Thanks for your coverage of what is IMO a salient moment--even an inflection point--in our current despotic spasm. One thing I keep thinking about, though, which you might also be thinking about, is that both Trump's and Musk's perspectives are relatively narrow, even constrictive, arising as they do from specialized, narrow experience. You see this among aging politicians in general, and also, I strongly suspect, among the tech bros. Intelligent as they are I think both groups are suffering from their respective blinders and immediate needs. Such short-sighted thinking ignores a fact of evolutionary change, which is that it's often multi-factoral, non-linear, and serendipitious, hence predictable only in uncertain ways, which suggests that leaving some room in our planning for the future for scope to allow these forces to flourish. It also suggests we might well opt for less bombast and more humility across the board from our leaders. In closing I'd like to add that electing leaders familiar with both Silicon Valley insights and perspectives as well as those of the
'rest of us' might prove extremely useful in the near term and perhaps from here on out.
Unlike one of the commenters below, I didn't know what to make of this piece. It has a rambling, even desultory, quality to it. The brittle, gossipy early part is already, quite possibly, stale because we heard early this morning that the two leviathans are moving towards an armistice of sorts.
But it was Mounk's reference to the MAGA base that is "irreconcilably" opposed to the Silicon vision but also to the GOP vision represented by the budget bill with its huge handouts that baffled me. The MAGA base is not the Appalachian Forgotten Man of Trump's first term and probably never was even then.
It should be clear that the MAGA base is the Tea Party slice of the population, now better organized. They are the self-employed, the S-Corp, the small businessmen, the private and closely-held companies, the reticent regional capital, who love tax cuts, hate all welfare programs, loathe wokeness and any kind of justice (and they have this in common with Yascha Mounk) and actually venerate billionaires because they hope to become one in the future. So no irreconcilability there at all. And this is why these two grotesque players will patch things up and move on.
Even on the matter of the elite universities there is no daylight between them. Silicon Valley is still predominantly Dem-supporting and pro-liberal education. But the VC and crypto crowd is resolutely pro-Trump and hostile to elite institutions. (A similar parallel is found in finance. Bankers are mostly Democrats, while the PE and HF crowd leans pro-Trump. A possible explanation can be found in the ethnicity of the pro-Trump groups, but I won't go into that here.)
Musk's dislike of universities is only in part due to their supposed wokeness, though it could also be that he was academically a mediocre student. It is because he believes in "learning by doing", rather than the formal learning in the controlled environment found in universities. And the VC crowd is with him on that. (Hence, their embrace of Curtis Yarvin, who wants to put tech businessmen on Mount Olympus.) And here too the MAGA base, as I have described it here, is with them all the way.
Thanks for the thoughtful pushback. I agree—this isn’t about some forgotten Appalachian voter clinging to promises of factory revival. That myth always served as emotional cover for a donor-driven power play. The real MAGA base, as you rightly point out, looks a lot more like the Tea Party’s remixed sequel: self-employed, grievance-fed, anti-tax, anti-regulation, and deeply allergic to any language of collective responsibility. They don’t resent the billionaires—they aspire to be one, or at least imagine themselves temporarily embarrassed future members of that club.
As for “irreconcilability”—you nailed it. There’s none. Silicon Valley’s self-styled rebels and MAGA’s “anti-elite” crusaders speak the same dialect of deregulation, dominance, and disdain for democratic norms. The rhetoric differs, but the goals align. They don't want government to work better—they want it to get out of the way while they rewire it.
So yes, peace will be made between Musk and the movement—not in spite of their similarities, but because of them.
Good post, but you should have put your parenthetical after "loathe wokeness." Insinuating that Yascha loathes "any kind of justice" is, in itself, an injustice.
Went is as a new comment by mistake but....duly noted. I should have put that word in inverted commas since I was not referring to justice-as-fairness in any abstract Rawlsian sense but in its modern, expanded use to include the structural and group basis of injustices, namely racial, gender, climate, etc., on which YM has made it amply clear where he stands.
