'If You Can Keep It': The World Tech Billionaires Want

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0:22Imagine if the U.S. weren't a democracy, but instead run like a corporation. The nation's leader would act as a CEO and would always have the final say. This is a world where countries are replaced by privately owned startups and technology renders democracy obsolete. It all sounds like the setup for a dystopian sci-fi movie. It's also a world of unchecked capitalism, and it's a world that some of the biggest leaders in the tech industry are trying to create. It is the goal of every founder, of every entrepreneur, it should be their goal to try to build a monopoly business. Most people believe that capitalism and competition are synonyms.

1:03I believe capitalism and competition are antonyms. That's PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Till. Earlier this month, we discussed why understanding the wealthy could be the key to understanding the economic and political tides in the U.S. And later this week, we're going to hear from historian Jill Lepore about the threat artificial intelligence poses to liberal democracy. I'm Jen White. And I'm Todd Zwilek. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. For today's installment of If You Can Keep It, our politics and democracy series, we dig into the motivations of America's tech billionaires, what they really want with our system of governance, and what it all means for us.

1:41That's coming up right after this short break. Stay with us.

1:48Support for this podcast and the following message come from Made in Cookware. President and co-founder Jake Halick shares why he was inspired by his family's fourth-generation kitchen supply business. Growing up in a commercial kitchen at home really opened my eyes to bringing what was cool in restaurants into your home. And when you think about what we do today, we are asking these chefs for product ideas. We are designing products together with them that we then realize a home cook can use as well. Learn more about Made in Cookware at M-A-D-E-I-N cookware.com. For the past 25 years, a rare Pacific ecosystem has been undisturbed.

2:27Now, the Trump administration is opening nearby waters to commercial fishing. American fishermen have never had a better ally in the White House than Donald Trump. This week on The Sunday Story, we discuss what's at stake for this wild ecosystem. Listen now to The Sunday Story from the Up First podcast on the NPR app. Welcome back to the 1A podcast. For the latest in our series, If You Can Keep It, we're talking about America's tech billionaires and how they play into U.S. politics. Joining us for this conversation in studio is Henry Farrell. He's the SNF Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University.

3:05He focuses on politics and technology. He's also author of Underground Empire, How America Weaponized the World Economy. Professor Farrell, welcome to the program. Thank you. Also with us is Gil Duran. He's a journalist and author of The Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Gil, welcome. Thank you. And Jacob Silverman. He's a journalist and the author of Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Jacob, it's great to have you. Thank you. Professor Farrell, I want to start with the big question of today's conversation, which is what do tech billionaires want with our democracy?

3:40And you argue that they fall into three or four different ideological buckets. What are those buckets? So I think there are people like Peter Thiel who genuinely believe that democracy is a bad idea. So he wrote a piece about 15, 12, 15 years ago where he suggested that democracy, once women and other people who believed in the welfare state had gotten the vote, that democracy and freedom were coming increasingly into conflict. So there are some ideologically driven people. There are other people who just see democracy as being something which is in their way. So we see a lot of people who see democracy as being something which is associated with government, associated with breaks upon their entrepreneurial energies as they see it.

4:23And finally, I think we have a number of people who are just aligned with the Trump administration because the Trump administration is there and is in power. And hence, given that they want to make sure that their interests prevail, they are very, very happy to go along with the program. There are, of course, some people in Silicon Valley like Reid Hoffman who are still, I think, committed to democracy. And I don't think that they're necessarily a minority, but their voice is not nearly as loud now as it used to be. So you have ideologues, you have people who see democracy as a burden, and then you have people who just see this as an opportunity.

5:03There's a moment of opportunity in the Trump administration. That's right. I think there are ideologics, impatient people, and opportunists. Jacob Silverman, you've said that tech billionaires, and this is a quote, don't believe in democracy. What did you mean by that? I think I meant exactly what I wrote there, which is that it is not really a value that they hold dear. I mean, in the case of someone like Peter Thiel, he's been much more explicit. Elon Musk, of course, has said things like he wants a Caesar-like figure for America. I just don't think it is a value that has really been preserved among the tech elite today, especially as they found that they can pour billions of dollars into elections here and charter cities abroad to try to undermine the rudiments of democracy.

5:50Gil, we'll talk about individual tech leaders in a moment. But when you look at Silicon Valley broadly, what are its major guiding principles? I'd say the major guiding principles are greed and disruption. In this case, the disruption of democracy. This is what Silicon Valley venture capitalists do. They bet on disruptive technologies, things that transform the world in some fundamental way and return a massive profit. profit. In this case, I think they're betting on Donald Trump as a technology to disrupt democracy and to give them everything they want in terms of no longer having to deal with rules, laws, regulations, or pesky voters who happen to be women and people of color.

