Why the Tech Right Lost Big This Week

“This felt like a decidedly anti-tech election.”

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

  What just happened to Elon Musk? Two years ago, the SpaceX founder and world's richest man was riding high. He and the rest of the tech right of Silicon Valley had helped propel Trump into office and had grand plans to reshape the federal government. Remember Doge? Those plans are now on hold. Musk once again spent hundreds of millions of dollars this election cycle, but got almost nothing in return. Instead, his allies had among the worst losses of their lives, and he became one of the main villains of some of the cycle's most important races. On today's episode, we're going to dive into the midterms and try to figure out what happened. Was this election a repudiation of Musk and his cadre of Silicon Valley billionaires? A referendum on AI buildout and the data centers cropping up around the country?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Or an entire rejection of the accelerating AI future that the tech industry has been aggressively selling? How did Elon Musk lose so badly? And what will he do next? I'm Max Reed. This is Hard Fork.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Welcome to Hard Fork. I'm joined by Aaron Griffith and Ezra Klein. Aaron is a tech writer for The New York Times and Ezra is, I believe, a podcaster who's been sent to us from the 28th floor to talk about politics. It's now been a little while since the Democrats retook Congress. And the thing I really want to talk about, the thing I've been thinking about, is what we have called the tech right. So I'm talking about a very highly visible group of Trump-supporting executives, founders, investors from Silicon Valley, people like David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Paul Merlucky, and of course Elon Musk. This was, two years ago, felt like the most powerful faction within the Trump coalition. They were able to dominate news and attention, most of all campaign contributions. They arguably helped elevate J.D.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Vance to the vice presidency. After the election, they were kind of put in charge of federal government budgeting and provision. And now it feels like it's all fallen apart. Both of you guys are close observers of the tech industry, and I wanted to see how you would characterize what happened this week to this growing conservative movement of leaders. Ezra, what do you think happened to the tech right?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Well, it attached itself to Donald Trump. And this is a place, I think, where at least in part, their success became a failure. The tech right is not the reason Trump layered the world in tariffs. It is not the reason that he went to war in Iran. But it is at least part of the reason why he has a hideously unpopular position on AI. And I was surprised in the exit polling how important people said AI was to their vote. So 56% said that artificial intelligence and data centers was a crucial or major factor in their vote. 57% said AI would do more to hurt society. 24% said it would help society.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  76% opposed a data center in their community. So you're dealing with an issue that people were both in a kind of direct and vibesy way, actually like taking into account, and Trump, because in this period, he has been really bought in on like the David Sacks, Jensen Huang, you know, Marc Andreessen, et cetera view of the world. His view and the Republican Party broadly's view on data centers was let them rip, build as many of them as you can, whoever wins AI wins. And that put them on sharply the wrong side of public opinion on an issue that's sort of unlike the diffuse issues of costs or the war in Iran. You could really sometimes like tie a specific politician like Husted in Ohio to like to

• 4:07Speaker 02

  data center backlash, and that gave Republicans, maybe who didn't like them, a reason to cross party lines on them.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Is this, I mean, let me ask the chicken and egg question. Is AI getting dragged down by Donald Trump and the tech right? Or is this that AI just has naturally bad politics and its association with these figures is dragging them down?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  I think it's a mistake to think that the only reason we regulate things is to slow them down or to stop them or because they're bad. You regulate things to put them within a like a trustworthy semi, at least semi-democratic container, such that people can make peace and have confidence in their trade-offs. There is a world where AI is rolling out in a way where people think that the folks in charge have thought through the risk, have thought through the questions of jobs, are finding out what they need to find out, and maybe have more trust in it. In that way, I don't think it's being dragged down by Donald Trump's popularity. I think the problem with AI in terms of popularity is that the basic sell on it is it might

• 5:12Speaker 02

  kill everyone. It probably will take your job. But if it doesn't do those things, you're gonna have cheaper energy. Like it doesn't, it's not a good like description of a technology you want. But the problem it is having on a secondary level is it, it's rolling out at a time when the people rolling it out just don't seem trustworthy. So they have not been subtle or agile or thoughtful about how to manage its risks.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  But that's like been the whole point of this like rightward shift, right? Is like all the tech guys are so excited to be able to not have to actually care and like soft pedal things and sell them to people, right? Like, hasn't that just been the gleefulness of this like kind of Trump 2.0 tech right kind of thing where they're like, ha ha, we're so powerful and rich that we don't have to convince you, we'll just do it and you'll like it, or you won't, but we don't care.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  And as you see, it's working out great.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Well, I think we're seeing the direct backlash to that, which is like kind of what you're saying, right?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Aaron, you were sort of addressing this in your, in the last thing you were saying, but I'm interested in why we feel like the, at least this group of tech investors and executives went for Trump so hard in the first place.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Oh, well, there's, there's a lot of layers to this. I mean, you could like, obviously, they, a lot of them just don't want to see regulation. You can go back to Marc Andreessen's whole thing that he, that he kind of went on this media tour after he came out for Trump and, and he was, you know, telling this story of the deal, the broken deal, and, you know, the elites are now under attack. And we had this meeting that, you know, may or may not have happened, and subsequent reporting has called into question that, where all the Democrats were saying they were going to kill AI. I do think it's also, you know, just a little bit of a cultural thing where it just like seemed like more fun for them to be edgelord meme kind of posters and like not having

• 7:04Speaker 03

  to care about cancel culture and wokeness and all of that. And so I think like, on the high level, some of the, a lot of the billionaires and the leaders of the industry kind of went to the right and everyone said, oh, well, the rest of the tech industry is still very liberal. But like, I think over time, that sort of like, you know, very online kind of thing attracted way more people to that side. And so I'm, I'm gonna be very interested to see like how that plays out, if people kind of just start like backing away from, from that vibe. The one thing I want to also just say, like, just to add on to what I was saying earlier is like, this idea of like kind of ramming through the tech stuff, regardless of whether people like it, regardless of sentiment, and like they'll like it on the other side,

• 7:49Speaker 03

  is like very prominent amongst a lot of the VCs that I talk to where they say, well, like, people don't like big tech or people are, don't trust big tech, but look at their revealed preferences. Like, look at, look at how much they're using Facebook and look at how much they're using Amazon. They actually, and they, they love their iPhones, they're addicted. And like, they're just sort of looking only at the data and saying like, because people use AI a lot, because ChatGPT has a billion users around the world, ergo, people are going to like this stuff. They might just like, you know, not have the trust or whatever, but that doesn't matter because people are using it. And I think this election is actually showing us that that's the wrong way of looking at AI because, you know, people obviously are very, very mad about it and to the point where they don't want it.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  This felt like a decidedly anti-tech election, but I think we can also separate some of the sentiments that were contributing to the votes and the, the blue tsunami. I, I heard somewhere that in Japan, because you don't want to call it a blue wave or a tsunami, they're calling it the national scolding, which I think is so much better. So I'll call it the national scolding. The factors that went into the national scolding, let me, I'm gonna separate this sort of tech stuff into three different categories. One is the sort of broad opposition to AI that you're talking about, Aaron. One is the sort of specific anti-data center sentiment that really captured a lot of attention this summer, that a lot of politicians ran quite hard on. And then finally, a kind of general anti-oligarchy, anti-billionaire sentiment that focused in

• 9:18Speaker 01

  particular on Elon Musk, but I think in general on a lot of tech billionaires. I want to take these one at a time and start with the anti-AI sentiment. And I'm gonna play a little bit of John Ossoff's victory speech from last night.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  And at our grave peril, humanity is fast forgetting the terrible lessons of two world wars and the Holocaust.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  Meanwhile, the titans of Silicon Valley dig bunkers for themselves and warn that the artificial intelligence they're creating risks human extinction.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  That's pretty strong. I mean, that's like, you know, I mean, and I'm not talking about those new biceps he's got, folks. That is like a real

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Well, he is getting, he's a lot stronger than he used to be. I thought that would play a lot harder, but maybe we can cut it out later. It's a pretty specific, pretty aggressive. I mean, this is, this is like a speech written by somebody who's on Twitter at the very least, who's like, you know, sort of has a strong understanding of AI culture, Silicon Valley culture. Ezra, what did you make of this part of Asaf's speech?