"The leaders of Silicon Valley grew deeply frustrated with the left’s instinctive hostility to technological progress, taking particular umbrage at the fact that mainstream outlets like the New York Times often covered significant innovations like breakthrough rocket launches by focusing on minor environmental impacts. They came to loath the way in which woke ideology undermined meritocracy, worrying that it would make it harder to find the talent they needed to succeed. And they started to worry about the ballooning federal budget, which might sap the competitiveness of American companies in the near future."
Yascha has swallowed the self-serving justfications of tech bro creeps Andreasson, Zuck, Musk, et al. whole, it seems.
In fact they've revealed themselves as petulant, fragile egos, who, like Wall Street honchos re: Obama, can't stand being critiqued even mildly after being lauded as hero entrepreneurs.
And btw, green energy has a big honking component of left cheerleading for tech progress built into it, does it not? Recognizing the devastations unfettered social media and 'breaking shit' have wrought does not constitute thoroughgoing hostility to 'technological progress'
It's impossible to tell but it seems very likely that Trump and his movement will go the way of Nixon. Then perhaps all his lovers and haters can turn attention from him to focus on: Ukraine, Israel, Iran, a global spike in atavistic and savage antisemitism, identity politics and the resulting regression and degeneration of racial and sexual politics, complete degradation of the traditional free press throughout developed nations, 20 years of misguided policy responses to global warming predictions, sudden onset of US-China conflict, maturation of western de-industrialization and sweeping demoralization of disenfranchised workers, over-reliance on threatened Taiwan, Russia as an economically weak but militarily powerful authoritarian state with historical axe to grind, fifty years and counting of overspending by developed nations, impending monetary and debt crisis throughout the west exacerbated by ten years of near zero interest rates capped with blowout spending binges during covid, energy and commodity policies in chaos with no political will to rationalize it, utter degradation of US education, health care in the west outpacing baseline inflation for half a century and now at an inflection point of crisis, global migration/immigration policies and politics driven by purely emotional thinking and cynical politics, a historic tech-driven inflection point in military weapons and tactics, two generations of indoctrinated university graduates just when new leaders will be needed as the unipolar order collapses and the emergence of AI with no idea what it means and how to deal with it. And a partridge in a pear tree.
That was clear, thank you. I always thought that the link between the Tech World and the MAGA World made no sense to start but now I understand how it happened and why it is failing. That is good. Now we only have to deal with MAGA
This piece lays out the Trump–Musk split in rich detail, but the diagnosis gets muddled. It treats the breakup like a tragic misunderstanding between two men with grand but incompatible visions. That’s generous.
The truth is simpler: both Trump and Musk were using each other. Musk wanted to hack the federal government like it was a sluggish startup—and push government contracts toward his own companies while he was at it. Trump wanted to launder his image through association with someone who still pretends to build things. Neither had any real interest in governing—only in spectacle, leverage, and self-promotion.
It’s no surprise the alliance collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity. Musk believed he could streamline government without understanding it. Trump believed he could modernize his brand without modernizing his policies. Meanwhile, MAGA voters never cared about abundance, H-1Bs, or Mars—they want grievance politics, not governance.
This wasn’t the “vibe shift of the century.” It was a transaction gone bad between two egos who mistook applause for a mandate.
The problem with "what Americans want" is that people are acting based on feelings rather than facts in the first place. That leads to demands and expectations that are impossible and unreasonable, just as regarding the failure of romantics.
It would be awesome if Silicon Valley moguls would go away completely, on both the right and the left. They've had only toxic effects on politics and culture.