6:35So I think that's what we're seeing here. And I agree that there are some of these billionaires who are not as enthusiastic as others. But I think what this moment is revealing is how cowardly the billionaires of Silicon Valley are. No one's really speaking out with great force against this. They're going to go along with whatever happens. If Donald Trump announces tomorrow that democracy is over, you'll see a lot of applause and a lot of silence among the Silicon Valley billionaire class. And I just want to mention really briefly here that we reached out to a number of people that you each name, and we didn't get responses from any of them.

7:06Gil, you mentioned that the titans of tech don't believe in democracy. It's greed and disruption that drives them. Is it fundamentally different from the Gilded Age robber barons of the past? We've dealt with this issue on the show before. You can look at the people who built the oil business or the railroad business go back. They all try to shape government and society to benefit themselves. Is there something fundamentally different in the philosophy driving tech now? They believe that they have the technology to completely outsmart and overpower everyone. Now, I think that's a difference. The railroads and other forms of wealth, the oil companies, were bad enough, and we had to have a whole slate of reforms in order to curtail their power.

7:48But these guys seem to think that they don't even have to be humans anymore. They can be transhuman with AI. They can live forever. They can become multi-planetary beings. So the delusions, I think we're seeing an outbreak of billionaire psychosis, their delusions of grandeur and power make them a lot more dangerous. And they do have a bit more power now. There's a lot more of them with a tremendous scale of wealth at a time when most Americans are falling way behind. These guys are just zooming, accelerating ahead, as they like to say in Silicon Valley. Well, that raises this question, Professor Farrell, of what it means for our democracy that the wealthiest people in the world and people who continue to gain wealth largely don't believe that our politics either serve them or that our politics should involve the participation of all citizens.

8:37So I think we're seeing a very interesting pushback over the last couple of months, which is really around the area of data centers. And I think that that pushback is happening because data centers are primarily, this is a story of local politics, and that is a place where people still have the ability to push back. So I think on the one hand, these people have huge amounts of money. You see Elon Musk saying that he's going to pour massive amounts of money into supporting one particular party during the next presidential election. But on the other hand, ordinary people have votes. And ordinary people, I think, a lot of people are very, very angry.

9:14So I think that we see the Silicon Valley billionaires, at least the ones who are vehemently pro-democracy, pushing in on the Trump side of the agenda and pushing in, I think, on the anti-democratic side of that particular story. We see, on the other hand, we see ordinary people mobilizing. and we see, I think, a degree of disconnect happening between the people who are thinking in Silicon Valley and thinking about what they can do and what is happening on the ground. Jasmine Sun, who's a journalist, did some fantastic work just talking to people in the various towns where data centres are going up and got the sense, I believe, that there is a much more complicated politics happening, which is not purely left versus right, but people on both sides of the agenda who really feel that they are in a place where they don't have power, they don't have voice, nobody seems to be listening to them, and data centers are becoming the kind of nexus through which these politics are getting expressed.

10:11Jacob, when I think about the early days of tech, when we talk about social media platforms like Facebook, like Twitter, there was this argument that these were pro-democracy spaces. These were places where people could share ideas and better connect to one another. But what I'm hearing from each of you is that the tech titans themselves have diverged from these ideas of democracy. So what drove the split from how social media platforms especially were sold to the public and how these tech leaders are actually exercising their power? Well, this actually gets to my first book that I have to remember what it was about, but in 2015 about social media and surveillance.

10:54And I think it was sold to us certainly as a democratizing and liberating force. but as we saw especially during the arab spring but the countervail or sort of countervailing narrative is that actually these dictatorial countries in the middle east many of them armed by the u.s were using social media to surveil their own populations and i think one thing we learned is that some of the original sins of the modern internet are basically surveillance and mass data collection and trying to run a digital economy based on those things is inherently sort of authoritarian. And I think one thing that we've seen in the last few years is that combining that attitude, I think, with this sense that none of these people want to be regulated, and they're increasingly pursuing bigger and bigger projects.

11:39We're talking about massive data centers. And these kinds of things are alienating to the public. It's not what people want out of the apps on their phone or the billionaires who are trying to control their lives. Coming up, Elon Musk spent nearly$300 million on the 2024 election. Now he's expected to spend$200 million this year across key races to boost the GOP. The implications of politics being pay to play for tech billionaires up next. Stay with us.

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13:31That and more of the week's big national security news on Sources and Methods. You can listen on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. Welcome back to the 1A podcast. For today's installment of our weekly politics series, If You Can Keep It, we unpack the motivations of specific tech billionaires, what they really want with our democracy, and what that means for all of us. We got this note from Leslie who says, How can anyone think government could be run as a business? What business has a military, prints their own money, is committed to the safety and rights of society, or pays for expenses by collecting money from citizens?