• 10:19Speaker 02

  So at the beginning of the book, Abundance, which Dirk Thompson wrote, we have this sort of thing about supply-side politics, where we say the core question should be, what do we want more of and how do we get it? And the basic problem that they have on AI is they have not convinced people to want more of it. They understand how you get it, right? Like, push all this money to CapEx, but not, why do you want it? And so first, you have all this energy going into that. And then the data centers are just big and ugly, and they don't create jobs, and people don't like the construction of industrial facilities near them, even in normal times, right? It's hard to build an apartment building. It's very hard to build, you know, these gigantic systems. So they seem to have come

• 11:03Speaker 02

  up with this view that it's not going to matter because people enjoy using their chatbot, but it is going to matter. And the reason Asaf, but not just Asaf, I mean, El Sayed had a great, you know, answer on AI pause when he was talking to our former colleague, Ross Douthat, on 60 Minutes.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, he actually knows what distillation is.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was very impressive.

• 11:24Speaker 05

  A lot of the frontier research is just spoofing our models.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  China's research.

• 11:28Speaker 05

  China's research. And it'd be like, you know, you're pulling a skier on a boat, and you speed up the boat, and you're like, the skier's still so close. We gotta speed up. Skier's still so close. Well, it's because you're pulling the skier.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  He knows what distillation is, right? This is a thing that I think younger politicians are really developing expertise on. I can tell you, they all understand and believe it will be a central issue in politics going forward. And sort of like everybody else, they're not buying the just don't worry about it line.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Okay, one question on that, though. What do you make of their sort of like answer to like, how did this happen? Is that AI has a messaging problem, which to me misses the point a little bit. Like, they're sort of reinforcing that, like, again, what you're saying, like, they believe that, like, this is what's best for everyone, and if everyone just lets them do it, then like, we'll see. But like, if they stick to that, it seems

• 12:27Speaker 02

  I don't think they do believe it's best for, I mean, some of the tech right guys do, but I think one of the most interesting things when I talk to them, and I'd be curious how much this backs up your experience, is a lot of the people in AI, say publicly and privately, oh, if I could, I would push the button. I would stop it for now.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  And I just don't feel we can. There is this inevitability thesis. There's China, there are the other companies, right? There's this kind of spirit of technology. In some ways, like when Elon Musk talks about it in a very teleological fashion, right? I tried to stop it. It turns out I can't, so it's more fun to be part of it. It is true that some of the tech right people we're talking about feel that way. And some of them also, you know, don't care or don't see it in existential terms. But what people, people are hearing from a lot of them and correctly absorbing the lesson, as John Asaf is, I mean, a lot of lab employees are going to Congress and talking to people like Asaf and explaining their concerns, that the message I think a lot of us are getting is that what is pushing

• 13:30Speaker 02

  this forward is a belief that cannot be stopped. But even the people pushing it forward believe that maybe it could be stopped, at least for a while, and figured out that would be better. And, you know, so if you don't buy into inevitability, and most politicians don't buy into inevitability, then all of a sudden it's like, well, why not try to pace it, slow it down, regulate it, you know, change public opinion on it?

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Well, I think there's two groups, though. There's like the, there's like the kind of employees that are very worried, like what you're talking about, especially at places like at the labs. And then there's the investors who I spend a little bit more time with, and they're not so worried about the existential risk kind of piece of it. And they're more, they think that, they don't think it's inevitable because they worry about regulation. And so that's like, and they worry about not having the data centers and the compute. And like, so they're kind of on the, on the flip side of that a little bit.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Let's talk about data centers for a second. So Tuesday night, near total rout for data centers on basically every level. Nearly every local referendum went against them, but also a bunch of the states that have been building them most intensely. Democrats took control often on anti-data center platforms. But I'm still sort of trying to figure out how big a deal it is, because there's a certain amount of like, it's not necessarily as salient, as tariffs, as affordability, as Iran, as immigration. But it also clearly animated voters all year. So I'm wondering, how big a driver do you think the data center issue was of these results?

• 15:02Speaker 03

  I mean, it was interesting, because last week, we talked about how it was like, you know, ranked in the bottom, maybe five out of like 30 some issues when you're asking voters, like what they care most about. But it's clear, as you're, as you're describing, that when asked on a binary yes or no question, the answer is absolutely not. And so whether or not that drove people to the polls, Ezra, you probably have a lot more info on that, but it's obvious that it's like, going to be, continuing to be an issue.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it was spiky. So in states where there is a ton of data center buildout happening, so, you know, states like Texas and Ohio and Georgia and Arizona, it was a really big issue.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  I think you have to look at the Texas results, and Texas is a place in the country that's been building the most data centers. They were the most vulnerable. It was a huge part of the campaign, particularly in the governor's race, and it worked. I mean, it was just a huge wedge. And it's a wedge that I think very importantly, doesn't split, like, doesn't polarize normally. You can win over Republicans that way. But you just, you look at that list, Texas, Ohio, Georgia, and Arizona, those are just all states where Democrats performed really, really well. And in Ohio in particular, they really went at Ramaswamy and Husted, the Republican gubernatorial and Senate candidates on the data center issue. I think what you see here is like, I don't think data centers were a huge part of the Alaska race.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  But in the place where they're building a lot of them, it really mattered.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting. And it does feel like there's going to be a big shift in how we think about the buildout. It doesn't necessarily mean, you know, a full sort of cessation of data center buildout, but it's going to take more time and it's going to be moving to other states. Maybe Louisiana, maybe Oklahoma. Aaron, I'm wondering how you think this is going to play out among the VCs and investors you talk to, like how they're changing their plans or thinking about, thinking about it differently now?

