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INTRODUCTION
In his final speech as president, Joe Biden warned that Silicon Valley billionaires posed an existential threat to American democracy. Sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office on January 15, 2025, a grim-faced Biden shared his concern about “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.” “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” said Biden. He reminded Americans that, in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had used his own farewell address to emphasize the rise of a “military-industrial complex” with “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six decades later, Biden said he was “equally concerned” about an emergent “tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”
It is unclear why Biden saved this dire announcement for his final days in office. His declaration, among the most dramatic in American history, arrived far too late. Five days later, on January 20, during a speech celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, performed a Nazi salute—twice—while standing behind a lectern affixed with the official seal of the President of the United States. Later that day, Musk officially took charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a project aimed at dismantling key parts of the federal government from the inside. He tackled the assignment with the sociopathic glee of a schoolboy ripping the wings from a butterfly, recruiting dozens of young men with zero government experience, including one nicknamed “Big Balls,” to serve as henchmen. Musk’s shock troops quickly set about tearing apart the federal bureaucracy. They were aided in this effort by Grok, Musk’s proprietary artificial intelligence chatbot, which his team deployed to sift through sensitive government data. The Constitution bars foreign-born individuals from the presidency, but the South Africa–born Musk found a workaround. He spent nearly $300 million to get Trump elected and buy himself a kind of co-presidency. Once deputized, he immediately began purging thousands of federal workers and dismantling the United States Agency for International Development, better known as USAID. The billionaire announced that he was tossing the agency—which provides lifesaving aid to the world’s poorest people—“into the woodchipper.” This decision alone is projected to kill up to 14 million people by 2030, many of them children.
Musk was not the only tech oligarch to find himself in a position of great power under Trump. In 2025, the tech industry revealed its true face. Devoid of any moral scruples or loyalty to democratic principles, many of Silicon Valley’s most well-known figures chose to openly ally themselves with a president who would soon, with their help, check every box in the authoritarian playbook. This shift took some observers by surprise. In the popular imagination, Silicon Valley had long been seen as a quirky West Coast bastion of liberal ideas and people, a land of future-facing billionaires who rejected the regressive politics of backward-thinking conservatives and aligned more closely with the Democratic Party.
During Trump’s first term, a movement called Tech Against Trump had sprung up to challenge his extremist policies. In 2017, over one hundred companies—including Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—had filed a legal brief challenging Trump’s ban on immigration from Muslim countries. But times had changed. In 2025, Silicon Valley was all in on Trumpism. Instead of filing lawsuits against the administration, tech giants lavished him with money and support. As his administration carried out a shock-and-awe effort to destroy the pillars of American democracy, the most powerful and prominent figures in tech stood behind him. There would be no energetic tech resistance this time around. Even those tech moguls who had expressed opposition to Trump during his first term now learned to love him, while others honored him by remaining silent. When inaugural festivities on the National Mall in Washington had to be moved into the Capitol Rotunda due to freezing temperatures, Trump reserved the scarce seats for his new tech billionaire friends. “Some of the most exclusive seats at President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday were reserved for powerful tech CEOs who also happen to be among the world’s richest men,” reported the Associated Press. “That’s a shift from tradition, especially for a president who has characterized himself as a champion of the working class. Seats so close to the president are usually reserved for the president’s family, past presidents and other honored guests.” An iconic photo from the ceremony showed Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai all seated prominently. Most of them had bent the knee to get there. Zuckerberg had banned Trump from Facebook and Instagram after the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol, then reinstated his accounts in early 2023. After Trump won the 2024 election, Zuckerberg dined with him at Mar-a-Lago. Trump deputy Stephen Miller said Zuckerberg wanted “to support the national renewal of America under President Trump’s leadership.” On January 7, 2025, Zuckerberg announced his decision to dismantle Meta’s fact-checking infrastructure, further enabling the kinds of disinformation and misinformation that had led to the January 6 insurrection. Bezos—owner of The Washington Post—had killed the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris a few weeks before the election. Subsequently, the