14:09One vision some of these tech titans have is to run the country like a corporation, Gil. What does that vision of a country look like from the perspective of the tech billionaires? And what would it mean for everyday Americans? We saw that with Doge, a destructive and chaotic effort to disassemble as much of the government as possible that failed in the end because government is not like a business. basically Musk tried to run the federal government like he ran Twitter, just pulling out wires and firing people willy-nilly, and it didn't work out. One thing the billionaires are is very stupid about things they don't know about, but they think they're geniuses at everything.

14:52And so if you've been in government, you know it's quite a complicated machine, and you don't want to just start ripping stuff out for no reason. A lot of these things were created for a very specific reason, to solve a problem that existed. And so if you want to know what government by corporation looks like, it's the idiocy and destructiveness of Doge. Well, let's stick with Elon Musk for a moment, Professor Farrell, of course, Tesla founder and the owner of X. What ideological bucket does Elon Musk fall into? What does he want with democracy? I think he wants democracy as a kind of a backdrop to his personal greatness.

15:29So the other thing that I think you need to realize about Silicon Valley is that a lot of these billionaires, they are bought into this idea of themselves as being the heroic people who are going to bring us to a new world. So, for example, if you read the IPO of SpaceX, this talks about how we are going to create a civilization which is capable of completely encasing the sun and using all of the sun's energy in order to multiply our ability to do things a trillion, trillion fold. I think that's probably the first major IPO that we have seen that really takes a ridiculous science fiction scenario and says this is our plan for the future.

16:10So I think that if you think about this from the point of view of people like Elon Musk, you know, they clearly are ideological in a very important sense. But I think in the end of the day, they really see all of democracy, all of politics, all of world history in a certain sense as being a stage upon which they can strut, upon which they can display their awesome capacity and a moment at which they can really transform the world and transform in a certain sense the galaxy and the universe as well so that humanity spills out into the universe. First, we have trillions and trillions and trillions of descendants, and these are the people who are bringing this through.

16:48So you really need, if you want to understand these people, you need to read a lot of 1950s, 1960s science fiction. This is what drives them. Well, we reached out to Elon Musk to request an interview or statement, but we didn't get a response. The offer stands. I think, Gil, we can talk about this sort of science fiction vision of the future for the United States and the world. But in real time right now, Elon Musk spent nearly$300 million in the 2024 election. He's expected to spend$200 million for Republican candidates this year across key races like in Texas. So why is he putting this amount of money to bolster the GOP?

17:25What does he think he can get from them specifically? He's trying to buy our system in order to break it. The GOP is largely controlled by Donald Trump's MAGA fascist cult. It's an authoritarian cult of personality in which Trump holds all the power and nothing he can do is wrong. And so they are trying to tap into that. They are investing in Trumpism as a way to break everything more quickly and get what they want. You notice this saying in Silicon Valley that's famous, move fast and break things. Well, they're trying to move fast and break democracy. And investing in today's Republican Party, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump family, is the best and fastest way to do that.

18:03But what is the benefit of chaos? That's something I've never really quite gotten about this Move Fast Break Things motto, Jacob, is chaos doesn't necessarily benefit people. You can lose money in chaotic times. You can also make money, true. People suffer in chaos. So what do they see benefiting not just themselves but also the public? Like if everyone, if our economy is in chaos and people don't have money to spend on the products they're selling, how do they benefit from that? Well, this might be misguided for them in a long-term sense. You have to kind of keep society safe for capitalism so that people aren't rising up in the streets.

18:47But they certainly see in-crisis opportunity. And Doge was a good example of that, where they tried to bring in a lot of AI and basically get contracts for all of Musk's friends and his own companies. And I think actually there's an email between Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein. I think they're talking about Brexit, but where they talk about how it's much easier when things fall apart to basically buy assets on the cheap. And I think because these guys are rich and because they are relatively powerful, they think that they can dismantle the rudiments of democracy or destroy some of our institutions.

19:24And from that rubble, they can build something new or they can sell contracts for their companies. And that's where they see themselves, I think, emerging as even more powerful. And apply a political science lens to that idea that there is opportunity in chaos. So there is opportunity in chaos, but as you say, there is chaos in chaos as well. And so if you looked at Silicon Valley maybe about a decade ago, I think the dominant ideology would certainly have been right-leaning in some ways, but it would have been very different. It would have been a classical liberal ideology, which suggests that we need to have markets and we need to have stable and regular institutions that support those markets.