• 16:58Speaker 03

  I mean, I think in general, investors are a little bit terrified by the results, particularly in Texas, when, you know, I was watching the All In feed last night, and as the Texas

• 17:09Speaker 01

  As you do, as you do every Tuesday night.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  And the Texas, the Texas governor race was the one that they, they seemed most upset about. There was this kind of like cope moment of like, oh, my God, well, that's, they're only reporting the liberal, you know, the blue district so far. Like, we still have a chance, because they know that, you know, of the sort of 45 gigawatts or so of total compute that's of energy that's supposed to come online next year, 10 to 15 gigawatts of that could be now in danger of not coming online because it's in Texas, because, you know, they all expected that the moratorium that was put on for building data centers in Texas up through the elections would just be, you know, removed, and they would all

• 17:55Speaker 03

  go back to building, and everything would be great. And so this is going to slow down a lot of the AI development. This is going to make capacity, compute capacity much more constrained, and ergo, much more expensive. And it's going to sort of hurt the growth, not just of the frontier labs that need the compute, but of all the ecosystem of companies that are sort of playing into the quote unquote AI trade, all of the kind of chips and Neo Labs and cloud resellers, all of that. So, you know, that is potentially going to hurt this kind of bull market that we've been on for a long time. So they're like, getting a little bit dramatic about that. You know, I've heard, there was a little

• 18:38Speaker 01

  No, no, investors getting dramatic, I don't think so.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  There was a little bit of catastrophizing, like, you know, no less than like, the entire market's going to tank, the economy's in the shitter, like, we're, China's going to win, all of that. I think I even saw a tweet, Beth Jayzos, the, you know, the kind of internet personality tweeted that this is the end of Western civilization, it's time to move to space, which is where the data centers were moving anyway, so.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Gotta, gotta, gotta get that space real estate. What I thought was interesting about this, I was hearing some of this from, from investors too, and then the Nasdaq futures were down. And then it's like, the market opens up on Wednesday morning, and it bounces up. And so first, create the, like, the market, doesn't think this is so bad. But, but a good contrarian take I've seen floating around a bit, is that this might be good for investors, because I do think there's a widespread suspicion that there is a kind of like collective rationality problem happening right now, where

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Or irrationality.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Everybody is investing too much in data centers because they don't want to be the company left behind. But that might lead to, say, the end of Oracle as a existing American corporation. And a situation in which the CapEx investment is externally paced, such that some of the, particularly the more fly-by-night players that are beginning to emerge, who could really, really collapse easily, either don't get off the ground or can't keep going, you know, and, and similarly, a situation where players like Anthropic and OpenAI focus more on diffusion and making what they are deploying economically useful, as opposed to racing each other to the notional goal of superintelligence. It's not obvious

• 20:26Speaker 02

  that that's bad for markets, like a, like a CapEx bubble is really bad for markets. The, you create dangerous AI before you create economically useful AI is actually bad for markets. But in a kind of slightly more sober sense, what markets need is a kind of alignment.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Between how fast a build out is happening and how economically useful the product is, and thus how quickly it is adopted, not at all obvious to me that a slowdown in data center construction from where we are right now is bad for that.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's talk about tech billionaires. This is sort of the third category of anti-tech sentiment that I've seen pop up throughout this election season, and it came up quite often on Tuesday in some of the victory speeches. We have Talarico effectively calling out Elon Musk, which is something he did many times over the course of the election cycle. Ezra, I'm wondering if you think that the amount of money that Elon was pouring into this election, because he poured in a lot of it, was counterproductive to him in some sense, because it gave politicians like Talarico a foil to play against.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Hugely counterproductive. So, so think about what that money is buying. That money is attempting to buy attention. But this, the sheer size of that money and its attachment to like Elon Musk himself, who's like an attentional super object. It did get attention, and the attention it got was that Elon Musk is trying to buy the election, buy it from you, and specifically buy it in Texas. And does Ken Paxton, did Ken Paxton want one of the central themes of the closing weeks of the election to be Elon Musk is trying to buy the election? Like, there's a broad anti-billionaire sentiment, you know, you, you can pull this, like, people really don't like billionaires. There's specifically negative Elon Musk sentiment.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  I was a little bit surprised, actually, that in California, the wealth tax proposition didn't pass.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanted to, I'm sorry, no, go ahead.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  In California, there's a proposition to do a wealth tax to, on the very, very wealthiest California residents, which would not be that many of them, a couple hundred people, but it was going to be a sort of hard to administer tax, and there was fear of having like billionaires flee California for, say, Texas. And it didn't pass. So in this sort of, like, election in which anti-billionaire sentiment was very, very, very constant, the argument that, you know, sort of potentially driving some of them out of California would be bad for California actually won, which struck me as, as a little bit surprising. If you had told me the, like, how badly Republicans would lose the election, if I knew that a week ago, and you said, what's going to happen to the wealth tax, I'd be like, oh, that'll definitely pass. It didn't.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Aaron, I wanted to ask you about this, because we talked about it last week, and you've done a lot of reporting on this, and I'm wondering how you sort of account for this result in what was otherwise a very clearly anti-billionaire election.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  It feels a little bit like a California thing, where people might just be tired of the politicians kind of throwing together a plan that doesn't seem fully thought out and saying, just trust us, we'll figure this out. And so I think there was enough messaging that introduced doubts to this, basically saying, it's not like, I mean, the messaging from the prop, the anti-prop 40 groups were, this is poorly written, they're just going to lose all the money, they need to do a better job of this, it's not sustainable, it's a one-time thing. I guess that kind of like resonated with people. And honestly, it's the one thing that the billionaires I've seen, and the, and the tech right that we're talking about, is like, are clinging to this more, or this, this week now, where they're like, if they can't pass this kind of billionaire tax in a blue tsunami

• 24:06Speaker 03

  in California, it'll never win anywhere in the country. And I don't think that's true. Ezra, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, but I think, I think there'll be more attempts at bat at this in the next few years, while they'll just try to maybe position it a little bit differently, or, or find ways that will resonate with people a little bit more. But I think in general, people are just kind of like tired of, of like half-hearted props that are, that are thrown out there, and this one got a lot of criticism for that.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree that the California prop has like, first, the problem that Californians have begun to be skeptical of ballot propositions, just full stop, correctly so, speaking as a Californian. But the, I do think the other issue with it was that there was a specific concern that would disadvantage California. I mean, I think it is meaningful that Gavin Newsom did not support it. And to the sort of comfort the tech right is taking this, I think it's going to be basically table stakes in 2028 for Democrats to have a wealth tax proposal. And the argument for a national wealth tax is a lot stronger than the argument for a state wealth tax, because, you know, they, they may say they will, but they're not actually

• 25:12Speaker 02

  going to move to Ireland, or, you know, wherever it might be, you know, Argentina. And so I think-

• 25:19Speaker 01

  It's a long history of people moving to Argentina when things go south in that country.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  So, you know, you're going to have Gavin Newsom with a wealth tax proposal, I think, for, for that election. So, the idea that this is gone, as opposed to it is going to move to the level at which is better administered, which is like the full force of the IRS, and like, the full jurisdiction of the United States, is, is more the way I understand the, the situation.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to talk about one more billionaire. Pour one out for Vivek Ramaswamy, who lost the governor, the governor's race in Ohio. I mean, Vivek is more or less a tech billionaire. He was ascendant in politics, or seemed to be, he was one of the two faces of Doge, and now he's frankly humiliated and probably should be ashamed, given the, the final ad of his campaign involved putting his opponent, Amy Acton's mother, on TV to call her daughter a liar, after Acton had said that her stepfather had abused her as a child. I'm wondering if, if this race stuck out to you, if, if, as a figure, what, what, what

