Silicon Valley’s right wing notches victories nationwide and at home | Technology

While Elon Musk spent election night alongside Donald Trump celebrating their decisive victory at Mar-a-Lago, Silicon Valley figures who were invested, quite literally, in the outcome of Tuesday night’s election shared in the Tesla CEO’s joy. Some also claimed political wins for their political causes in San Francisco.

Venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale, and executives at Peter Thiel’s venture fund celebrated Trump’s win, which they predicted would usher in a new anti-woke, light-on-regulation regime that would be a boon for the tech industry.

David Sacks, a startup investor and podcaster, was there at Mar-a-Lago. Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril and Oculus, celebrated by tweeting a screenshot from the animated Pokémon TV show.

For some of them, the victory was personal: among those who have Trump’s ear are their contemporaries, connections, friends and others they describe as “some of the most effective people on the planet”.

It was a sentiment previously echoed by Lonsdale, who launched the America political action committee along with Musk, in an interview with the tech news site the Information. The government could possibly be run “by, like, all my smartest tech friends”, he said. In addition to Lonsdale’s close relationship to Musk, the Palantir co-founder counts Silicon Valley darling and vice-president-elect JD Vance among his longtime friends.

Many of these men, including Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and Palantir, and Sacks, the former COO of PayPal and CEO of Zenefits, have been “investing together” for years, said Rob Lalka, a professor at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business. This pooling of their time and resources to support Trump is only the latest in their joint ventures, he added.

“With Donald Trump’s candidacy, they have gained immense influence to advance libertarian ideals and move the Republican party away from traditional conservatism, which has been decades in the making,” Lalka said.

Sacks posted a lengthy tweet on X about “why Trump won” Wednesday afternoon, explaining and crowing over the strength of Trump’s “substantive campaign” and the failure of Kamala Harris’s “ersatz campaign”. Musk called it an “accurate assessment” of the political landscape.

Musk’s allegiance to Trump is expected to be rewarded. Trump plans to tap the billionaire Tesla CEO to lead a government efficiency commission he said he will create once he’s in office. Musk has said he will slash government spending and jobs as the “secretary of cost-cutting”.

“Assuming if things go the right way with this election we’re going to do a comprehensive review of all the government agencies,” Musk said in a virtual X space he hosted as polls closed on Tuesday. One of Musk’s suggestions was the government should “transition” some government workers to private sector jobs “where they can make parts and services that are more useful”. They would be given two years of pay to find another job, he also suggested.

Some prominent tech investors also celebrated what they predicted would be the end of Lina Khan’s tenure as the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, during which she launched antitrust investigations in to, and cases against, Google, Amazon, Meta and Apple. Musk tweeted that Khan would be fired. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Trump planned to soften the government’s approach to big tech’s antitrust cases, particularly Google.

But some tech industry executives are not as convinced a Trump presidency is the gift to the industry that some have made it out to be. In an interview with the Newcomer newsletter, Parker Conrad, the chief executive of payroll software Rippling, said people are wrongly convinced Trump’s administration will align with their personal agendas.

“My personal view is that a lot of smart people are being very stupid and believe that Trump is going to do THEIR thing,” Conrad said to Eric Newcomer. “Tech people think he will usher in new, tech-forward, business friendly environment. Kooky fluoride conspiracy theorists think he’s gonna take care of that thing, etc.”

In addition to the national race, several of these players had their eyes on local races closer to Silicon Valley, where they’ve spent millions to shape local policies and unseat more progressive incumbents.

Over the past months, wealthy Silicon Valley executives had thrown their weight behind different moderate candidates for the job of San Francisco mayor and moderate candidates for the board of supervisors.

While votes in that contest were still being counted, at least one group, GrowSF, was celebrating what looked like a “promising” result for the mayoral candidate that that organization had backed: Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.

GrowSF, a dark money group started by alums of Apple, Google and Amazon, Sachin Agarwal and Steven Buss, says it backs “common sense” candidates as opposed to what the group’s board member and YCombinator president and chief executive Garry Tan called “prog nut jobs”.

Tan on Tuesday reposted a victorious message from Lurie and tweeted his own:

“It’s a great outcome for San Francisco. A near clean sweep of moderate Dems. Hats off to Marjan Philhour, Danny Sauter, Bilal Mahmood and Michael Lai on retaking the Board of Supervisors. Incredible work by @GrowSF @TSFAction @ConnectedSF @PirateWires @StopCrimeSFnews,” Tan wrote.

Other organizations run and funded by wealthy figures in the tech world saw less success on Tuesday. Together SF, another organizing group, had thrown its weight behind mayoral candidate Mark Farrell. Proposition D, a ballot proposition pushed by the group (and others, including GrowSF) that would have cut the number of commissions San Francisco has in half and give the mayor more authority, appeared headed for defeat. Total contributions to boost the ballot measure – the most expensive in San Francisco history – were just under $9.4m.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage