It's been an eventful week for Silicon Valley heavyweights who have pledged their support for Donald Trump's reelection bid.
Given where tech and Trump are headed, when Leda Health founder Madison Campbell asked me if I could buy her another ticket to the Republican National Convention, I agreed. During the four days I attended the event in Milwaukee, Silicon Valley’s presence was palpable everywhere. Jacob Helberg, husband of venture capitalist Keith Rabois and evangelist for former President Donald Trump, watched the Republican National Convention from a private box overlooking the floor, wearing a red yarmulke with “Trump” emblazoned on the edge. Investor David Sachs took the stage to address hundreds of red-clad delegates. JD Vance, a former venture capitalist and protégé of Peter Thiel, sat smiling next to Trump.
In the brightly lit hallway, filled with Texas delegates in cowboy hats and jeans, Trump enthusiasts in stars-and-stripes suits, and women in red ballgowns, I spotted Blake Masters, another Thiel protégé running in Arizona. When I asked if he, Vance, and Thiel had a group chat, he hesitated. But then he smiled and said, “Peter is very, very happy” about Vance's nomination as vice presidential candidate.
During my week at the Republican National Convention, I watched as the tech elite experienced a moment of mismatch between the outcome they dreamed of and the working-class MAGA supporters who filled the halls. Sachs, a critic of labor unions, spoke at 9 p.m., only to be closed down a few hours later by Sean O'Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
On the first day of the convention, I met Campbell at the Pfister Hotel, where Trump was reported to be staying, where Secret Service agents were lined up at the door and a constant stream of armored cars pulled up to drop off lawmakers. (I passed Alabama Sen. Katie Boyd Britt as I entered.) Every night, delegates and lobbyists talked business over espresso martinis in the hotel bar, beneath skies that looked like oil murals.
Campbell, who runs a company that makes evidence collection kits for victims of rape and sexual assault at home, shared her political journey with us. Campbell is a libertarian (famous for dating former hedge fund libertarian Martin Shkreli, the notorious former hedge funder), and has recently been focusing on her hometown of Pittsburgh. She won Miss Pittsburgh last year and has since started working closely with local conservatives. She has also recently become interested in the Trump administration, and has interviewed to be included in the Presidential Personnel Database for Project 2025, an initiative by the Heritage Foundation to centralize potential talent for the Trump administration.
Campbell, who was selected at the last minute as an alternate delegate for Pennsylvania, told me she's not a huge Trump supporter. (Trump was eventually convicted of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll.) Rather, she thinks Trump benefits businesses like hers. “I agree with some of his policies, but I don't necessarily agree with his personality, and right now it looks like the election is going to be Trump,” she said. “So here I am.”
RNC security on board.
Tense contradictions
On our way from the hotel to the convention center, we passed boats on the Milwaukee River, bicycles on the street, hordes of police on horseback milling around the perimeter, and we weaved through throngs of protesters waving Palestinian flags.
Upon arriving, I pushed through a group of reporters to ask Vivek Ramaswamy, a former presidential candidate, investor, and founder of biotech company Roivant Sciences, what he thought about Silicon Valley's support for Trump. Referring to Silicon Valley's endorsement of Trump, he said he and Musk “talk often about our shared passion for reviving our country.” (The WSJ reported this week that Musk has donated heavily to a Trump super PAC.) Musk has publicly refuted the reports.He said other tech elites have said “there will be a recovery this year” and predicted “the big surge will come this summer.”
Ramaswamy has good reason for optimism: The tech elite has traditionally leaned to the right, but it has some surprising supporters, such as Ben Horowitz and a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen, who publicly announced their support for Trump this week rather than donating quietly.
The Republican Party has also been courting Silicon Valley. Earlier this month, it released its platform, highlighting its support for the development of cryptocurrencies that are “free from government oversight or control.” Trump is also scheduled to speak at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville later this month, and investor Mark Cuban has offered a cynical take on why the tech industry is turning to him: “It's a Bitcoin ploy.” he tweetedHe explained that it's all about increasing the price of Bitcoin.
The platform also supports “AI development rooted in free speech and human flourishing.”
Of course, politicians in the Republican National Committee had a more classically anti-regulation logic. “Like Elon Musk and others, [Trump] “He supports free speech, he supports free markets, he doesn't support the idea of using policy to drive the private sector,” Rep. Corey Mills of Florida told me.
Yet Silicon Valley's support for Trump is full of tense contradictions. The Trump administration has actually been pretty tough on cryptocurrencies (even banning Venezuelan cryptocurrencies), and Trump himself has mocked subsidies for electric cars. Even Vance has a questionable track record as a pro-tech voice, having campaigned on an anti-big tech platform. “I see Lina Khan as one of the few people doing a pretty good job in the Biden administration,” Vance said in February. During Khan's time at the Federal Trade Commission, she aggressively pursued antitrust cases blocking acquisitions.
Nonetheless, Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told me that Biden's focus on antitrust and push for AI regulation are increasingly alienating parts of Silicon Valley that tend to lean more liberal.
“The Biden administration needs to be careful not to demonize Silicon Valley,” he said.
It may be too late now.
RNC VIP party invitation. Image courtesy of Margaux MacColl
Inside the VIP party
Everywhere Campbell and I went, we saw the Silicon Valley of the MAGA world. Outside the convention center, we ran into Connor Sweeney, a software engineer at Snapchat, wearing a snakeskin belt. We spoke with him shortly after Vance was selected as the vice presidential nominee. “Anything with Peter Thiel is gold,” he said.
That evening, in the mahogany-paneled bar of the Pfister house, Campbell struck up a conversation with Jeff Miller, a powerful political strategist and aide to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Campbell pitched Miller his company for finding rape kit evidence in homes, and Miller steered the conversation to his position on abortion. (Miller was against abortion, but agreed that there should be exceptions for “rape, incest and the life of the mother.”) The conversation ended with the enticing promise of passes to a VIP afterparty. Later, I noticed that Miller had “liked” an Instagram photo of Campbell from the Miss Pittsburgh swimsuit competition.
The next night, