Because they aren't nearly as clever as they think they are. Having more money to invest or spend does not make you more intelligent. In fact at a certain level it seems like money makes people dumber because they insulate themselves so much from the rest of society and reality. The most intelligent people got the cash they needed for life and either left or are working on their own personally fulfilling projects.
Having enough money to be able to throw bad money after good money until everything somehow works out really is power of SV. Corner the market by dumping and then insert yourself as middleman and then charge as much as you can for anything you provide. And everyone is forced to pay.
Lot of tech companies take a huge cut for relatively little. Or then when you really start calculating price of some SaaS service you end up with pretty staggering figure. Doesn't seem big when you make lot of money by selling same service, but from outside it looks disgusting.
This has worked out for long while. But it remains to be seem if there is change in market coming. After which things might not happen so easily anymore.
Because their skills in one domain are not broadly applicable to others. Someone who is good at one or a few things is not all things. You can also see this in their inability to market AI to the broader public. If they could make a compelling case they, perhaps, wouldn't be facing such a widespread backlash to data centers and the technology generally.
Its a tough ask for any mega corporation to be indifferent to the power an administration can wield against you. Especially one that actively seeks retribution and petty grievances.
Spines: the more money you have, the harder they are to afford.
I'm beginning to think there's a relation between the two. If you have morals you'd never be a billionaire, your conscience would hate your robber baron behavior too much. But there are probably unnoticed billionaires who are actually quite moral, e.g. Warren Buffett, that is a counterpoint to this idea. (This thought of mine is quite shallow/unresearched, so perhaps under this comment will soon be the reply of how Buffett is an asshole...)
And that might take poorly to anyone influential that predicted an election loss for the administration? Maybe to the extent of suing them and/or seeking to prosecute them? Yeah, that computes.
This is a terrible article not fit for a MIT publication.
Most business leaders, especially at public companies, care about nothing but short-term profits. Just a couple of years ago they were fully embracing the so-called "woke politics" during the Biden administration. One could have accused them of getting the previous election wrong too, as well as the "reputational damage" with the majority that won that election.
These people lack any ideology beyond personal enrichment. They will be in bed with whoever is in power and later say "You misunderstood what I meant, it was taken out of context, in reality I think that <enter new administration-friendly idea here>"
The reason they are silent about the midterms is because they have to balance the fact that there are two parties in power now, but the president still has a much stronger short-term influence on their businesses. They must be careful and the less they say, the easier it will be for them to survive the next two years.
SV has never known the future. All they have ever done is claim that whatever product they are currently developing is the next big thing. Because they say this before their product is released, they can sometimes look like prognosticators when their products succeed.
We’re like slime molds. In a good way. We try all the options, even the ex ante stupid ones, and then crowd resources into the path that works.
That works for innovation. It does not for politics. It fails horribly in governance—see David Sacks and Howard Lutnick right now in respect of compromising Nvidia and national security.
A Dutch reporter made a very tough story on a mother who couldn't afford furniture. And this wasn't some crack addict it was a woman with a job who made 3000 dollars month.
Now if people like that are struggling you know something has gone very wrong.
Clinton once said "it's the economy stupid" but the elite are beyond the economy.
A. 3k month is min. wage in NL. I don't think min. wage is intended to support children. I assume they also have other social programs as that's at least close to poverty line in the US.
This reminds me of the good money I made off the techbros convinced Andrew Yang still had a shot at the nomination deep into the 2020 primary (or the MAGA diehards betting on Trump winning states that had already been certified for Biden). It's a dangerous game to get emotional over betting, and there are few topics that can be more emotional than politics, at least among those willing to put money on it.
This democratic party is not exactly the same as any other democratic party that's been in power. There's been a pretty clear shift in party beliefs again. Democrats used to be pro tech neolibs, defending Elon on the debate stage while Mitt Romney attacked him, etc. The democratic party now is the one that got betrayed by the oligarchs and has an axe to grind and mandate to grind that axe
You are also a demagogue. I said the game is dumb and you are attributing to me some claim of 4D chess. You want them to lose, but they won't. The game is dumb and pretty much anyone could play OK, which is what they are doing.
Ooh I can say random stuff too, that has nothing to do with the article! Like, "only someone with literal shit for brains would be out here saying 'both sides same' in 2026 with a straight face!"
