Silicon Valley got what it wanted - by Brian Merchant
Well shit. A day or two before the election I wrote a post titled “How bad will it get?” with regard to the union of Elon Musk, X, Silicon Valley, and Trump, and now I guess we will find out.
I—many of us—were waiting for Musk’s social media platform to be weaponized, flooded with scaremongering, threats, AI slop, and bad information, and it was, but not at any level that could be considered abnormal by its own toxic standards. Most of the AI stuff I saw was relegated to dumb memes. And frankly, little Election Day weaponizing needed to be done. The Democrats were crushed handily as it was.
Apart from Trump himself, there are few more obvious victors than Elon Musk; for $100 million or so and a few months’ display of unrestrained fealty, he just bought himself some real estate in the inner sanctum of Trumpworld. It may be the most fruitful investment he ever made, a bargain really. Some are taking solace in the notion that given Trump’s—and Elon’s—volatility, their relationship will be headed for a spectacular implosion sooner rather than later, as so many of Trump’s previous partners did (remember Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, anyone?) but I’m not as confident. These two men are pretty in tune, and are more similar—each constantly embattled and aggrieved, insecure and never satisfied, incapable of any sustained level of happiness, constantly trying to build bigger monuments to their own egos but always doomed to come up short—than not. And their opportunities to mutually benefit are considerable.
I digress. Suffice to say that Elon Musk is the closest that a Silicon Valley tech titan has been to the White House, in a position of overt and direct power. There is of course a long lineage of the Valley linking up with Washington for defense contracts, help in avoiding regulations, and other forms of material support—see: Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto—but this is the next level. It could even, perhaps, be considered a logical culmination.
