Silicon Valley leans towards the right with support from billionaire Elon Musk, giving a significant boost to Donald Trump.

After assuming control of Twitter, Elon Musk has shifted towards right-wing politics, challenging the belief that Silicon Valley is dominated by wealthy liberals aligned with the Democratic Party. Previously seen as politically neutral, Musk now openly aligns with conservative ideologies, using his platform, now known as X, to promote ideas commonly associated with Fox News, conservative talk radio, and far-right movements in the Western world.

In just the latest example of Musk repeating conspiracy theories from far-right chat rooms, Musk posted last week that US President Joe Biden was importing immigrants for votes, setting the stage for “something far worse than 9/11.”

But beyond the messages, the question on everyone’s mind is whether the world’s second-richest person will put his weight and wealth behind former US President Donald Trump’s bid to regain the White House.

The rumor mill was fueled when The New York Times reported that the two men met with other Republican donors in Florida last week.

Trump is seriously behind Biden in raising campaign funds, even as he sails toward the Republican nomination for the US presidency, and Musk could single-handedly make up the shortfall.

Musk turned to X to insist that “to be clear, I’m not donating money to either candidate for the presidency of the United States.”

But U.S. election financing is opaque and complicated, and Biden supporters fear that Musk could change his mind or fund political committees that themselves fund Trump or find other ways to help the Republican cause.

“Techno Optimist”

Musk is not alone: other Silicon Valley stalwarts are also championing conservative causes and making noise in a region that remains a liberal stronghold; In 2020, Trump’s vote share in Silicon Valley was less than 25 percent.

Some tycoons are working to build a political movement that, while not directly supporting Trump, embraces conservative causes, cryptocurrencies and goes against the grain in California.

One of the loudest voices of this change is Marc Andreessen, an early Internet kid who founded Netscape and now heads Andreessen Horowitz, the prestigious venture capital firm.

Once a typically left-of-center tech magnate with close ties to former Vice President Al Gore, Andreessen now fiercely fights left-wing priorities, particularly so-called “woke” aspects of equality or workplace inclusion.

Last year, in a 5,200-word “techno-optimist manifesto,” Andreessen laid out a techno-utopian vision of the future that listed co-opted government, regulation and concerns about discrimination or equality as enemies.

Like many of his fellow right-wing investors, Andreessen’s company has invested heavily in cryptocurrencies and launched a political war chest last year to trouble Democratic or Republican lawmakers who want tighter regulation of the nascent industry.

According to technology analyst Carolina Milanes, the recent outspokenness may be less about Musk’s monkey than the old guard’s concern that the status quo is disappearing.

“When people talk about awakening, when you talk about either diversity, equality and inclusion or sustainability, all of these things are basically a threat to the status quo,” he said.

This exasperation with what Musk calls the “Virus of the Awakened Mind” leads to a hit podcast called “All-In,” in which four tech giants, some of Musk’s friends, weigh in on the world and the latest technological developments.

The host is David Sacks, one of the members of the PayPal mafia, men that include Musk, who worked at that late 1990s startup and have since become representatives of Silicon Valley’s small but growing right-wing group.

Another PayPal veteran is investor Peter Thiel, a German-born archconservative who joined Trump when he entered the White House.

After the 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Thiel said he would stay out of politics and has since become a kind of Silicon Valley right-wing kingpin who stays above the fray.

– Artificial intelligence of the extreme left –

The power of this new watchdog is beginning to be felt as diversity-minded tech companies learn from criticism that San Francisco has drugs and crime, or that generative artificial intelligence has become too “woke.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai came under fire last month and his company’s stock price plummeted after it emerged that its newly launched Gemini AI app had created images of ethnically diverse World War II Nazi troops and other ahistorical pranks.

“The people who use Google’s AI are smuggling their preferences and biases, and those biases are extremely liberal,” said Sacks in an All-In podcast segment titled “Google’s Awakened AI Disaster.”

In a sign of growing conservative influence, Google’s Pichai called the AI snafu “absolutely unacceptable” and founder Sergey Brin said “we are absolutely screwed” by creating such “far-left” images.