You must not be LGBTQ+, or a minority who can now legally be stopped purely because of their race, or a minority who has had a war declared on their ability to vote. Or an immigrant who now feels very unwelcome. Or one of the millions who have lost health insurance. Or the many whose SNAP benefits have been cut. Or an American shot down in the street for extremist belief that we need to treat immigrants with decency and within the laws of the Constitution and that we have a right to observe government law enforcement in action.
> “Move fast and break things” might work in a startup, but it’s a terrible strategy for building reputational goodwill
This is more or less something I've been thinking for a while
We have been moving fast, breaking things, at breakneck speeds for short term gains for way too long. It has been working out financially but ever other metric seems to be struggling. We aren't building secure software. We're not building responsible software. We're maximizing a single pillar at the expense of all other considerations and it's eventually gotta fall apart right?
Edit: It seems to me that SV elite have let themselves get boxed into an echo chamber. They aren't paying attention to what is going on outside their bubble.
> breakneck speeds for short term gains for way too long
quarterly earnings come to mind... even at $company everything is crunched into quarter-scale thinking (and its even less because of various overhead) so long-term thinking is just non existent from my vantage point
Because SV is itself a bubble, believing in a utopia of 1,000 people purchasing from themselves that own everything and 7.9 billion people out of work.
The problem is, we have not experienced a serious correction in a long time and if there are no economic solutions to this problem, then may we deserve a crash to make the consequence clear.
So of course people outside of tech [0] are not convinced of AI data centers, i.e (Homes for agents). And no. UBI is not a viable solution to solve this problem in the long term.
1. Trump retaliates against businesses which aren't 100% for him.
2. The amount of money (a few hundred million dollars or whatever spent on the election) was relatively small in Silicon Valley terms.
3. The Democratic politicians won't hold grudges: they will now happily accept all the new cash soon to come from Silicon Valley.
4. The hostility from the public is not because of Silicon Valley's association with Trump; instead it is because of issues like higher electricity rates, loss of privacy, job losses, etc.
#3 is not a given. That money is poison. If Mississippi can go blue then new york can go red. We're just entering a less polarized era of politics. Things have been trending in that direction every election this decade.
One of the things that Americans broadly agree on right now is data centers can go to hell and data centers are just a proxy for tech. Democrats won in primaries and the general by being outspent. Not while being outspent. By being outspent. Just accepting particular categories of donor money sunk primary campaigns and the general in e.g. Texas turned into a referendum on the donors.
Politicians' driving motivation is getting re elected. If that money is toxic they're not touching it. If democrats turned around in Ohio and Texas and accepted data center money after rage against them was specifically the one thing that got them into office, you think they have a snowballs chance in hell of keeping those seats? The GOP just ran that experiment. They betrayed the like specific things said they'd do, and got rewarded with a comical amount of donor money, and fricking Blansas Blexas Blississippi because it turned out voters were like no but we were serious about that tho
If the democrats don't deliver anything after this I think you'll see a wild swing backwards to whoever on the right promises to solve problems but won't solve the problems, and after that I think all bets are off in terms of what happens.
People will have had no rational reason whatsoever to believe that they have any say in the running of the country or whats being done to their lives families and communities. Democracies that don't respond to voters die and absolutely nobody running a company in silicon valley or SF understands the level of utter rage simmering among people.
#3 was probably more true in 2024 than it is today. Not realizing populism is becoming a bigger factor in both parties is a pretty big miscalculation though. Also media and tech were both common axe grinds in the first Trump term. So maybe they thought they would get ahead of the retribution which they probably did but at the cost of losing the other side. They also miscalculated that Trump will just do stuff even if you thought you paid him off, eg tariffs.
Definitely, and I think it was more true in 2022 than 24, and 20 than 22. Personally for 18 and 16 I feel like I have no idea what has happening. I think sometime around then polarization peaked and started to decline. Like the populist surge with Bernie and Trump (end citizens United/drain the swamp/etc) was 2016 but I don't trust my my own memories of what I felt at that time because what even was the pre pandemic era? Im sure people smarter than me can explain what was happening then and how it relates to now but to an idiot m like my it just feels like stuff was happening, then we all paused, put the world in a blender, shook it up, then hit play.
