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As votes flooded in for Donald Trump, Silicon Valley leaders grew anxious. "Tonight we cry, we despair, and we fear. Tomorrow we get back to work trying to build the world we want," OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman wrote on Twitter. "We have to admit that we are hugely disconnected with our nation," Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi tweeted. "I don't like it but have to recognize this issue."
That was in 2016, the first time Donald Trump won the White House. This week, many of the same tech executives dutifully celebrated his election.
Khosrowshahi, who moved to become CEO of Uber in 2017, hailed Trump's "resounding victory" in a post Wednesday on X, as Twitter is now called. "We stand ready to work with you and your administration," he said. "Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory," Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also criticized Trump in 2016 and owns The Washington Post, wrote on X.
Altman also changed his tune: "congrats to President Trump. i wish for his huge success in the job," he tapped out on X. OpenAI declined to comment. Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The change in tone underscores the pragmatism many tech companies have adopted as another Trump administration nears. In recent years, many tech elites have shrugged off the idealism once central to Silicon Valley's self-image, in favor of a more corporate and transactional approach to politics.
"There were already rumblings of a change in our industry's political outlook. Harris's tax plans would have sundered her support in the tech community had she won," said Matt Calkins, CEO of Appian, which makes business software used by companies and government. "The industry may be more accommodating and less confrontational this time." Calkins says he is a political independent.
That shift occurs as the tech industry looks to continue the phenomenal growth of its early years.
Google and others joined the ranks of the world's biggest companies by getting the world online and putting a smartphone in every pocket. Now tech leaders and venture investors must reckon with the antitrust scrutiny that comes with running the most powerful companies in the world. They are pursuing growth in more regulated or government-dependent sectors such as finance, defense, energy and electric vehicles.
A growing contingent of right-wing tech figures argue that Trump can usher in a new era of American dominance by removing red tape.
The co-founders of high-profile investment firm Andreessen Horowitz threw their support behind Trump in July - shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk - calling for clear rules around its multibillion-dollar crypto portfolio, and more investment in artificial intelligence and defense start-ups to boost U.S. competition with China.
Augustus Doricko, CEO of the cloud-seeding start-up Rainmaker, who has championed a community of patriotic young male start-up founders in El Segundo, California, said in a text message after Trump's win that political outsiders like the president-elect and his close ally Musk could "accelerate America by a thousand years" by investing in and deregulating "futuristic technology."
"This election was a miracle because the winners believe in a glorious, sci-fi future of colonizing Mars and controlling the weather," he said. "Americans embodied this in the past and are recapturing it."
A much wider swath of Silicon Valley leaders did not endorse Trump but have been unhappy with the Biden administration's approach to tech regulation and in particular his appointment of FTC Chair Lina Khan. Her tougher approach to policing megamergers rankles start-up leaders and investors who want to one day sell their companies to tech giants for billion-dollar payouts.
Cloud storage company Box CEO Aaron Levie, who campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris and argued with Trump-supporting tech leaders on social media in the months before the election, struck an upbeat tone in an interview on Wednesday.
Levie remains concerned about Trump's promises to deport undocumented immigrants and the former president's track record of slowing high-skilled immigration, but said tech companies and the wider economy could benefit from lower corporate taxes.
He is hopeful Musk's influence on Trump would temper his policies, despite backing a different candidate. "I will fully admit that some of my optimism is driven by the closeness that Elon has had to Trump," Levie said.
Musk has endorsed many of Trump's signature policies and unsubstantiated political claims, telling his followers on X on Monday that unless they voted for the former president the Democratic Party would "legalize so many illegals in swing states that this will be the last real election in America."
Veena Dubal, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, who has studied the inequities of the gig economy, said that the emergence of conservative tech figures such as Musk and investor David Sacks makes it easier for tech leaders who voted against Trump to now embrace him.
In response to Trump's anti-immigrant policies in 2017, ride share start-up Lyft donated $1 million to the ACLU and Airbnb took out a pointed Super Bowl ad about accepting people regardless of their race, religion or the country they immigrated from. The calculation being made now, Dubal said, is that publicly opposing Trump "is not economically or politically advantageous."
Many of the tech leaders now welcoming Trump live and work in some of the deepest-blue communities in the nation.
Nearly 80 percent of San Francisco voters, and around 70 percent of those in the Silicon Valley counties to the south of Santa Clara and San Mateo voted for Harris. Many tech workers are immigrants themselves - including the CEOs of Google, Microsoft and Uber - and thousands live in the United States on skilled worker visas.
Trump has said he will deport undocumented immigrants en masse and during his time in office, he slowed visa processing times significantly.
In interviews with The Post, some in Silicon Valley's rank and file expressed disappointment at the reaction from tech leaders.
A Google employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job said they wanted the company's leaders to do more to acknowledge the impact of the election on real people.
"It's frustrating to be told to focus on AI when the foundation of society and democracy feels strained. As plans for the largest deportation in the history of the U.S. are being planned, I'm told to focus on Gemini," the employee said, referring to Google's flagship AI chatbot. "I get that that's the job but it feels absurd."
In 2017, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and company co-founder Sergey Brin attended a company protest of Trump's immigration restrictions. This April, Pichai told workers that they should not debate politics at work after the company fired 28 workers for staging a sit-in against Google's work with the Israeli government. And this week, Pichai congratulated Trump on X and said "we are in a golden age of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to help bring the benefits to everyone."
Weeks before the election, Trump said Google should be prosecuted for election interference for allegedly showing biased search results.
Multiple tech workers told The Post that there had been little to no discussion on internal forums about the election, in contrast to how workers had pressured management to respond to Trump's election in 2016.
The industry once stood apart from the rest of corporate America in how readily employees spoke out. Now fears of layoffs and leaders' reduced tolerance for employee protest have silenced internal political debate.
Inside Amazon, leadership communicated "absolutely nothing acknowledging the election" an employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job said. Another corporate Amazon worker said that Wednesday was "more or less business as usual." Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on X that he was looking forward to working with Trump. The company declined to comment.
At Meta, which for more than a year has had rules against engaging in divisive rhetoric at work, executives did not mention the election in a companywide meeting last week, according to a recording listened to by The Post.
Hours after Trump's win became clear, workers spoke more freely on Blind, a workplace app that gives people who have held a Meta email a private anonymous discussion board, according to copies of messages seen by The Post.
"Don't cry on Workplace tomorrow about the election," wrote one user, referring to Meta's internal communication platform. "No one wants to hear about your liberal politics at work any more than you wanna hear from conservatives about their viewpoints. That is all."
The sentiment seemed to echo CEO Mark Zuckerberg's own recent attempts to distance himself from Democratic political activism. Earlier this year, he said it had been a mistake for Facebook to crack down on posts about covid and Hunter Biden's laptop in previous years as he attempted to mend fences with conservative politicians who have attacked him and the company for years.
On Meta's Threads social media platform, Zuckerberg wrote "Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration."
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