Thanks for your coverage of what is IMO a salient moment--even an inflection point--in our current despotic spasm. One thing I keep thinking about, though, which you might also be thinking about, is that both Trump's and Musk's perspectives are relatively narrow, even constrictive, arising as they do from specialized, narrow experience. You see this among aging politicians in general, and also, I strongly suspect, among the tech bros. Intelligent as they are I think both groups are suffering from their respective blinders and immediate needs. Such short-sighted thinking ignores a fact of evolutionary change, which is that it's often multi-factoral, non-linear, and serendipitious, hence predictable only in uncertain ways, which suggests that leaving some room in our planning for the future for scope to allow these forces to flourish. It also suggests we might well opt for less bombast and more humility across the board from our leaders. In closing I'd like to add that electing leaders familiar with both Silicon Valley insights and perspectives as well as those of the
'rest of us' might prove extremely useful in the near term and perhaps from here on out.
Unlike one of the commenters below, I didn't know what to make of this piece. It has a rambling, even desultory, quality to it. The brittle, gossipy early part is already, quite possibly, stale because we heard early this morning that the two leviathans are moving towards an armistice of sorts.
But it was Mounk's reference to the MAGA base that is "irreconcilably" opposed to the Silicon vision but also to the GOP vision represented by the budget bill with its huge handouts that baffled me. The MAGA base is not the Appalachian Forgotten Man of Trump's first term and probably never was even then.
It should be clear that the MAGA base is the Tea Party slice of the population, now better organized. They are the self-employed, the S-Corp, the small businessmen, the private and closely-held companies, the reticent regional capital, who love tax cuts, hate all welfare programs, loathe wokeness and any kind of justice (and they have this in common with Yascha Mounk) and actually venerate billionaires because they hope to become one in the future. So no irreconcilability there at all. And this is why these two grotesque players will patch things up and move on.
Even on the matter of the elite universities there is no daylight between them. Silicon Valley is still predominantly Dem-supporting and pro-liberal education. But the VC and crypto crowd is resolutely pro-Trump and hostile to elite institutions. (A similar parallel is found in finance. Bankers are mostly Democrats, while the PE and HF crowd leans pro-Trump. A possible explanation can be found in the ethnicity of the pro-Trump groups, but I won't go into that here.)
Musk's dislike of universities is only in part due to their supposed wokeness, though it could also be that he was academically a mediocre student. It is because he believes in "learning by doing", rather than the formal learning in the controlled environment found in universities. And the VC crowd is with him on that. (Hence, their embrace of Curtis Yarvin, who wants to put tech businessmen on Mount Olympus.) And here too the MAGA base, as I have described it here, is with them all the way.
Thanks for the thoughtful pushback. I agree—this isn’t about some forgotten Appalachian voter clinging to promises of factory revival. That myth always served as emotional cover for a donor-driven power play. The real MAGA base, as you rightly point out, looks a lot more like the Tea Party’s remixed sequel: self-employed, grievance-fed, anti-tax, anti-regulation, and deeply allergic to any language of collective responsibility. They don’t resent the billionaires—they aspire to be one, or at least imagine themselves temporarily embarrassed future members of that club.
As for “irreconcilability”—you nailed it. There’s none. Silicon Valley’s self-styled rebels and MAGA’s “anti-elite” crusaders speak the same dialect of deregulation, dominance, and disdain for democratic norms. The rhetoric differs, but the goals align. They don't want government to work better—they want it to get out of the way while they rewire it.
So yes, peace will be made between Musk and the movement—not in spite of their similarities, but because of them.
You may like my stack: JosephZeigler.substack.com
Good post, but you should have put your parenthetical after "loathe wokeness." Insinuating that Yascha loathes "any kind of justice" is, in itself, an injustice.
Went is as a new comment by mistake but....duly noted. I should have put that word in inverted commas since I was not referring to justice-as-fairness in any abstract Rawlsian sense but in its modern, expanded use to include the structural and group basis of injustices, namely racial, gender, climate, etc., on which YM has made it amply clear where he stands.
"The leaders of Silicon Valley grew deeply frustrated with the left’s instinctive hostility to technological progress, taking particular umbrage at the fact that mainstream outlets like the New York Times often covered significant innovations like breakthrough rocket launches by focusing on minor environmental impacts. They came to loath the way in which woke ideology undermined meritocracy, worrying that it would make it harder to find the talent they needed to succeed. And they started to worry about the ballooning federal budget, which might sap the competitiveness of American companies in the near future."