20:01And now we see a number of people, including Elon Musk pretty explicitly in a tweet a couple of weeks ago, more or less abandoning that vision. So I think that to the extent that we see this model of disruption being brought out of markets and applied to the basic systems that we want and we need in order to run our country, in order to run the international economy, we're going to see Doge happening on a much bigger scale. We're going to see that same kind of idiotic, we can move in there, we can disrupt things. 80 % of this stuff is nonsense. 80 % of this stuff can be gotten rid of. And we're going to see a bunch of people having pulled out the wires and not having particularly any clue of how to fix this.

20:46Jacob, I'm curious what you think the conversations are like between tech billionaires and the Trump administration now. The unspoken contractor may be the explicit. Elon Musk spends$200 million two years ago and maybe$300 million in this election. The other way around,$200 million coming up in the midterms, he says. Jeff Bezos of Amazon dropped$40 million on the First Lady's documentary, $28 million of which went into her pocket, as is reported. Mark Zuckerberg donated$1 million to the inauguration fund. Mark Zuckerberg used to donate millions of dollars to pro-democracy, pro-election funds in states to help localities and states run elections.

21:27He doesn't do it anymore. He's run far from it. All of that is the backdrop to an ongoing conversation between these titans of industry and the Trump administration. What's the tacit conversation and the social contract, if I can call it that, between them now? Well, I think it's very transactional. I think with With someone like Zuckerberg, he certainly falls into the more opportunistic bucket of tech oligarchs, I think, that Professor Farrell was talking about. But, you know, he is someone who is glad to sort of stay out of the way, at least, and let MAGA do what they do. But I assume that the conversations with people like Elon Musk and some of the organizations he donates to are much closer.

22:11I mean, there was a good Wall Street Journal report a few weeks ago about one of Trump's chief fundraisers, how she basically calls up companies and shakes them down for donations. And, you know, this is actually one step forward, which is that a lot of these people are in business with the Trump administration or with the Trump family in one way or another, whether his family's crypto companies. Or now they, I mean, they have interest in everything from crypto to nuclear power to tungsten mines in Kazakhstan. stand. So I think these conversations are rather close. And also you have some of these big donors like Musk, their people, while Doge was this sort of catastrophic mess, they still have some of their people in the administration.

22:52So I think they're talking to people like David Sachs may have transitioned out, but these people who are either in the administration officially or having those regular meetings with Trump and his family. And I think they're asking, you know, what does the map look like? What do you guys need? Because they know that the benefits will flow to them, if not already, then after the midterms. And they also have a hand in shaping policy. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, was appointed to Trump's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to help shape national policy on AI. Let's go to our voicemail.

23:22Hi, my name's Shelley and I'm from Kentucky. And my question is, are there any current safeguards that could prevent America from having a tech oligarchy due to tech billionaires' means and wealth going into election campaigns, in addition to their ability to control algorithms and what we see during the election year. Professor Farrell? So I think that there are two things we can look to. One is voting. So as I say, there are a lot of people who go out there. There are a lot of people who are very, very unhappy with what is happening. And so if you are unhappy, you need to look at the candidates.

23:58and this is not necessarily a partisan thing. You need to figure out who are the candidates who are working in your interests and you need to vote for those candidates and you need to vote against the others. In the end of the day, money can help to shift perceptions in one way or another. Votes are what actually count. And the other thing that I think is important is that there are some clashes of interest between different factions of billionaires. And I think that the more that the wheels begin to come off, the more that people begin to worry about what might happen if the people who they support do not win in the midterms, the more that we are likely to see factionalism, backbiting, backstabbing, and all sorts of other things.

24:38And there may be opportunities to break some of the solidity of the block that appears at the moment. And actually, I'm sort of seeing some different perceptions, some different beliefs, some of the cowards perhaps coming out from cowering behind the parapets and actually showing themselves and pushing forward a little bit more strongly than they have. Gil Duran, Shelley raises another key point beyond just money and pouring it into political races. People like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, the second part of her point, they control some of the most powerful social media platforms in the world and also the algorithms that boost content, boost outrage, and have some large degree of control over what we see or at least how well-trafficked it is.

25:23What role does their control over the technology play beyond just the dollars and cents, the actual information dissemination? Oh, it's massive. And that's why Elon Musk bought X in order to exert control over this major algorithm that journalists spend a lot of their days on in recent years. And it's going beyond that. Now they're buying TV stations. CBS has been acquired by oligarchs, and they've installed someone completely incompetent who's right wing with no TV experience to run roughshod over the historic and legendary CBS news operation to try to take over CNN. So just like we see in other countries with oligarchs, control of the media is a key plank in this system of authoritarian capitalism.