Post’s opinion pages, once the home of Trump’s fiercest critics, morphed into a lapdog for the president who had promised to be a “dictator on day one.” Bezos’s Amazon—along with Apple, Meta, Google, and Microsoft—donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. So did Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO who had once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler. “Watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him,” wrote Altman on X on January 22, explaining his shift. “I’m not going to agree with him on everything, but I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways.” But none reveled in Trump’s ascension more than Musk, who during the first five months of Trump’s second term became the face of the US government. In February, one month into his tenure at DOGE, Musk celebrated his reign of destruction by waving around a chainsaw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Techno-Fascism Comes to America,” declared The New Yorker less than one week later. However, it was another tech billionaire who would emerge as the real power behind the throne: Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and cofounder of well-known Silicon Valley companies like PayPal and Palantir. While Thiel did not become a special government employee or dance around with chainsaws, his influence on the Trump administration would prove more pronounced and durable than Musk’s. In March 2025, Bloomberg reported that sixteen men connected to Thiel and his companies now held positions of power in the Trump administration. Among them: David Sacks, a longtime Thiel crony and early PayPal employee, whom Trump appointed as his AI and crypto czar; Michael Kratsios, who had worked at several Thiel companies and now served as assistant to the president for science and technology; and Jim O’Neill, former chief of staff at the Thiel Foundation, who became deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services. Thiel’s master stroke was JD Vance. Trump had chosen the former senator from Ohio, who had once derided him as “America’s Hitler,” to serve as his vice president. Vance is almost entirely a creation of Thiel, who bankrolled his brief stint as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and United States senator. With Vance at Trump’s side, Silicon Valley had one of their own in the White House—a tech venture capitalist one heartbeat away from the presidency. The merging of tech and MAGA networks created a frenzy of open political corruption unlike anything in American history. Trump had already become a tech CEO in 2022 after launching a social media platform called Truth Social. It flopped as a product but attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, impressing upon Trump the fact that a tech company need not be commercially successful to generate massive profits. Trump, who had once called crypto a “scam,” now expanded his business interests to include his own crypto company. Within a few months of his return to the White House, the Trump family’s net worth increased by $5 billion thanks to their crypto company World Liberty Financial, which launched a new coin called $WLFI. “The trading debut was most likely the biggest financial success for the president’s family since the inauguration,” reported The Wall Street Journal. It was a dynastic merger. Trump and his sons transformed themselves into Silicon Valley moguls while Silicon Valley transformed itself into an arm of the Trump family. Days after the election, Donald Trump Jr. had joined 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm. The firm’s stated goal was to engage in “patriotic capitalism,” which meant creating a “parallel economy” to support Trump’s right-wing America First movement. The firm’s cofounder, Chris Buskirk, had previously cofounded the Rockbridge Network, a Thiel-funded group that promoted itself as a venture capital firm for right-wing politics. In March 2025, the president’s middle son, Eric Trump, became chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin, a Bitcoin mining company he cofounded with Trump Jr. Both brothers became vocal proponents of pro-crypto policy. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who officially attained billionaire status in 2025, also cofounded an AI company, Brain Co., with tech investor Elad Gil. As Trump’s behavior became increasingly authoritarian—openly defying laws, targeting his enemies with prosecutions, dispatching troops into Democratic cities, and turning US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into a shock force to terrorize immigrant communities—many in Silicon Valley cashed in on the action. Palantir, the data surveillance company cofounded by Thiel, received a $30 million contract to augment Trump’s masked ICE squads with software called ImmigrationOS, designed to identify targets for deportation. The Trump administration also turned to Palantir to expand its data platform across federal agencies, a move that The New York Times reported was “raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.” In July 2025, the company received a contract worth up to $10 billion to expand AI and data tools for the US Army. Altman’s OpenAI and Musk’s xAI also received massive government contracts. Even Marc Benioff, the Salesforce founder widely portrayed as a tech liberal in the press, became an unabashed Trump supporter as his company sought lucrative opportunities to work with ICE. When Trump threw himself a military parade in Washington, DC, to celebrate his seventy-ninth birthday in June 