Bezos' and Ellison's Politics, Newsom Drama, Charity Blues

Hi, I’m Teddy Schleifer, welcome back to The Stratosphere.
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Welcome back to The Stratosphere.

Today, I’m offering a wide-lens look at Silicon Valley’s evolving politics at a turning point for the country and the industry: Trump is out of office, 2024 is fast approaching, and tech’s biggest personalities are increasingly comfortable aligning themselves with the political right.

Further down, subscribers have full access to exclusive reporting that you will only find in this email: New dish on a last-minute super PAC from David Sacks & co. to beat Gavin Newsom; the favorite candidates of Ron Conway and London Breed; and the latest insider reporting on the next moves involving the powerful donor group, Mind the Gap.

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Bezos, Musk, Ellison, and the Rightward Lurch of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has always been declaratively liberal, particularly during the high times of the Obama era. But the political tenor has been quietly moving rightward for years, punctuated of late by the declarations of three of its heaviest heavies.

TEDDY SCHLEIFER

I’m not sure it’s ever been true that Silicon Valley, as Mark Zuckerberg put it during his umpteenth address before Congress, is “a very left-leaning place.” It is a seductive narrative for Republicans like Jim Jordan, and it is certainly a useful feint for people like Zuckerberg, himself. But it doesn’t pass the smell test. Silicon Valley may be somewhat culturally liberal, but its economic value system is as unmistakably conservative as Wall Street or Houston.

Steve Jobs dropped acid, but he also knew that he needed Foxconn to manufacture the iPhone. Sam Bankman-Fried, a top Democratic donor, makes his money from a scarcely regulated cryptocurrency exchange domiciled in The Bahamas. While the preponderance of tech executives took various stands against Donald Trump, they also welcomed his corporate tax cut. The industry was profoundly outraged when Trump moved to restrict H-1B skilled-worker visas, but Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax found few takers here.

And yet media commentators have often overlooked all of this, casting conservatives like Peter Thiel as aberrations in an otherwise unanimous Silicon Valley. To some extent that’s true: Most political donations from people in tech still go to Democrats, and the rank-and-file entrepreneurs certainly lean left, especially on issues like climate, immigration and abortion. But at the upper-most elite level, Thiel is an aberration primarily in that he spends real money on his convictions. There are plenty of center-right tech leaders these days—Marc Andreessen, John Chambers, Scott McNealy—as well as plenty of liberals who diverge from the progressive consensus in meaningful ways. Even Jack Dorsey, of the silent meditation retreats and Ferguson protests, has adopted more libertarian views on free speech....

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