Two Horse Race
“Two Horse Race” – a cartoon that illustrates how Silicon Valley’s attempt to become more political has ended up in partisan rancor.
The technology industry for most of its history focused on influencing sector-specific regulators, but with the arrival of societal changing and broader consumer impacting technologies (e.g. social media, digital financial fraud), technology leaders felt that they needed to get more involved.
In 2010, Mark Schmidt remarked “Washington is an incumbent protection machine. Technology is fundamentally disruptive. Washington will respond to that, and we need to be there to make sure they don’t get it wrong.“
Today, the technology industry has an effective lobby machine (e.g. crypto industry spent $22M trying to influence lawmakers in 2023), but many of the industry’s proponents are splintered on many issues (some of them non-technology related) along party political lines.
For example, in a recent “VCs for Kamala” Zoom with hundreds of Silicon Valley techies that raised $150K, Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn remarked, “People who worry about kind of little corner cases in crypto, taxation, or regulation are missing the fundamental importance of a stable, unifying force, both domestically and internationally.”
Meanwhile, Marc Andreesen recently posted that, “For little tech, we think Donald Trump is actually the right choice.”
At a June fundraiser, David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya spearheaded an event for Donald Trump that reportedly raised $12 million, and Elon Musk has agreed to provide $45M per month to support Donald Trump’s campaign.
This has resulted in online spats between tech leaders, for example, YC founder Paul Graham referred to David Sacks as “the most evil person in Silicon Valley.”
For most people, this is perhaps a wonderful opportunity to get out the popcorn and laugh at the ridiculous nature of it all.
For all the millions of dollars the tech industry has spent lobbying, the impact of their influence has been marginal since with a federal legislature that does not pass many laws, it seems everything ends up getting resolved in the courts anyway.