2025, Amazon, Coinbase, and Palantir, along with Coca-Cola and Walmart, chipped in to sponsor it. Widely circulated press photographs showed US Army tanks rumbling down Constitution Avenue, in front of a pavilion where Trump, behind the presidential seal, watched the parade as the Palantir logo flashed on screens behind him. When Trump made the surprise decision to tear down the historic East Wing of the White House and replace it with a $400 million gilded ballroom, a slew of tech companies—Apple, Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Palantir—helped finance it. So did Ripple and Tether, two crypto exchanges that sell their own coins, along with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twin brothers and crypto influencers best known for accusing Zuckerberg of having stolen the idea for Facebook from them. As experts on governance raised alarms about the erosion of democracy in the United States, the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley lined up to lick Trump’s loafers. It quickly became clear that these tech moguls were not mere bystanders supporting him out of respect for the presidency. Instead, they saw his return to power as the best path for achieving their goals for business and their vision for the future. To many observers, tech’s embrace of Trump seemed like a sudden reversal, an opportunistic pivot driven by tax policy or deregulation. In reality, tech’s authoritarian turn had been years in the making, and it had accelerated sharply in the 2020s. And it wasn’t just about money. “Balaji Srinivasan and the network state—let’s talk about that,” Steve Bannon, right-wing mastermind and former Trump advisor, told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat during an interview in April 2025. “They’re not weird. They’re radicals.” “All right, the network state, we can save that for next time we have you on,” said Douthat, cutting him off and changing the subject. This was a strange choice given Bannon’s unparalleled knowledge of right-wing politics and long relationship with Trump. Why interrupt the MAGA mastermind as he tried to expose the truth behind tech’s radical turn? Bannon, an overt racist and fierce enemy of democracy, did more than almost anyone to aid Trump’s rise to power. Yet even he seemed taken aback—and, perhaps, jealous—by the degree to which Silicon Valley oligarchs had absorbed Trump and his family. Maybe he wanted to hit the tech oligarchs where it hurt, by exposing the strange ideology underlying the tech moguls’ newfound love for Trump. Bannon was right to call them radicals. But what exactly do they believe? For decades, many described the anti-government politics of certain Silicon Valley figures as libertarian, portraying them as the eccentric beliefs of rich men who hated taxes but mostly wanted to build their companies without government interference. This framing is now dangerously obsolete. What began as libertarian-inflected fantasy among wealthy entrepreneurs and thinkers in the twentieth century has now curdled into something even more sinister: tech fascism. The sight of tech billionaires partnering enthusiastically with authoritarian regimes, providing technologies of control and surveillance while profiting from government contracts, clarifies the reality. Rather than opposing government control, they seek to enhance it. For decades, Silicon Valley had promoted libertarian fairy tales about freedom from government power. In fact, seizing that power for itself was the true goal. Thiel himself dismissed libertarianism as useless fantasy in 2009, famously declaring, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And the precursors of fascism were always present in libertarianism, which has deep roots in eugenics-adjacent ideas of hierarchy, supremacy, and disdain for the social contract. The term “fascist” is highly charged and, according to some, overused—most likely its incidence has skyrocketed because fascism is resurgent in the twenty-first century. But fascists excel at deflecting the accusation. “[T]he right in the United States has attempted to turn the term against itself, labeling those who oppose fascism as fascists themselves, sometimes even the ‘real’ fascists,” wrote the late David Golumbia in Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. The word comes from the Latin fasces, meaning a bundle of wooden rods bound together with a small axe protruding from the side. This totem, carried by bodyguards of magistrates in ancient Rome, signaled authority and the power to punish. It also symbolized the power of unity: One stick can be snapped, but a bundle cannot be easily broken. Benito Mussolini, the dictator who invented fascism and ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943, sought to bundle every institution of society under unified state authority. Italian fascism combined religion, the military, corporations, and media under state authority. Technofascism innovates on this model through technology, creating a system that seeks the “technicization of all aspects of government and society,” making technology the “driving force” of the authoritarian regime, historian Janis Mimura told The New Yorker in 2025. Tech fascism bundles powerful technologies—AI, crypto, defense tech, social media platforms, surveillance systems—toward authoritarian goals. These technologies are bound together under the control of a small, interconnected group of oligarchs who, simultaneously integrated into the highest levels of government, are creating an authoritarian infrastructure with boundless power. Its goal, like MAGA’s, is to