• 26:26Speaker 01

  you remember about his rise and his fall, or if it was, if, if he was just a singularly bad candidate regardless of the tech halo around him.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Look, Vivek and, and for that matter, J.D. Vance are the kinds of MAGA politicians the tech right actually wants. They don't want Donald Trump with all of his all-over-the-place-ness, right? They want these guys who are actually their guys and can go to their conferences and, you know, talk knowledgeably about the kinds of highly cerebral reactionary policies that the, the right likes, the tech right likes.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  And they also, like, they don't have to convince him, right? They, they can just, like, they already agree, they don't have to, like, sell him on it.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  And the thing about both of those guys is they're bad politicians. And the, and Ramaswamy here, I did you think, has like a particular arc, where he could have lost this election in an honorable way, and he decided to lose it in a maximally dishonorable way. And it was just a grotesque, awful, immoral thing to do that covered, that should cover Ramaswamy in shame. But I would say that, I, I see this sometimes with Vance, I see it with Ramaswamy, I see it with a bunch of Republicans, where they kind of speak Trump with an accent, that Trump

• 27:48Speaker 02

  has this cruelty to him, this outrageousness, but because it's natural to him, he actually knows where the lines are, he knows how to deliver it in a way where people don't take it exactly that seriously. Like, he's done some stuff that is pretty gross in his time, quite a lot of stuff that is very, very gross, but he has a finesse to it, that these guys who are mimicking him as if they are like, like a, like a GPT-3 level LLM, right? Like, smart, but without any art to it whatsoever, has like no feel for the situation. And then it just comes out horrible, right?

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Like horrible and cruel, and it's like a silent room, you know, where nobody's laughing. And, and that's that race. And, you know, Vance runs into this kind of problem too, right? Like, dogs and cats thing is like an example of this for J.D. Vance, where they, I think they think they're doing what Trump is doing, and they don't understand they're not. And the thing here about them, and it, it speaks to maybe to, to kind of tie this a little bit to our main conversation here, a big problem the tech right is going to have, the tech right could only really survive as a factional player in a broader Republican ecosystem, in which their completely like inhuman and bizarre views about how to treat

• 29:13Speaker 02

  other people were not dominant, right? They could have a lot of influence, and they were the smart players in the coalition, they had a lot of money, but ultimately, the thing was run by this guy with animal charisma and like magnetic cunning. And when you kind of reverse foreground and background here, and put them and their people in the front, it goes really, really badly. Because what the non-college white working class is looking for is not Vivek Ramaswamy. It is just not the, not the brief. And I don't think this is where, like, the politics is going. And I think you, you see in the failure of some of these candidates, and in the problems, I think, that J.D.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Vance himself is going to have, like, where the tech right is very, very, very fragile, which is that it doesn't understand and often doesn't seem to like human beings, to say nothing of the kinds of people who will need to, to vote for things, and it doesn't want to listen to them. And that's not how you win in politics.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  It's kind of wild seeing them learn this in real time, because it does feel like in 2024, they just had this like awakening where they realized, oh my God, we are so rich, and the amount of money we have, if you apply it to politics, is absurd. Like, our money goes so far in politics, like, fair shake, you know, one of the largest PACs ever, supporting crypto things, the, the amount of money they actually raised was just a drop in the bucket for, you know, some of these billionaires and the companies that, that donated to it. But now they're starting to learn, Ezra, like, this is a great point, they're, they're starting to learn that it takes more than money.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  So let's pause for a sec and look forward. I kind of want to game out, or at least speculate about what's coming next. Two years ago, we were talking about a big vibe shift in Silicon Valley. I'm wondering whether or not we're vibe shifting back again, and what the sort of early signs are. I want to ask in particular, Aaron, I'm wondering what you're seeing in sort of the, the early days after the results, how investors and other Silicon Valley figures are reacting to this.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, we're seeing a victory lap from the likes of Reid Hoffman.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  You know, and, and, and it's just, it's still a little bit confusing, because he's out there saying, we should get money out of politics. And while he's, you know, one of the biggest left, left-wing donors in this, in this last cycle, so that's, that's a little odd.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  I think it's going to take a little bit, a little while to shake out. I mean, maybe they're all going to hire their lobbyists and sort of like buddy up to people on the left and figure out like how to get their companies well positioned for this next moment. But I think culturally, we're still going to see people hanging out and espousing their right wing ideas. I don't know that, I don't know that this big forgetting that everyone's talking about is going to happen as rapidly, but Ezra, I'm sure you have thoughts.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  It's not obvious to me if in like a vibe shift, you know, back in the other direction, like, okay, Mark Zuckerberg takes off the chain, you know, you have like some things like that happen. But in the way that Andreessen and Musk and some of these other figures have become kind of like influencers, right? They all became tech, you know, online influencers. Do you have a group of them, you know, with maybe Reed being among those people, who can do that, you know, in the other direction, given the kind of headwind they're against? You know, in some ways, I think this is like a good moment to be like a Sachin Adella, right? A just like a normal tech CEO, right?

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Who doesn't seem to be like out there trying to be a kind of comic book villain or, you know, a podcaster, right? Like, just like somebody who runs a company in a seemingly normal way. I think that is going to be like the play. I don't see there emerging a kind of left wing analog to the all in guys.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I would also suggest like part of what we're seeing, as we've already been discussing, is a, is a collection of liberal to left politicians who are pretty well versed in tech and tech criticism beyond a kind of anti oligarchical stance. I mean, we already sort of swooned over AES's 60 Minutes interview where he's able to talk about diffusion, but not in a way that suggests that he's fully bought in. I mean, one of the really interesting contrasts between this blue wave election and the one in, say, 2008 is, you know, I mean, maybe I'm only speaking for myself, but I think we all associate Obama and the Obama administration with Silicon Valley and the sort of 20, it's tech industry of the 2010s. And now we're looking at a Democratic Party that no longer has the same relationship to

• 33:59Speaker 01

  the tech industry. And so, you know, I, I'm interested not just in what, what CEOs emerge as, you know, normal or even liberal leaning or whatever, but also what politicians emerge and how their relationship to tech is going to unfold over the next few years. And it feels like, go ahead.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  I think the flip side of that is also for the Democratic Party, and this is going to be harder in this period, which is what do they want from tech? As opposed to just like, what do they not want from tech, right? They don't want billionaire and oligarchical influence. They don't want AI to take all your jobs or kill the human race or whatever it might be. They don't want the, you know, effects on, you know, utility rates and, and water and the environment. But if you go back a couple of years, and I thought a lot about this, you know, in terms of the work I was doing in this period, when climate was the issue, there was a sort of natural union emerging between the Democratic Party and an area of tech. I mean, there's some alternative universe where Elon Musk, who makes solar panels and

