Last year, a coterie of tech billionaires rallied behind Donald Trump’s candidacy. Many had not been lifelong Republicans. In 2016, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen declared Hillary Clinton the “obvious choice” for president, saying Trump’s immigration agenda “makes me sick to my stomach.” Elon Musk, meanwhile, had once been an Obama-supporting climate hawk. Yet they, and many others in their circles, found their way to supporting an openly authoritarian insurrectionist in 2024.

They offered many explanations for this decision, some of which were unabashedly self-interested — Trump had promised to limit regulatory scrutiny of their companies and taxation of their capital. But right-wing tech moguls generally insisted that their fundamental concern was for the country, not their profits: Trump’s pro-business policies would accelerate economic growth and technological progress — thereby ensuring America’s prosperity and global supremacy.

Three months into his presidency, Trump has delivered on many of the so-called tech right’s requests for regulatory relief.

Yet, to the extent that their faction genuinely cares about maximizing American economic growth, technological progress, and global standing, their investment in Trump has been an utter disaster.

Why the tech right backed Trump

It isn’t hard to see why right-wing tech moguls believed Trump’s election would advance their interests. To some in their circles, the Democratic Party had become a financial threat. Many venture capitalists were heavily invested in the crypto industry, which the Biden White House regarded as “rife with bad actors.” The Democratic administration therefore discouraged banks from serving many crypto businesses and prosecuted some of its moguls for money laundering.

What’s more, Joe Biden chilled mergers through vigorous antitrust enforcement, proposed new regulations on AI development, and suggested taxing unrealized capital gains. All this was antithetical to many tech billionaires’ material interests. And this financial injury was compounded by cultural insults. In the tech right’s view, the “woke” left seemed to disdain success in general and successful white males in particular. And social justice ideology didn’t just irritate the Silicon Valley superrich online; it increasingly fomented insubordination within their workplaces.

Donald Trump credibly promised to advance the tech right’s interests along all these fronts.

But some Silicon Valley moguls weren’t content to rest their case for Trumpism on grounds of narrow self-interest or cultural grievance. Rather, Andreessen and his fellow VC Ben Horowitz insisted Trump’s election was necessary for safeguarding nothing less than “the future of America.”

In their account, the United States was suffering from a crisis of low economic growth and stagnating productivity. Unwise government policies were not merely stymying crypto’s profitability but American innovation writ large. And this posed a threat to liberty both within America’s borders and beyond them.

After all, “Low economic growth also means the rise of smashmouth zero-sum politics” in which people come to believe that “gains for one group of people necessarily require taking things away from other people,” Andreessen and Horowitz wrote in a pre-election manifesto. More critically, the United States would not be able to maintain geopolitical supremacy without retaining economic and technological preeminence. And if America did not reign supreme, the Chinese Communist Party would be able to impose its “much darker, more totalitarian” view of global governance upon the world.

Trump understood how important it was for the US to “win” in its........

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