But since then every election has just felt (I keep qualifying "felt" because these are just the vibes in my bubble) like "can we have less chaos and good economy and [some vision of a government that is less powerful and controlling, anti covid or anti trump corruption or something] and also [a somewhat frustratingly contradictory vision go also, a government that is not inept and gridlocked and gets stuff done] and less war"
"No for real tho"
"No for real tho let me try the guys on the right again"
"No for real tho what about this socialist mayor"
"No for real tho - uhh - this is not working - let's try some mashups. Jesus and single payer healthcare - or - no that's not really a mashup I guess that was sort of his original deal anyway. So uhh, Union Bros, but, they're pro immigration now and hate tarrifs. And what if we had like a younger Bernie type that's on about all the same things but he's Muslim and he calls himself a capitalist. We'll do an old senator in ohio and a young governor in Alaska, and, actually fuck it just reroll everything one of these gotta work" <- we are here
Who TF knows what we're gonna get for 2028s "No like for real tho" but somehow I feel like a dominant driving force is going to involve how stuff is expensive and people don't like war.
Costco did not bend the knee on the anti DEI freak out the GOP went on in 2025 and did not suffer any consequences from Trump admin. Target and Apple couldn’t get on their knees quickly enough and Apple went embarrassingly low.
> The hostility from the public is not because of Silicon Valley's association with Trump; instead it is because of issues like higher electricity rates, loss of privacy, job losses, etc.
Because they aren't nearly as clever as they think they are. Having more money to invest or spend does not make you more intelligent. In fact at a certain level it seems like money makes people dumber because they insulate themselves so much from the rest of society and reality. The most intelligent people got the cash they needed for life and either left or are working on their own personally fulfilling projects.
Having enough money to be able to throw bad money after good money until everything somehow works out really is power of SV. Corner the market by dumping and then insert yourself as middleman and then charge as much as you can for anything you provide. And everyone is forced to pay.
Lot of tech companies take a huge cut for relatively little. Or then when you really start calculating price of some SaaS service you end up with pretty staggering figure. Doesn't seem big when you make lot of money by selling same service, but from outside it looks disgusting.
This has worked out for long while. But it remains to be seem if there is change in market coming. After which things might not happen so easily anymore.
I would argue that this is not specific to SV, and in fact applies to large swaths of the US economy. [1]
[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com
Exactly, they surround themselves with sycophants and sociopaths and end up insulating themselves from reality.
That’s not unique to SV. The interesting bit is why they’d hitch their wagon to such instability.
Because their skills in one domain are not broadly applicable to others. Someone who is good at one or a few things is not all things. You can also see this in their inability to market AI to the broader public. If they could make a compelling case they, perhaps, wouldn't be facing such a widespread backlash to data centers and the technology generally.
Its a tough ask for any mega corporation to be indifferent to the power an administration can wield against you. Especially one that actively seeks retribution and petty grievances.
Spines: the more money you have, the harder they are to afford.
I'm beginning to think there's a relation between the two. If you have morals you'd never be a billionaire, your conscience would hate your robber baron behavior too much. But there are probably unnoticed billionaires who are actually quite moral, e.g. Warren Buffett, that is a counterpoint to this idea. (This thought of mine is quite shallow/unresearched, so perhaps under this comment will soon be the reply of how Buffett is an asshole...)
buffet is absolutely ruthless under that "uncle warren" persona
he also basically had has wife find his mistress
And that might take poorly to anyone influential that predicted an election loss for the administration? Maybe to the extent of suing them and/or seeking to prosecute them? Yeah, that computes.
The claims are an assertion, not a finding.
Yeah. WTF is this?
>The industry’s misreading of the moment has already punctured one myth Silicon Valley holds dear: that its leaders can always see what’s next.
This is a terrible article not fit for a MIT publication.
Most business leaders, especially at public companies, care about nothing but short-term profits. Just a couple of years ago they were fully embracing the so-called "woke politics" during the Biden administration. One could have accused them of getting the previous election wrong too, as well as the "reputational damage" with the majority that won that election.
These people lack any ideology beyond personal enrichment. They will be in bed with whoever is in power and later say "You misunderstood what I meant, it was taken out of context, in reality I think that <enter new administration-friendly idea here>"
The reason they are silent about the midterms is because they have to balance the fact that there are two parties in power now, but the president still has a much stronger short-term influence on their businesses. They must be careful and the less they say, the easier it will be for them to survive the next two years.
SV has never known the future. All they have ever done is claim that whatever product they are currently developing is the next big thing. Because they say this before their product is released, they can sometimes look like prognosticators when their products succeed.
We’re like slime molds. In a good way. We try all the options, even the ex ante stupid ones, and then crowd resources into the path that works.
That works for innovation. It does not for politics. It fails horribly in governance—see David Sacks and Howard Lutnick right now in respect of compromising Nvidia and national security.
A Dutch reporter made a very tough story on a mother who couldn't afford furniture. And this wasn't some crack addict it was a woman with a job who made 3000 dollars month.