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Teslas, like just is a normie Democrat and remains a normie Democrat and is like very influential from that perspective.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  What a world.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  The problem is that particularly with AI, although not only with AI, the question of do we want this is so salient. And for right now, for most people, the answer is like, not under these conditions, not if it's going to do the thing you say it's going to do, you person who is building it and profiting off of it and in control of it. And in that world, it's just like very hard to have a, like a positive politics of technology because the technology is perceived, I think, very correctly and understandably as first and foremost a threat. You know, you go back to that 08 role you're talking about, and what tech means in politics is the internet and social media, which is going to connect everybody and we're going to have more friends and we're going to know about more things and also green energy.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  The economy from the recession.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Going to save the economy and, and green energy, right?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  You know, and, and right now, it's like, it has all cohered around AI. And the AI story is just a much more mixed and frightening story for people at the moment. I don't think you're going to have any politicians running saying, what we just need is way, way, way more AI. I think there's some saying, there are things we can get from AI, you know, in terms of drug development and other, and, and other domains, and we should encourage that. But yeah, I mean, the problem with the tech industry is right now, they are all in, no pun intended, on something people increasingly don't think they want. And that's not a messaging problem. You know, I just wrote a column about this the, the other week, Max, you wrote about

• 36:37Speaker 02

  it, you know, with this idea of like on we risk. But even when you hear them talk about the world they're trying to get to, this world where human beings are the well-kept pets of the super intelligent AIs, that world sucks. People don't want that world. That's not an inspiring vision. And so like, there's a real, there's a, not a messaging problem here. There's a, there are like too many people in Silicon Valley are building towards a future that if it goes well, if you're not in the existential risk scenario, people don't want that future either, where, you know, I got a seven and a five year old. It's completely unclear what it would mean to train them to have like jobs.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  They're not going to be prompt engineers? That doesn't seem to be, no longer seems to be a growth industry. Okay, we're going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to do a segment that, okay, we're trying out a new name. We're going to see how it plays. The new name is pacing the frontier. And we're all going to take stories, this is really negative reaction so far, we're all going to take stories. If you're not watching this on YouTube, I'm getting the stoniest faces I could imagine. We're going to, we're going to talk about stories that we are tracking ourselves, that maybe other people aren't looking at, that we think are going to be important over the next few weeks, months or years. This is Hard Fork. I'm with Aaron Griffith and Ezra Klein.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Wait, I thought you were going to like announce a name for the segment.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Pacing the frontier.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  I don't get it.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  I know, it doesn't really make sense, does it?

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• 39:50Speaker 01

  Welcome back to Hard Fork. I'm here with Aaron Griffith and Ezra Klein. We are doing a segment that before the break was called pacing the frontier and after the break is no longer called pacing the frontier. We're asking our guests about stories that they're tracking that we think are going to be important over the next few weeks or months, but that nobody or not enough people are paying attention to right now. Aaron, what did you bring to show and tell today?

• 40:10Speaker 03

  So there's a great story by our colleagues Dana Goldstein and Natasha Singer about Google announcing that it's going to turn off search, the, the main thing we know Google for, for schools that don't want to use their AI products. And this is notable to me because, I mean, Google is in many, many schools. Google Chromebooks are kind of the most used laptop in schools. And so kids are using Google search for a lot. There are a lot of schools, including New York City schools, I believe, that don't want their kids to be exposed to or using AI. And Google is basically kind of saying, you don't want our AI? Well, fine, you don't get our search either, which is like such a classic tech industry

• 40:53Speaker 03

  move of like, I'm taking my ball and I'm going home because you don't like me. And, you know, Google had to come out and clarify and say, okay, well, we're going to figure out a way to kind of work through this. But like essentially, any schools that don't want AI also don't get Google search. And it's kind of, there's definitely a backlash to this, but it also, I think, speaks to this moment that we're in of schools and parents and everyone.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Pushing away from tech in in schools and education and you know, Google is kind of going in the other direction. So this story is, I think, something that's going to continue and be something to watch.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's a good story to talk about on this episode in particular, because it feels like this is an issue that is going to weigh heavily on the electorate and politicians for the next two years. I mean, you know, speaking as a millennial parent, you know, I get the feeling that a top issue for us voting millennial parents is going to be keeping AI the hell away from kids and education and maybe away from kids entirely. And I think this kind of thing where the tech company doesn't seem to be listening exactly. You know, if you are a campaign manager somewhere or a chief of staff somewhere, you are going to want to stick your crowbar in and and and use your leverage to make it a big issue.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't know why they don't just use DuckDuckGo, but.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I do think all classrooms should be very aware of surveillance and privacy issues. I'm happy to come and lecture at elementary schools about this stuff. Ezra, what story are you tracking this week?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  There's this permitting reform bill, and I think it's actually relevant to this whole conversation in a couple of ways. So this permitting reform bill was struck. It's a bipartisan bill between, on the Democratic side, Senators Whitehouse and Heinrich of Rhode Island and New Mexico. On the Republican side, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Mike Lee of Utah. And it's a big bill that, you know, it would take a long time to kind of go through it and parts of it I don't understand, but it basically makes it easier to build energy of all kinds, green energy, you know, non-green energy. And then it also has data center provisions about trying to internalize more of the costs of the the data centers. And this is a bill that's kind of splitting the Democratic Party a bit. It is there in the lame duck, but it is really like a like a movement around

• 43:03Speaker 02

  how easy is it to build energy in this country? And then there's also a place where, as it gets amended and worked through, you know, the data center backlash can find a place to express itself. So this bill is, I think, going to be a signal for how much bipartisan deal making the two sides want to do, particularly in the lame duck session right now. And it's also, although, you know, how much Democrats are going to want to stick with that now that they have so much power coming up, I think is a very open question. But it's also a place where this question of how easy should it be to build energy, particularly at a time when a lot more natural gas is being built to power data centers? And then what are the national rules on building data centers? This bill could become a vehicle where a lot of that gets fought out, or we get to see, actually, there's not enough consensus

• 43:46Speaker 02

  for even a very, very bipartisan piece of legislation to move forward on this right now.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  And what's the sort of timeframe you're looking at? Like, this is over the next several months?

• 43:54Speaker 02

  So my, the last I heard, it was going to be to to start moving forward in the Senate in the next week or two. But yeah, over the next several months.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we'll get we'll get a good picture on how willing Trump and the Republicans are to make those deals.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  And the Democrats, right? Because I think the theory right now is that if the deal does not get made in the lame duck, it probably will not move forward. It's actually going to be harder in some ways under a Democratic Congress, even though the bill does have Democratic support.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  I see.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  But, you know, we'll see.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Interesting. My story is kind of a non-story. I was shocked that prediction markets didn't make more of a splash this week. And that's not to say that they weren't everywhere being advertised to constantly. You walk outside the Times offices, they're all over Times Square. There are Calci and Polymarket ads. But they seem to have largely gotten the elections right. I'm using air quotes because I think it's a it's a question of philosophy and epistemology, what prediction markets are actually doing in terms of getting things right. But unlike the Brazilian elections a few weeks ago, there wasn't, there weren't any huge swings. We didn't have any crazy stories about wins or losses. Just feels like less of a coming out party than a sort of a moment when prediction, when it feels like prediction markets have been folded

• 45:02Speaker 01

  fairly thoroughly into the elections and newsmaking apparatus.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  I don't know, I'm a little skeptical of this whole thing. Like, go look on Polymarket at the prediction market for the Mississippi Senate race.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  OK, there's, OK, that's fair.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Like, just look at what that lot, like.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  What happened there? I missed that. What, like, were they really wrong?

