Jennifer O'Connell: Silicon Valley’s tech bros bet everything on Trump. What will they do now?

Spare a thought this week for Silicon Valley’s broligarchy – the tech titans who prostrated themselves so low before Donald Trump in the aftermath of the 2024 election that they’ll be seeing a chiropractor for years. In the coming weeks, as they desperately try to resurrect their inner Democrat and reverse the precipitous falls in their share prices, it’ll be worth reminding ourselves of a few things. Chief among these are the tech dollars that poured into Donald Trump’s inauguration fund in 2025 courtesy of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI chief Sam Altman, Apple boss Tim Cook and Google. Cook went one better – like a modern-day wise man paying homage to baby Jesus, he arrived at the Oval Office armed with gold, presenting the new president with a glass disc mounted on a solid 24-carat gold base, engraved with both men’s names. Bezos made an offering he deemed even better than gold, frankincense or myrrh – he sent Trump a selfie with his then-fiancee Lauren Sanchez. Over dinner with Trump, Bezos moaned about the Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, like it was his recalcitrant teenage offspring. “The people there are terrible,” Bezos said. “They don’t listen.” Amazon spent $35 million (€31 million) promoting the impressively bad “documentary” Melania. READ MOREPerhaps the most craven of all was Zuckerberg. Trump threatened in 2020 to jail the Meta boss “for the rest of his life” if he was elected again. After the 2024 election, Zuckerberg – taking no chances – sent Trump a letter his daughter, then aged about 8, had written to the president, in which the remarkably precocious child shared how much she was “looking forward to the golden age of America”. But while this isn’t all that surprising from Zuckerberg – whose moral core seems forged out of Playdoh – the most puzzling broligarch conversion was that of Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir. The one-time socialist wrote his PhD dissertation on the rhetoric of fascism, which he has said many times “terrifies” him. He supported Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris in 2024. Yet sometime over the following year he underwent a mysterious conversion that would see Palantir donate $1 million to Maga and Karp himself personally give $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee. Palantir worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to target people for Trump’s mass deportation campaign, helping Trump conduct a mass surveillance campaign of Americans that a cynic might say had a distinctly fascist flavour.Nobody was more tickled by Zuckerberg and Bezos “kissing my ass” than Trump himself, according to a book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Regime Change. “Think of where these guys were in 2016,” the book recounts Trump sneering to Elon Musk about Zuckerberg and Bezos. “They hated me. They were doing everything they could to knock me down. And look at them now.”“First-class grovelling,” Musk, who would know a thing or two about it, replied.[ Republican downfall: The inside story of Team Trump’s midterm collapseOpens in new window ]Musk himself spent $446 million trying to get Republicans elected in the midterms (0.04 per cent of his net worth, or the equivalent of about €100 to you and me, but a lot of money to throw away nonetheless). He burned $150 million supporting Ken Paxton, who wanted Texas - Musk’s new home - to become a hub for data centres. In what would emerge as a recurring theme of the midterms, Paxton lost to James Talarico, who is promising much tighter regulation of them. Oh, and he wants to “tax trillionaires out of existence”.What did the broligarchs get in return for these efforts? Expect the Democrats to make finding out a top priority now they’re back in control of Congress. Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, warned that “they are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing”. Some of it is already known. The administration took a hands-off approach on AI regulation and Trump signed executive orders to speed up permission for data centres. Democrats will almost certainly want to know more about contracts awarded to defence technology firms and manufacturing and mining companies, as well as companies with ties to Donald Trump jnr and Musk and his Doge service.What is remarkable is not even that the tech bros didn’t appear to foresee an end to Trumpism. It’s that, for all the effort they put into harvesting our data and anticipating our every move, they overlooked the possibility that voters might choose to reject AI – a technology its own creators keep warning will guzzle power and water, potentially go rogue and hack into our private data, wipe out millions of jobs and livelihoods and may even, or so they keep saying, kill all of humanity. Perhaps that’s what happens when you run a company that treats human beings as a commodity; you tend to forget they have minds of their own.They’re getting a loud reminder now. Many saw a sudden drop in their personal fortunes on Thursday as investors sold out of AI and chip stocks, driving the Nasdaq down more than 5.5 per cent. In an NBC exit poll, 56 per cent of voters said data centres and AI were “a crucial or major” factor in their vote in the midterms and more than three in four said they would oppose a data centre in their community. Talarico characterised the vote as a referendum on “the billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians”.[ Democrats routed Republicans in the US midterms. But can they capitalise on it?Opens in new window ]In the coming weeks, as the strength of voter feeling on the issue crystallises, expect to see lots of Democrats appointed to tech company boards and the role of “chief diversity officer” to once again become the fastest growing job sector on LinkedIn. The only Silicon Valley value that seems to be immutable is that ideology comes second to self-interest.