Yascha has swallowed the self-serving justfications of tech bro creeps Andreasson, Zuck, Musk, et al. whole, it seems.
In fact they've revealed themselves as petulant, fragile egos, who, like Wall Street honchos re: Obama, can't stand being critiqued even mildly after being lauded as hero entrepreneurs.
And btw, green energy has a big honking component of left cheerleading for tech progress built into it, does it not? Recognizing the devastations unfettered social media and 'breaking shit' have wrought does not constitute thoroughgoing hostility to 'technological progress'
It's impossible to tell but it seems very likely that Trump and his movement will go the way of Nixon. Then perhaps all his lovers and haters can turn attention from him to focus on: Ukraine, Israel, Iran, a global spike in atavistic and savage antisemitism, identity politics and the resulting regression and degeneration of racial and sexual politics, complete degradation of the traditional free press throughout developed nations, 20 years of misguided policy responses to global warming predictions, sudden onset of US-China conflict, maturation of western de-industrialization and sweeping demoralization of disenfranchised workers, over-reliance on threatened Taiwan, Russia as an economically weak but militarily powerful authoritarian state with historical axe to grind, fifty years and counting of overspending by developed nations, impending monetary and debt crisis throughout the west exacerbated by ten years of near zero interest rates capped with blowout spending binges during covid, energy and commodity policies in chaos with no political will to rationalize it, utter degradation of US education, health care in the west outpacing baseline inflation for half a century and now at an inflection point of crisis, global migration/immigration policies and politics driven by purely emotional thinking and cynical politics, a historic tech-driven inflection point in military weapons and tactics, two generations of indoctrinated university graduates just when new leaders will be needed as the unipolar order collapses and the emergence of AI with no idea what it means and how to deal with it. And a partridge in a pear tree.
That was clear, thank you. I always thought that the link between the Tech World and the MAGA World made no sense to start but now I understand how it happened and why it is failing. That is good. Now we only have to deal with MAGA
All theater as the tecno-deep state revs up A/i to replace despicable governments as our new masters and executioners.
Keep a weather eye. Curtis Yarvin and Pete Thiel especially creep me out!
Basically, impossible to combine tech libertarianism with nationalist left-wing politics
This piece lays out the Trump–Musk split in rich detail, but the diagnosis gets muddled. It treats the breakup like a tragic misunderstanding between two men with grand but incompatible visions. That’s generous.
The truth is simpler: both Trump and Musk were using each other. Musk wanted to hack the federal government like it was a sluggish startup—and push government contracts toward his own companies while he was at it. Trump wanted to launder his image through association with someone who still pretends to build things. Neither had any real interest in governing—only in spectacle, leverage, and self-promotion.
It’s no surprise the alliance collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity. Musk believed he could streamline government without understanding it. Trump believed he could modernize his brand without modernizing his policies. Meanwhile, MAGA voters never cared about abundance, H-1Bs, or Mars—they want grievance politics, not governance.
This wasn’t the “vibe shift of the century.” It was a transaction gone bad between two egos who mistook applause for a mandate.
You may like my stack: JosephZeigler.substack.com
I will simply say, a missed opportunity for progress.
The problem with "what Americans want" is that people are acting based on feelings rather than facts in the first place. That leads to demands and expectations that are impossible and unreasonable, just as regarding the failure of romantics.
I'm guessing Musk saw Trump's BBB as robbing Peter to pay Paul, so that Musk was just a gardener. I would be upset as well.
Musk didn't actually found Tesla.
It would be awesome if Silicon Valley moguls would go away completely, on both the right and the left. They've had only toxic effects on politics and culture.
You write SO well. Big fan…
The great Jesse Welles already has a song about the Musk-Trump break-up, it’s on YouTube, “My billionaire daddies are fighting”. Enjoy.
Very balanced and informative.