Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Five things to know about J.D. Vance’s ties to tech billionaires

"Trump’s techno-libertarian dream team goes to Washington"

NPR

By Bobby Allyn
Published July 17, 2024 at 7:58 PM EDT


Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio shakes hands with former President Donald Trump during a rally in Delaware, Ohio in 2023. Vance has ties to tech billionaires who are endorsing his vice presidential nomination. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

While Ohio Senator J.D. Vance’s Appalachian roots are well-known, thanks to his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” another aspect of Vance’s background is now gaining attention: His connection to prominent Silicon Valley billionaires.

Vance’s 2016 book about the struggles of his childhood was published right around the time he began to quietly cement his ties to a cadre of mega-wealthy tech powerbrokers who could be considered the opposite of the Rust Belt’s working class.

------
[Insert: J.D. Vance and the Myth of White Exceptionalism
[...]How a chronicler of hillbilly culture and incoming U.S. senator
positioned himself as a representative of people he despises
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175051514
Yes, enough Americans were badly conned to elect gangster Trump a 2nd time.]
------

Now, as President Trump’s pick for vice president, many elite tech leaders are coalescing around the GOP ticket and expected to help bankroll Trump’s re-election bid.

Here are five things to know about why the tech billionaire class is backing Vance, and what it means for the 2024 presidential election.

Elon Musk and influential venture capitalists are leading the charge to support Trump/Vance

Musk endorsed Trump just minutes after a gunman in Pennsylvania tried to assassinate the former President in Pennsylvania, and he doubled down on the support when Trump announced Vance as his running mate.

During his time working in venture capital in San Francisco, Vance became a protégé of Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder who is considered something of a kingmaker in Silicon Valley. When Vance ran for Senate, Thiel fueled his run with a $15 million donation.

Vance also made inroads with David Sacks, a former tech executive and podcaster who has become a loud cheerleader for Musk since the billionaire acquired Twitter, now X. Sacks recently held a Trump fundraiser at his home in San Francisco, raking in $12 million for the former president. Sacks this week spoke at the Republican National Convention, where he spent much of his time bashing President Biden over the U.S. supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.

------
[[...]The three South Africans and a close friend who ran the PayPal Mafia
[...] What is not widely known about the PayPal Mafia is that three South Africans played a major role in its formation and growth under the so-called ‘Don’ of the mafia, Peter Thiel.
The three South Africans – Elon Musk, Roelof Botha, and David Sacks – share a common background, all coming from the tip of Africa.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175398148]
------

Using X as a megaphone, Musk and Sacks have been blasting out daily rallying cries for Trump and Vance. “Come on in,” Sacks wrote on X on Tuesday following a list of prominent tech figures now backing Trump. “The water’s warm.”

Tech billionaires are already giving millions and expected to turbocharge Trump/Vance campaign

Shortly after Vance was announced as Trump’s VP pick, a new tech-aligned super political action committee was unveiled called America PAC.

With the backing of the crypto billionaire Winklevoss twins, the co-founder data analytics firm Palantir Joe Lonsdale, Doug Leone of powerful VC Sequoia Capital and others, the group has raised more than $8 million, according to a recent Federal Election Commission filing.

The group’s war chest could turn into a formidable force for the Trump campaign.

Andreessen and Horowitz are on tap to pump the group with cash. And the Wall Street Journal has reported that Elon Musk could funnel as much as $45 million a month into the effort.

Trump’s Vance pick has drawn praise in crypto circles, with investors hoping for lax regulations of the digital currency. In his latest federal financial disclosure, Vance reported that he owns between $100,000 and $250,000 in Bitcoin.

Tech elite see Vance as change-agent on tax policy, AI and crypto regulations

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who operate the prominent venture capital firm named after them, released a podcast on Tuesday laying out their rationale for backing Trump and Vance.

Horowitz said he was reluctant to wade into politics, but that he had no other choice, since “the future of our business, the future of technology, new technology, and the future of America is literally at stake,” he said.

The duo said the Biden administration’s proposed regulations for cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence are too heavy-handed. They said they fear a second Biden term would crimp American innovation.