privatize the public and eliminate democracy. Few grasp the power of technology better than Trump. In 2016, he used social media to overpower the incumbent political system and become president. Without Twitter, he would have been a joke candidate, an attention seeker hunting for cameras. His previous presidential campaign, in 2000, was a short-lived stunt and, though he flirted with another run in 2012, he decided against it because he had no chance. But in 2016, his massive Twitter following gave the reality TV star the power to eclipse both his opponents and the media. He became the main algorithm of US politics and, to the shock of many experts, triumphed. In 2026, Trump’s regime is amplified and bolstered not only by social media, but also by artificial intelligence, crypto, surveillance, and a national media apparatus increasingly controlled by his accomplices. Toni Morrison called fascism “marketing for power.” Fascism is nakedly aggressive and authoritarian by design, a terrifying spectacle of power for the sake of power, “recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas.” In addition, it “is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones—so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears.” Everything Morrison articulated has now manifested in the streets of the USA, where private corporations partner with a fascist regime to purge federal workers, immigrants, the military, and even the press. AI is being used to hollow out the federal bureaucracy as masked goons, aided by Palantir, violently kidnap, terrorize, and kill citizens and immigrants alike. The Trump family gorges on crypto profits as the tech oligarchs gorge on government contracts in an orgy of corruption distinguished by both its unprecedented scale and its radical transparency. So certain are they of their power—so unafraid of consequences—that they are not even trying to hide their misdeeds from the public eye. And given how much they have gotten away with so far, it is not yet clear how far they will go. Trump has raised the prospect of using the federal government to interfere in elections, and if he does so, it seems likely he will have the full backing—or, at least, the silent complicity—of the tech billionaires. “There is an alignment of interests that runs through Silicon Valley to what is now a coming autocracy,” warned veteran British tech journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who said the US was undergoing a “digital coup.” “It’s a type of power that the world has never seen before.” “America has become a digital narco-state,” declared Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. How did this happen? This book tells the story of what Biden meant when he warned the American people of a rising “tech-industrial complex” and what Bannon tried to tell Douthat about the “network state.” It traces the origins of tech fascism, starting with an apocalyptic 1997 book which predicted that, in the twenty-first century, powerful new technologies would eliminate jobs, sow widespread poverty and chaos, and hasten the collapse of nations while enabling the rise of a new class of high-tech oligarchs with loyalty to no existing nations. The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, written by two men with a long track record of doomsaying and conspiracy theory, had a profound effect on a restless Stanford University graduate named Peter Thiel, who spent the next few decades chasing its dark prophecies. The book put him on a path to becoming a multibillionaire obsessed with escaping democracy. Over the subsequent decades, his obsession with the book’s thesis led him to cultivate and fund a cultish network of radical anti-democracy thinkers. Among them: Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer who developed an expansive new theory for dismantling democratic governance, and Balaji Srinivasan, a tech entrepreneur who designed a blueprint for replacing nations with corporate city-states. For many years, these ideas—that nations would crumble, that democracy would become obsolete, that a tech-powered elite would rule through technology—seemed like fringe science fiction fantasy to most observers. But they have now become the operating principles of some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world and have spawned a movement promoted by a rotating cast of venture capitalists, fringe philosophers, and political operatives who took these ideas from obscure blogs to the halls of power. A small network of Silicon Valley moguls has threaded this radical ideology into the governing philosophy of the Trump administration. They count the vice president of the United States as one of their own. When a nation is betrayed by its wealthiest citizens—men who believe their money and technology entitle them to rule—existential crisis follows. But the future remains unwritten. The next few years will determine the destiny of our nation, our species, and our planet. While the United States is currently the main project, tech fascism has global ambitions. All around the world, Silicon Valley oligarchs are scheming to acquire land, resources, and power. They see a world in decline and seek to profit by hastening its collapse—and remaking it in their own image. Consider this a map of how we got here and a warning about the post-American authoritarian dystopia the billionaires of Silicon Valley are racing to build.
--Durán, Gil. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy (pp. 1-11). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
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