U.S. President Donald Trump attends an event to honor Angel Families at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 23, 2026. REUTERS
President Donald Trump has close ties to Silicon Valley billionaires, relying on them to shape policy on everything from waging war against Iran and deregulating cryptocurrency to paving the way for rampant AI in American society.
“Multiple candidates backed heavily by Big Tech executives floundered in Tuesday’s primary elections, as concerns about the corrosive effects of new technologies such as artificial intelligence tools continue to mount,” reported MS NOW’s Ja’han Jones on Wednesday. “The clearest examples came in California, where tech executives spent ungodly amounts of money attempting to make sure their chosen candidates emerged victorious.”
Jones listed examples of how this happened including in the California gubernatorial primary, during which San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan went down to humiliating defeat despite being funded by tech executives like Google co-founder Sergey Brin and pro-Trump Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Jones also cited Ethan Agarwal, a tech investor who challenged Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) after being funded by pro-Trump Silicon Valley executive Marc Andreessen in large part by opposing Khanna’s proposed one-time 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires.
“The results bring to mind a discussion MS NOW hosts Michael Steele and Stephanie Ruhle had on primary election night, about the massive amounts of money Big Tech executives are shoveling out to reshape American politics,” Jones wrote. “Indeed, the issue of money in American politics is one that shouldn’t be ignored. At the same time, Tuesday’s losses by billionaire-backed candidates are a reminder that candidate quality and policy positions still matter to voters, who can (for now) outmatch deep-pocketed donors looking to put their thumb on the scale.”
Since returning to power in 2025, Trump has assiduously courted Silicon Valley’s most powerful billionaires, who have returned the favor by donating generously to Trump’s various causes and to pro-Trump candidates.
“As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, a fierce anti-intellectual spirit has long animated American culture, but it has typically targeted the knowledge elite from below,” The Nation's Elizabeth Spiers, a digital media strategist and writer living in Brooklyn, explained in April. “What’s striking about today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is that it infuses the American knowledge elite; it stems from the bedrock conviction among tech oligarchs that they have mastered everything and have nothing left to learn. In this cloistered vision of tech-driven learning, they believe that deep intellectual work—the kind you do when you author a complex piece of music, for example—has little or no inherent value.”
Spiers added, “Their disdain for it has fueled their attacks on higher education, the humanities, and learning for its own sake, which they believe has no purpose beyond its inevitable digitization and monetization.” She cited, as one example, Andreessen himself among others.
“The examples are everywhere” of their anti-intellectual tendencies, Spiers wrote. “[Palantir co-founder] Peter Thiel’s crusade against college attendance and his program that subsidizes high school students who want to forgo it, [venture capitalist] Marc Andreessen’s boasts that he actively avoids introspection, the gleeful prediction of Thiel’s Palantir colleague Alex Karp that AI will hurt educated women the most.”
Spiers added, “That all of these scourges of learning for learning’s sake are themselves beneficiaries of privileged educations doesn’t matter: As ardent monopolists, they’ve managed to believe they’ve cornered the market on critical thinking. Everyone else needn’t be troubled by the rigors of learning, since they exist solely to serve as drones in the tech regimes of the future.”
