Why Billionaires Obey in Advance

It's what they're trained to do. It's also why we should stop looking to them for moral leadership.

*Programming note: I’m now recording my own audio version of this and all my posts. Paid subscribers get a weekly audio anthology for commute-friendly listening!

In an interview this week with the San Francisco Chronicle, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, a funder of progressive efforts to fight homelessness and raise taxes on billionaires like himself (not to mention a one-time supporter of Hillary Clinton), defended his new public support of Donald Trump. “It’s only appropriate to want our president to be successful,” he told the Chronicle.

"I feel that when we elect a new politician we have to absolutely support them — this is our president now," Benioff said Monday. "This is a moment where we are turning the page. … It’s an opportunity for a new chapter."

Other billionaires are lining up to get on Trump’s good side before he takes office. Some lined up even before he won. Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with Emily Chang of Bloomberg in July, said that “seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.” (This week the WSJ reports that Meta has given $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.) Jeff Bezos, who clashed with Trump in his first term in office but personally canceled his own paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in October, told the Dealbook Summit last week “I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” and that he expects Trump to be “calmer than he was the first time — more confident, more settled.” Even Barry Diller, an outspoken Democratic donor, told Dylan Byers on his podcast The Grill Room this week that he’s eager to see what Trump and Elon Musk can do to reduce government waste (“give him a chance!” he urged), although he stopped short of agreeing with Bezos that Trump is likely to be more chill this term.

Jeff Bezos at the DealBook Summit, where he described feeling “optimistic” about Trump’s second term. Photo: Michael M. Santiago, Getty Images

They’re all stepping right into what the historian Timothy Snyder, in his book On Tyranny, writes is the first tendency under authoritarian regimes: obedience in advance. (His Substack is here.) As Snyder puts it:

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

The Trump administration is being actively taught right now that it can expect the full cooperation of the leaders of industry. Why are they offering themselves without being asked? Because that’s what they’re trained for.

The myth of the moral billionaire has dogged me my entire career. For years I’ve been reassured by people inside and outside the power structure of Silicon Valley that the moral judgement of people at the top of major companies was so reliable that it required no real oversight. Here’s a short clip of Eric Schmidt making this case to me when it comes to regulating threats posed by AI:

The moral judgement of the world’s richest people has enormous effects on the rest of us. After all, we’ve enshrined their power to get their way through the tax policies and social capital that reward philanthropy. In his 2018 book Just Giving, Stanford political science professor Rob Reich argues that a society that rewards the rich for dodging taxes and pursuing their own interests with their money is capitulating to them, and disregarding democratic ideals in the process.

Philanthropy is a form or exercise of power. In the case of wealthy donors or private foundations especially, it can be a plutocratic exercise of power, the deployment of vast private assets toward a public purpose, frequently with the goal of changing public policy. In the United States and elsewhere, big philanthropy is often an unaccountable, nontransparent, donor-directed, and perpetual exercise of power. This is something that fits uneasily, at best, in democratic societies that enshrine the value of political equality.

At a time when corporations are allowed unlimited political spending, and Super PACs are a way of hiding the funders’ identities, political equality is being rapidly devalued. In fact, the narrative of equality is being rewritten by the one group of billionaires who didn’t capitulate when their political foes took office. Those, of course, are the rightward-leaning ones, who resisted the last administration actively, supported Trump, and are taking a victory lap at the moment.

Some are getting appointments out of the deal. David Sacks, cohost of the All-In podcast and a yearslong funder of recall efforts against progressive officials in California, is part of the “PayPal Mafia” group of billionaires who came up through that company — including Elon Musk. He was Trump’s Silicon Valley fund-raiser, and this past weekend he and his podcast hosts threw a holiday party in San Francisco that The Economist billed as a celebration of their ascent in Washington. He’s poised to become Trump’s AI and crypto czar.

Bari Weiss’s Free Press has given pro-Trump billionaires a relaxing place to reflect on their win, and to spin it. Peter Thiel, another PayPal Mafioso who funded JD Vance’s public ascent and candidacy, came on the show just after Election Day. Weiss gave him the space to say, without contradiction, that this was a victory against the elites. “The Democratic Party,” Thiel told her, is “like the Empire. They’re all Imperial Stormtroopers, and we're the ragtag Rebel Alliance.” (I think any interviewer should at that point jump in to ask how a billionaire who funds his own candidates can possibly consider himself “ragtag,” or anything but elite, but that’s me.)

Thiel is an ideologue. He suggested in a formative 2009 essay about his own politics that certain individuals should, well, have more say than others. “The fate of our world may depend,” he wrote, “on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.” He also didn’t show much enthusiasm for the idea that the will of voters should determine what comes next. In a later addendum, he added that “while I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.”

But for most billionaires, the considerations are purely pragmatic. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, came on Weiss’s show this week. (An unfortunate side effect of the cloistered media environment we’re in is that the only place to see someone like Andreessen or Thiel speak at all freely is to a friendly interviewer like Weiss.) Andreessen described having once supported Democrats, and warmly recalled “super healthy and productive” relationships with past administrations which more or less stayed out of Silicon Valley’s way. Andreessen’s political leanings seem to have changed as public opinion turned against his sector. He recently wrote an angry pro-AI manifesto that argues those seeking to regulate the technology his firm funds will “cost lives.” And so, he told Weiss, meetings in the Biden White House about regulating AI caused him to decide his firm had to switch political positions. “When we endorsed Trump we only did so on the basis of tech policy,” Andreessen told Weiss.

The meetings were absolutely horrifying…They said “AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing.” They actually said flat out to us…“Don't do AI startups…it's not something that we're going to allow to happen…AI is going to be a a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government, and we're going to basically wrap them in” —you know, I'm paraphrasing but— “we're going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon.”

As years of reporting on these folks have taught me, tech leaders don’t exactly prize the democratic tradition of collective decision-making. (As a friend of mine says, “they watched Akira too many times, and don’t really get what it’s about.”) Andreessen wrote in his AI manifesto that “markets are an inherently individualistic way to achieve superior collective outcomes.” It’s this pro-market pragmatism that explains the rightward lean of so many Silicon Valley billionaires, and the tendency of the leftward-leaning ones to obey in advance.

(I should nod here at LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who was part of the same PayPal cofounder group as Thiel and has feuded with him in public. He’s one of the most active left-leaning billionaires, and he bucks the trend I’m describing here. In the days after Trump’s victory he didn’t exactly raise a fist in protest, but he didn’t line up to shake Trump’s hand, either. He told Fast Company’s Robert Safian, "if I were to continue in politics, I’d likely have a negative influence because it would be just oppositional. I think it’s best to add where I can contribute, which is on the business, technology, and investment sides.” That said, he’s a pragmatist too. Fortune reports he’s considering moving out of the country.)

Time and again, I encounter among tech founders the belief articulated in this 1970 essay by Milton Friedman that the only moral responsibility of a company is to enrich its shareholders. One founder of a loan-making platform cited that idea as he told me that to try to correct for past financial discrimination against Black and brown communities in modern-day loan-making would be “immoral.” You can read that story in my book.

Strangely enough, Friedman’s own description of corporations that throw their money at moral questions winds up describing those rightward-leaning individuals who raise and throw money at candidates like JD Vance who clearly could not win without it. As Friedman puts it, ”they are seeking to attain by undemocratic procedures what they cannot attain by democratic procedures.” (The irony is deepened, of course, by the fact that while Friedman may be speaking for tech’s shareholders, he’s certainly not speaking for its employees, the majority of whom studies have found hold left-leaning, anti-establishment political views, and are ideologically very far from leadership.)

I’m constantly astounded by the willingness of Americans to credit billionaires with ethics, altruism, and democratic leanings they do not possess. The ultra-rich became so because of their pragmatism, not because of their moral compass, and that pragmatism has brought them monopolistic control and unaccountable political power. It’s important not to fall for the public image they create of being elder statesmen operating on the nation’s behalf, because while the outcomes of their efforts may be collective, the incentives and rewards, in Andreessen’s words, are individual.

We’ll see more and more capitulation as we go. One of Bezos’s throwaway lines at the Dealbook Summit stuck with me in particular.

“I’ve had a lot of success in life not being cynical — and I very rarely have been taken advantage of as a result,” he said, continuing his optimistic streak. “Why be cynical about that?”

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