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yes, but yeah, it's more just like the way it's like, the thing just all of a sudden, you get like the actual information and then the two lines go like this.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Right? And it's not like the prediction markets got something wildly right either. They're willing to swing faster in the direction of of information we're seeing.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  They do kind of like track the polls quite a bit, like, in many of the races.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  But, you know, really, more than anything, it just felt like this was an election where we all kind of just nodded our head and said, yeah, of course, there's prediction markets and they exist and that's there on every TV screen all the time. I'm not saying that's good. I'm not saying it's bad, though I have my suspicions. It just was sort of an interesting feature of the week.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  I mean, maybe it's just that they're becoming more sophisticated and that, like, there's, there's less suckers out there and so.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  I mean, I think there is smarter and smarter money. Yeah. Sadly for degenerate gamblers, don't, not for me, not for me. I'm an ethical journalist. I do not have any stakes in any bets on the election, but I'm happy to give tips to Hard Fork readers. Email us, [email protected]. Thank you, Ezra and Aaron, for joining us. This is like an unbelievably stimulating discussion. I had a really good time. Everybody else, stick around. We've got Teddy Schleifer coming on to talk about who spent their money wisely and who spent their money poorly. I'm going to give you a hint, who's in the latter category. His initials are E M. Thank you, guys.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us.

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• 48:26Speaker 01

  Welcome back to Hard Fork. I'm here with Times reporter Teddy Schleifer to talk about winners and losers in tech from this week's elections. So Teddy, you've spent the last several months reporting on campaign money, especially pertains to the tech industry. In this cycle, I know from your reporting, the top 20 donors injected about $2 billion into the midterms. More than 800 million of that came from the tech industry in one way or another. I want to start by identifying the big players. When we're talking about the top tech donors, who are we talking about?

• 48:54Speaker 07

  Sure. I mean, the the number one tech donor is a guy named Elon R. Musk.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  OK, I'm going to write this down, sorry.

• 49:00Speaker 07

  He spent, it looks like about $470 to $500 million, somewhere in that range, on the election. Other tech people that folks may have heard of are Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the founders of Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, spent $100 million themselves. There are also people like the company Coinbase, which joined Andreessen Horowitz in backing a big crypto super PAC this cycle. And there's a couple other individuals, such as Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, who spent a ton of money on MAGA Inc., the Trump super PAC, and also has been a huge proponent of all this money supporting, quote unquote, pro-AI politicians.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  A couple of years ago, it felt like a sort of conventional wisdom was coalescing among at least some people in the valley that they were so rich. Maybe Elon in particular was so rich, they could really just spend freely and get what they wanted out of politics. Feels a little bit like a big lesson from this election is that that's not really true. Tell me a little bit about how spending has functioned here, how it's maybe different from two years ago, and and what kind of lessons we might take away from it.

• 50:05Speaker 07

  Sure. I mean, so now, 16 years ago, the Citizens United decision comes down from the Supreme Court, which kind of begins this new era of anything goes billionaire political spending. And now people can cut checks of unlimited sizes to political committees. And every cycle, you know, the zeros keep adding up to more and more. So in 2024, you know, Elon Musk spent somewhere around $300 million. And this is just in disclosed giving. We're not even touching all the undisclosed giving that happens. And the narrative formed, I think, somewhat unfairly, that like, it was a raging success. So what Musk did in 2024 was perceived as successful. And I think the the gospel of kind of the entire world of of money and politics

• 50:49Speaker 07

  is that money helps with politics, that you you win elections by spending more money. This cycle, I think, and I've, this is a meta critique of my own stuff over the last decade. Like, I don't know. I mean, I mean, there are, there are times when that's true. There are times when it's not true. Last night was a vivid illustration of the fact that you can spend, you know, in Musk's case, $500 million or $450 million, and this stuff doesn't necessarily convert.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So part of what I want to do in talking to you is create, I don't want to call it a loser list. Let's call it like a return on investment power ranking. I want to know whose money was well spent and whose money wasn't. And I want to talk about some of the people that you were just mentioning. Seems to me, and, and, and I'm going to throw out the, the names that seem like they've done particularly well. And I want you, feel free to challenge me if you disagree. Reid Hoffman is basically the only Democratic donor among the tech group in the $20 billion. It's got to feel like he did pretty well with his money.

• 51:45Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, Reid's single biggest investment this cycle, at least publicly, was he spent $17 million on supporting James Talarico, including in the Democratic primary, which was competitive. And of course, the general election was, was competitive and Talarico won by, you know, a shockingly large margin. Makes you wonder if Reid didn't even need to spend anything in the general, honestly, in retrospect. You know, yes, he, he is somebody who knows a thing or two about political spending at this point. He's been doing this now for like 10 or 15 years. And he believed that Talarico was, you know, a generational talent and the sort of person who could win Texas. And, uh, you know, he won, so.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  So we can maybe put him somewhere near the top.

• 52:25Speaker 07

  Let's do that.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Another person I want to talk about, it didn't come up before because he hasn't been a huge donor, sort of nationally across the midterm cycle, but Sergey Brin did pretty well for himself.

• 52:33Speaker 07

  Yeah. Sergey's not on the list we mentioned because all he was giving is at the state level. But Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, if, if Reid is a veteran, you know, Sergey is a rookie. He spent over $100 million this cycle on a California political effort called Building a Better California. Brin basically started this group to push back on the proposed wealth tax in California, which at least as of this recording, seems like it's going to fail. And that is in large part because Sergey and other wealthy people from tech spent $330 million on a political effort to kind of cripple this thing.

• 53:14Speaker 07

  And it worked. I mean, Sergey, they were able to demolish this thing financially. Not only did they raise $333 million, but the pro side of the union pushing this billionaires tax in California basically raised bupkis. They, they, they were outspent tremendously and it's a testament to money in politics.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  So these two guys, Sergey and Reid, we might put at the top of our list.

• 53:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Partly because they're the only guys who got what they wanted out of the races last night. I want to turn to the crypto people because this is a whole grouping that you've put together when we're looking at the top 20 top donors. We have the Winklevoss twins, who were big donors to Trump and Trump-aligned PACs. And there's also this thing called Fairshake, a super PAC that is, is crypto-aligned. Where are the crypto people spending their money? What are they looking for?

• 54:01Speaker 07

  Yeah. So this kind of started in 2024 when Fairshake raised somewhere in the $100 to $150 million from a couple of key crypto companies, including Coinbase, Ripple, Andreessen Horowitz. And the narrative that was set was that it was a raging success. And that basically they were able to elect a very pro crypto Congress. Even Trump ended up being, you know, seen as pro crypto. And they wanted to keep it going in 2026. They had some successes in primaries, like there was a congressional race in Maryland in a Democratic primary

• 54:40Speaker 07

  where they elected a pro crypto person. They had some losses in primaries where the Illinois Senate race. But this November, their big bet was identical to 2024, which was to defeat Sherrod Brown, the Ohio senator who used to be in charge of the Senate Banking Committee, which of course regulates crypto. It's a big deal in, in Washington. Sherrod Brown was the target of $45 million of ads against him by Fairshake in September and October. And Sherrod Brown won last night. And, you know, there is a invincibility or infallibility that I think that, that, that, um, people felt about crypto where like if you were going to oppose the crypto industry,

• 55:24Speaker 07

  you were going to get demolished. And Sherrod Brown, obviously that would be very resonant for him because he lost in 2024, in part because the crypto industry, I think, spent $40 million then. But this time they won. And, you know, the crypto industry has won some other races. So I don't want to say that they're totally on the bottom of the loser's list, but certainly in their highest profile race, it's an L for them.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's lots of room on the loser's list.