Now if people like that are struggling you know something has gone very wrong.
Clinton once said "it's the economy stupid" but the elite are beyond the economy.
I agree with the sentiment. Though,
A. 3k month is min. wage in NL. I don't think min. wage is intended to support children. I assume they also have other social programs as that's at least close to poverty line in the US.
B. Wasn't Clinton, but Carville, his advisor.
You're misremembering.
Carville didn't want a thin Dem majority because DSA would have holdout power.
He's totally fine with this outcome.
Now, they (and Fetterman) can't hold the Dems hostage because they had such a strong margin of victory.
See the latest where Fetterman is hedging? He can't run the Manchin $$$ playbook now.
> but the elite are beyond the economy
They may act like it. And the stupider among them believe it. But they aren’t. At least not beyond the political economy.
Wishful thinking and self interest may play a part.
Maybe they really can’t distinguish bots?
This reminds me of the good money I made off the techbros convinced Andrew Yang still had a shot at the nomination deep into the 2020 primary (or the MAGA diehards betting on Trump winning states that had already been certified for Biden). It's a dangerous game to get emotional over betting, and there are few topics that can be more emotional than politics, at least among those willing to put money on it.
Did they get the midterms wrong or are you just demonstrating wishful thinking?
Democrats had plenty of terms and yet none of the illegal competitive practices have been stopped. You are being played.
This democratic party is not exactly the same as any other democratic party that's been in power. There's been a pretty clear shift in party beliefs again. Democrats used to be pro tech neolibs, defending Elon on the debate stage while Mitt Romney attacked him, etc. The democratic party now is the one that got betrayed by the oligarchs and has an axe to grind and mandate to grind that axe
> Did they get the midterms wrong
When Alex Karp suddenly claimed to be a progressive after the election, it wasn’t because he got the outcome he was expecting.
Or you are being played.
Honestly you have to be a moron to not have action plans for either side winning. The dude you brought up clearly had.
"Oh I've been in your team all along" is not a convincing action plan.. Maybe if playing cops and robbers with 4 year olds..
Let's see if it will work then
How do you define "work"? What would be your yardstick? Genuinely interested.
That… uh… is not an action plan. That’s… dare I say it? The concept of a plan.
I’m not disagreeing with the moron bit, however.
I mean, the important part is the 4D chess and the fact you're in on it and smarter than the rest of us, yup, totally dude. How insufferable.
You are also a demagogue. I said the game is dumb and you are attributing to me some claim of 4D chess. You want them to lose, but they won't. The game is dumb and pretty much anyone could play OK, which is what they are doing.
Ooh I can say random stuff too, that has nothing to do with the article! Like, "only someone with literal shit for brains would be out here saying 'both sides same' in 2026 with a straight face!"
You must not be LGBTQ+, or a minority who can now legally be stopped purely because of their race, or a minority who has had a war declared on their ability to vote. Or an immigrant who now feels very unwelcome. Or one of the millions who have lost health insurance. Or the many whose SNAP benefits have been cut. Or an American shot down in the street for extremist belief that we need to treat immigrants with decency and within the laws of the Constitution and that we have a right to observe government law enforcement in action.
But again tell me how both sides are the same.
> again tell
I said nothing of the sorts, demagogue.
> “Move fast and break things” might work in a startup, but it’s a terrible strategy for building reputational goodwill
This is more or less something I've been thinking for a while
We have been moving fast, breaking things, at breakneck speeds for short term gains for way too long. It has been working out financially but ever other metric seems to be struggling. We aren't building secure software. We're not building responsible software. We're maximizing a single pillar at the expense of all other considerations and it's eventually gotta fall apart right?
Edit: It seems to me that SV elite have let themselves get boxed into an echo chamber. They aren't paying attention to what is going on outside their bubble.
Because SV is itself a bubble, believing in a utopia of 1,000 people purchasing from themselves that own everything and 7.9 billion people out of work.
The problem is, we have not experienced a serious correction in a long time and if there are no economic solutions to this problem, then may we deserve a crash to make the consequence clear.
So of course people outside of tech [0] are not convinced of AI data centers, i.e (Homes for agents). And no. UBI is not a viable solution to solve this problem in the long term.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8n50w445zgpo
Nobody who's lived through the last three years still seriously believes in UBI, do they?
It wasn't that big of a mistake:
1. Trump retaliates against businesses which aren't 100% for him.
2. The amount of money (a few hundred million dollars or whatever spent on the election) was relatively small in Silicon Valley terms.
