leaders to the right. For a time, the field’s top figures were happy to debate new regulations. But then AI exploded into the mainstream, and companies needed massive infrastructure investments—and far less restrictive rules to grow. And Trump was ready to give them what they wanted. “In terms of him as a human being or a visionary, nobody’s a big Trump fan,” says Peter Leyden, an author and former WIRED editor working on a book about technological progress. “But then AI hits—it’s game time. So they decided, ‘Fuck it, we’re gonna hook our wagon to this crazy-ass Trump.’”

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has complained bitterly on his podcasts about Biden’s policies on antitrust, AI, and