• 55:48Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  One interesting thing here is I think there was a, a whole narrative that got built out of both the money that crypto was spending, but also a sense that there was this demographic shift in 2024. Young men were becoming conservative or Republican, a sense maybe the Democrats had to appeal to crypto owners, crypto traders. You know, this was a narrative obviously pushed quite hard by the crypto industry. Feels like the armor has been pierced a little bit on this. Like maybe we'll see Democrats being a little more aggressive with the crypto industry after something like that.

• 56:14Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, and the reason why Fairshake got involved in such a significant way at all this cycle was because they encountered this pushback you're speaking to. I mean, basically in September, it was not clear whether or not the crypto industry was going to spend all this money they had. Basically, the way that these super PACs tend to work now, which I think is kind of interesting, is they raise a ton of money and then it's sort of in this bank account and they don't necessarily always spend it. It's just like this like permanent looming threat. Like, you know, shame if something happened to you. And they basically, uh, Democrats blocked this crypto policy bill called the Clarity Act in, in September. And then like that, the next day was time to punish the Democrats and they spent all this money against Brown.

• 56:54Speaker 07

  So like, right, if you're a believer that, you know, the crypto industry is overrated politically, obviously you'd be emboldened by Brown staring down $45 million and winning.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Let's talk about another set of donors to the Fairshake super PAC.

• 57:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Andreessen Horowitz. This is one of the Silicon Valley's most famous and prestigious VC firms, but also quite memorably a conservative one. Marc Andreessen, obviously one of the loudest sort of pro-Trump voices in the valley. They were big donors on this. They donated to Fairshake, but they also were donating to an AI super PAC called Leading the Future. Tell me a little bit about the money they were spending and where that was.

• 57:35Speaker 07

  Sure. I mean, it's fascinating for people who are in the Andreessen, uh, have read his biography or, or, you know, familiar with his oeuvre kind of politically. Cause this is somebody who like, was in his twenties, was like a, like an institution in Democratic fundraising. I mean, Andreessen's been around for forever. And now he and his firm, you know, for a while, until Elon Musk entered the picture, like we're, we're the biggest political donors the entire cycle. And I read a story about kind of earlier this year about how they got into this. The AI stuff they do is the most interesting.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:06Speaker 07

  Because basically after Fairshake spends all this money in 2024, then the crypto industry is seen as political savants. They basically say, hey, let's do the same thing with AI. The AI industry in 2024 is nascent, but in 2025, 2026, it's becoming this huge thing. And they, they, it's the exact same model. You know, obviously it's not crypto companies that are funding it. It's, it's AI firms like OpenAI's co-founder Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz, which has a ton of investments in AI, and they basically run it back with AI. The difference as probably was, is predictable in retrospect or, or foreseeable is that people have a lot stronger opinions about AI than they do about crypto.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, it's, it's funny to sort of say that AI feels more toxic than crypto right now, but if, as we're making our loser's list, it feels a bit like that's what we're learning.

• 58:58Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, on crypto, there is, there's, I do, I do think there's some political upside on crypto for, for people, especially because there's the downs, the downside is it's not a salient issue for people. So like taking money from crypto can be a net positive decision strategically.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Right. But let's keep talking about AI because I think perhaps even below Andreessen Horowitz on our list is Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, president, one of the most prominent people at the company after Sam Altman, and a major donor to Leading the Future. You reported, and I found this story incredibly fascinating, on the controversy that spurred inside OpenAI. Tell me about that.

• 59:38Speaker 07

  I was going to say, you know, he's the biggest donor, one of the biggest donors to Leading the Future, asterisk, which is that it was pledged. And this shows how quickly the politics of AI have changed. Greg Brockman in 2025 and his wife Anna, uh, commit to giving $50 million to Leading the Future. And it's matched by $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz. Only the latter actually happened because Brockman's, the Brockmans gave the first $25 million in 2025 when AI is, you know, uh, it's an, it's a, it's a policy issue, but it's not like it is today. And then a year later. They back out of the second 25 they're gonna give. So that instead of being two installments of 25, it becomes one. And that's in part because Greg Brockman said internally inside the company

• 1:00:21Speaker 07

  that he was upset that his support for the super PAC was becoming a distraction. We've also seen this with, not totally with the same, but Meta as part of their political engagement this cycle. Also retracted about 20 to 25 million dollars from their state political giving. It was timed in the same way that the Brockman gift was, which is to say, as the politics were getting worse, they want to spend less money.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:44Speaker 07

  So this is tough and it just shows how quickly things have changed.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it does seem like we're seeing a revival of some of the internal employee pushback that was really common in the tech industry at the end of the 2010s, say, and then got really quashed during the Biden administration and the second Trump administration. But it seems clear that if you're an executive, you want to be careful about what kinds of causes your name is getting attached to and what kind of politics is getting attached to.

• 1:01:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, and that's why we have the beauty of dark money groups, which is if you want to do something, there's a way to do it. And I mean, that's a joke, but it's also that like, you know, we're talking about gifts to disclosed vehicles and so much of the world of money and politics and billionaire influence now funnels through things that are undisclosed. And if you're Greg Brockman out there and you're listening to this and you want to get another 25 million dollars in the political system, there's a nonprofit out there waiting to take your money.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Okay, so we've kind of constructed a list here. We've got a couple of people who got what they wanted and then a lot of people who really didn't, who spent their money in different ways. I think at the very bottom of our list, no matter what, is Elon Musk, who spent 400-plus million dollars and didn't, I don't know that he won a single race that he spent money towards, he got a positive outcome out of it. Beyond that, even more than somebody like Greg Brockman, who became a story when he didn't want to, Elon became an enemy, especially in Texas, when he was constantly invoked by as a foil in the Senate race. I don't even know where to begin with this. Sort of what happened with Elon's money here? And why did it turn out so poorly in your estimation?

• 1:02:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, let's roll back the clock to last spring, the spring of 2025, when this special election in Wisconsin. Musk, this is a random election, people probably don't even remember it, but like Musk spent a ton of capital, literally and also in terms of his time, on this judicial race in the state where he again became the main character in the race. This is at the time he was leading the Department of Government Efficiency. After the guy lost in Wisconsin, his name is Brad Schimmel, Musk kind of realized, I think, based on some reporting, that this was not working out to be so visible in his political support. And he tried to be a much, wanting a much, much lower profile going forward.

• 1:03:04Speaker 07

  That election, I think, was basically why Musk, for over a year, was not really doing much at all in the public eye. He was talking at one point about starting a third party, never did that, never recanted it, I should also add. He's still technically alive situation.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  It's so crazy that Elon Musk announced something he was gonna do and then it didn't happen. That's probably the first time that's ever happened.