3. The Democratic politicians won't hold grudges: they will now happily accept all the new cash soon to come from Silicon Valley.
4. The hostility from the public is not because of Silicon Valley's association with Trump; instead it is because of issues like higher electricity rates, loss of privacy, job losses, etc.
> Democratic politicians won't hold grudges: they will now happily accept all the new cash soon to come from Silicon Valley
I think one could single handed defeat a Democrat in a primary based on their receiving funds from certain now-verboten Silicon Valley names.
> The Democratic politicians won't hold grudges: they will now happily accept all the new cash soon to come from Silicon Valley.
The core base of the dems is out for blood. This would get them exiled.
#3 is not a given. That money is poison. If Mississippi can go blue then new york can go red. We're just entering a less polarized era of politics. Things have been trending in that direction every election this decade.
One of the things that Americans broadly agree on right now is data centers can go to hell and data centers are just a proxy for tech. Democrats won in primaries and the general by being outspent. Not while being outspent. By being outspent. Just accepting particular categories of donor money sunk primary campaigns and the general in e.g. Texas turned into a referendum on the donors.
Politicians' driving motivation is getting re elected. If that money is toxic they're not touching it. If democrats turned around in Ohio and Texas and accepted data center money after rage against them was specifically the one thing that got them into office, you think they have a snowballs chance in hell of keeping those seats? The GOP just ran that experiment. They betrayed the like specific things said they'd do, and got rewarded with a comical amount of donor money, and fricking Blansas Blexas Blississippi because it turned out voters were like no but we were serious about that tho
If the democrats don't deliver anything after this I think you'll see a wild swing backwards to whoever on the right promises to solve problems but won't solve the problems, and after that I think all bets are off in terms of what happens.
People will have had no rational reason whatsoever to believe that they have any say in the running of the country or whats being done to their lives families and communities. Democracies that don't respond to voters die and absolutely nobody running a company in silicon valley or SF understands the level of utter rage simmering among people.
#3 was probably more true in 2024 than it is today. Not realizing populism is becoming a bigger factor in both parties is a pretty big miscalculation though. Also media and tech were both common axe grinds in the first Trump term. So maybe they thought they would get ahead of the retribution which they probably did but at the cost of losing the other side. They also miscalculated that Trump will just do stuff even if you thought you paid him off, eg tariffs.
Definitely, and I think it was more true in 2022 than 24, and 20 than 22. Personally for 18 and 16 I feel like I have no idea what has happening. I think sometime around then polarization peaked and started to decline. Like the populist surge with Bernie and Trump (end citizens United/drain the swamp/etc) was 2016 but I don't trust my my own memories of what I felt at that time because what even was the pre pandemic era? Im sure people smarter than me can explain what was happening then and how it relates to now but to an idiot m like my it just feels like stuff was happening, then we all paused, put the world in a blender, shook it up, then hit play.
But since then every election has just felt (I keep qualifying "felt" because these are just the vibes in my bubble) like "can we have less chaos and good economy and [some vision of a government that is less powerful and controlling, anti covid or anti trump corruption or something] and also [a somewhat frustratingly contradictory vision go also, a government that is not inept and gridlocked and gets stuff done] and less war"
"No for real tho" "No for real tho let me try the guys on the right again" "No for real tho what about this socialist mayor" "No for real tho - uhh - this is not working - let's try some mashups. Jesus and single payer healthcare - or - no that's not really a mashup I guess that was sort of his original deal anyway. So uhh, Union Bros, but, they're pro immigration now and hate tarrifs. And what if we had like a younger Bernie type that's on about all the same things but he's Muslim and he calls himself a capitalist. We'll do an old senator in ohio and a young governor in Alaska, and, actually fuck it just reroll everything one of these gotta work" <- we are here
Who TF knows what we're gonna get for 2028s "No like for real tho" but somehow I feel like a dominant driving force is going to involve how stuff is expensive and people don't like war.
Costco did not bend the knee on the anti DEI freak out the GOP went on in 2025 and did not suffer any consequences from Trump admin. Target and Apple couldn’t get on their knees quickly enough and Apple went embarrassingly low.
> The hostility from the public is not because of Silicon Valley's association with Trump; instead it is because of issues like higher electricity rates, loss of privacy, job losses, etc.
Why not both? Or rather, all?
"And now, their industry is very squarely in the new victors' crosshairs."
It was in the crosshairs before the current administration took office
The current administration has thus provided (temporary) relief
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