------
[Fear-mongering hyperbole for Horowitz above. Future of America literally at stake? Tech bs.
Bottom line they want no regulations at all, so to be able to do whatever they want to. See:
Trump’s techno-libertarian dream team goes to Washington
"Confirmation: JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US
[...]Trump picked Vance as his running mate because Vance publicly stated he’d do what
Mike Pence refused to do – overturn democracy and place the US under Maga control."
Silicon Valley didn’t shift right. It just wants to be left alone.
[...]It’s not hard to see why Musk would benefit from a close relationship with the White House. The billionaire certainly didn’t have much of a rapport with the Biden administration, which snubbed him at an electric vehicle summit, an incident that reportedly led Musk to embrace Trump. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, makes billions of dollars through government contracts, while his car company, Tesla, is lobbying for fewer regulations around self-driving cars as it attempts to launch a robotaxi business. Musk’s company Tesla Energy, formerly SolarCity, has received billions in subsidies over the years and surely looks to benefit from the federal government’s continued investment in the energy transition. Meanwhile, Trump has promised Musk a role in his administration as the “secretary of cost-cutting” — a position that doesn’t yet exist, but one that Trump seems to be seriously entertaining.
P - The other loud pro-Trump voices in Silicon Valley share a web of connections to each other and to Musk. There’s former PayPal COO and Musk pal David Sacks, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in July; Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir with Peter Thiel and helped launch Musk’s America PAC; and Marc Andreessen, who last year published the 5,200-word Techno-Optimist Manifesto that envisions tech leaders as keepers of the social order.
[...]“I think a lot of it is about crypto,” O’Mara said. “Crypto is also tied in — and always has been tied in — to a broader worldview, which is one of libertarianism, deregulation, or privately regulated markets that are separate from government.” She described this ethos as “escaping the state.”
P - Now, the techno-libertarians are the state. The day after Trump declared victory, he asked Musk to join him on a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And in the coming months, several more members of the PayPal Mafia get to decide what US tech policy will be for the next four years.
P - You have to wonder if they just want to tear it all down. Or maybe they’ll get bored and move to a floating nation in international waters where there are no laws and never have been.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175368736]
------

Their firm has invested in numerous crypto and AI startups, big bets on those two industries, said Samuel Hammond, an economist with the right-leaning think tank Foundation for American Innovation.

“Whether that bet pays off depends entirely on the policy of the U.S. government," Hammond told NPR.

Andreessen, who has historically supported Democrats, said the “final straw” with his shift away from Biden was the president’s policy aimed at the super rich: a 25% tax on unrealized gains on households that are worth more than $100 million.

That kind of levy on the wealthiest Americans “makes start-ups completely implausible,” Andreessen claimed on the podcast. “Venture capital just ends. Firms like ours just don’t exist.”

The remarks underscore a fusing of the right-wing flank of Silicon Valley and Trump's populist movement.

“If there’s any unifying ideology to the rising right in Silicon Valley it’s a sense that the system is broken and also the parallel sense that they can build a better system," Hammond said.

Tech billionaires endorsing Trump and Vance as way to rail against perceived ‘wokeism’

While many of the tech moguls supporting Trump and Vance tout policy positions that favor Silicon Valley, another element is that the tech elite are now embracing the GOP ticket as being on the side of a rebellion against liberals.

Whether it is railing against diversity, equity and inclusion rules, or policies supporting transgender youth, Musk, Sacks and others in the tech elite used X to go on the offensive on culture war issues.

In Vance, not only do they have someone who has called .. https://www.vance.senate.gov/press-releases/senator-vance-rep-cloud-introduce-legislation-to-eliminate-all-dei-programs-from-the-federal-government/ “ the DEI agenda a destructive ideology,” but a person who wants to fight the culture war with a background in venture capital.

------
And someone who has said he would do for Trump what Pence wouldn't do.
------

“Many of these guys who previously identified as libertarian are now sort of re-imagining themselves, or pivoting themselves, to a kind of right-wing populism, to Trumpism. And Vance is a really great example of that,” said Max Chafkin, who wrote “The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power,” which discusses Vance.

“J.D. Vance is seen as one of theirs,” Chafkin added. “He also has policy positions that can be perceived as being friendly to tech,” he said. “But I think that is secondary to the identity piece of this.”

------
That's the Vance who sold himself as a homegrown ordinary hillbilly white guy.
------

Adds economist Hammond: "To them, there is government by managers, by a woke DEI office," he said. "Or government by entrepreneurs."

Not all of Silicon Valley is behind MAGA, but support is growing in venture capital world

Large swaths of the tech world are still very much deeply liberal. Rank-and-file tech workers at big companies and smaller startups tend to favor Democrats and their donations typically support left-leaning causes.

The Information, a technology news site popular in Silicon Valley, conducted a reader survey this week and found that nearly 60% of respondents plan to vote for President Biden in November.

Yet when it comes to tech financiers and their elite friends, it is another story, said author Chafkin.

“It’s tempting to paint this with a broad brush and say all of Silicon Valley is getting behind the former president, but what’s actually happening is that Silicon Valley’s right wing has been activated and persuaded to open their pockets,” he said.

Executives of the biggest companies, like Apple, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have not endorsed any candidate, keeping with the tradition of Big Tech leadership staying on the sidelines of presidential elections.

Copyright 2024 NPR

https://www.wfae.org/politics/2024-07-17/five-things-to-know-about-j-d-vances-ties-to-tech-billionaires