• 1:03:26Speaker 07

  He does delete tweets, though, and he has not deleted the tweets about the party. Musk, this time, he was barely saying anything about it, you know? He said one time like, "Vote red today," which he did delete at some point overnight on Tuesday night. His spending was concentrated in a few places. We don't have all the details yet because of campaign finance reporting, but essentially, probably about half of the spending, maybe a little bit more of it, was centered on Texas and was centered on Ken Paxton's race. And that's why James Talarico was able to really make him a foil at the end and including in his victory speech last night, where he basically took a shot at Musk.

• 1:04:08Speaker 07

  Paxton lost by a lot and ultimately, like, that sucks for Elon Musk. So he deserves the bottom spot here. But to what extent he is to blame? I mean, Paxton probably would have lost even if Musk had spent zero. And maybe the argument there, the ROI, is to not spend in a race we're gonna lose, because at least that way you still have the 500 million dollars, right?

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think you could also argue that Elon Musk was gonna become a character in this race no matter what, since he is an important figure, like a huge right-wing figure in Texas and around the country.

• 1:04:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Can we look forward a little bit? So we're still sort of, the dust is still settling on this week's elections. We're still figuring out what happened. Are you expecting all of the people on this list to be on it again in 2028? Are there figures we should be looking out for who weren't on it this cycle?

• 1:04:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, let's start with Musk. I mean, the most extensive thing he said about the midterms was a couple of days ago, where he basically said his fear and the reason why he was so involved in the midterms this cycle was about 2029. His fear is basically they'd have a Democratic trifecta, where they have the White House and they have both Houses of Congress, which they now do, and that that's gonna lead to a, you know, in his view, the end of civilization. I think he's a game over for America or something like that, which meant, you know, Democrats are gonna let all the illegals in from Mexico and, you know, they're gonna basically register all as voters and then it's the end of civilization and blah, blah, blah. Like, that, to me, I read that as like, yes, Elon Musk plans to play in the 2028 Republican primary.

• 1:05:43Speaker 07

  Musk has a pretty good relationship with JD Vance, probably not a surprise, but like, that relationship has stayed pretty good, even with the ups and downs with Trump. I would be shocked if Musk did not support Vance. The other people on the list that we've mentioned, I don't know, because some of the folks who are really tied to a specific industry, who are just kind of doing effectively like pay-for-play lobbying, I don't really mean that in a furious way, but like, the crypto industry, the AI industry, where they're really engaged on a specific issue. It really depends what politicians do on those issues. Like, you know, we're also talking about Republicans, like, in the Democratic primary, like, will there be a crypto candidate who kind of gets the money from the crypto industry? Or, you know, there will certainly be a range of opinions on AI,

• 1:06:28Speaker 07

  even in the Democratic primary, like, will there be someone who is more pro-AI and get some money there? One interest group that I think is fascinating, which we haven't talked about from the tech sector, is the AI safety money, which is basically the backlash to the Andreessen view of the world. And that is a huge source of cash. I think one of the big takeaways from this cycle is that, like, there is a ton of money in the, like, anthropic, you know, effective altruist, lowercase d, maybe uppercase D, democratic world, where people who want the AI companies to move more slowly, were more concerned about existential risk.

• 1:07:11Speaker 07

  And it's, you know, absolutely gonna be a force in the Democratic primary. And I think in 2028, you know, Dario Amadei could be on this list or, you know, even some people at OpenAI who are more partial to that.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I expect, you know, given your beat, that you are looking with some interest at the Anthropic IPO coming up soon, because you're gonna mint a bunch of billionaires who are gonna, who have these, exactly the passions you're talking about and exactly the interests.

• 1:07:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, they're already on the cap table to some extent. I mean, already on the cap table of the company and I think on the campaign finance cap table, so to speak. I mean, like, people like Eric Schmidt, who's a big investor in Anthropic, is a huge Democratic donor. Dustin Moskovitz, who is, you know, one of the earliest investors in the company and is a huge Democratic donor. The resources, though, that's gonna be created by these IPOs are gonna mint a lot of people who are not necessarily even billionaires, but, you know, it's a very civically-minded community of people at Anthropic. It's a casting with a massively broad brush, but like, you know, these are people who could easily give a million or 2 million or 3 million dollars. And I know that Democratic fundraisers are also watching the Anthropic IPO closely

• 1:08:21Speaker 07

  with kind of the hope that there's gonna be a lot of, you know, 30-year-olds who are gonna make a ton of money and are gonna want to host, you know, Josh Shapiro when he comes to San Francisco, for example.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  You mentioned dark money before. I mean, is there a version of the next, I mean, I suppose this is the version of the next cycle, where a lot of the people who are on the list right now are spending the same kind of money, but they're keeping it much more secret?

• 1:08:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's a huge caveat to everything I've said, which is that I am very curious and hopefully self-aware about the amount that we don't know about what's happening in this space. I've been writing about this kind of on and off for 10 years now, and there is less disclosed than ever, especially in the Democratic world, where so much political giving now happens through nonprofits. And, you know, to read a campaign finance report is just to be inundated with like, an alphabet soup of nonprofits that are, you know, Americans for America, Inc. All of these groups started like, two weeks before you're reading the thing.

• 1:09:28Speaker 07

  And like, suddenly, there's a super PAC that is 30 million dollars that got this donation from Americans for Americans, Inc. And it's like, how'd that happen? And that's an attractive way of kind of engaging in politics now, especially in the Trump era, where lots of Democrats are fearful about investigations or, you know, Trump regularly threatens big Democratic and progressive donors. And, you know, he's gone after Harvard and other Ivy League institutions for philanthropic gifts and tried to withhold research money. There's a wholly legitimate reason why I think liberals fear the Trump administration and want to have their political giving be more shrouded in secrecy. But the downside is, no one really knows much about this stuff now.

• 1:10:11Speaker 07

  And none of the nonprofits made the list or referencing, because they were all, it's so, there's so many of them, honestly. It's like, it's like, the number of different nonprofits that started in, you know, August that each donated 10 million dollars is, you could have your own list, Nate, of just that.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  All right, well, on that very cheery note, Teddy, I want to thank you for coming by and talking to us about this stuff. You can find Teddy's work, as well as Aaron's, on the New York Times app, where you can also watch or listen to every episode of The Ezra Klein Show. Thanks for coming on, Teddy.

• 1:10:41Speaker 07

  You bet.

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• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  This episode of Hard Fork was produced by Whitney Jones and Sawyer Roque and edited by Viran Povich, with additional editorial support from Brendan Klinkenberg, Lisa Tobin, and Brooke Minterz. We were fact-checked by Will Peichl and engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Alicia Beetup, Marian Lozano, Diane Wong, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell. Our assistant video editor this week is Rebecca Blondon, with additional video production by Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Jessica Testa, Huiweng Tam, Matty Masiello, Zach Caldwell, Dave Mayers, Sirdian Stojikovic, Chris Moore, Thomas Trudeau, Samantha Winter, Michael Cordero, and Dahlia Hadad.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  If you have any questions or comments or want to give us a piece of your mind, find us at newyorktimes.com/hardfork. You can also email us [email protected].

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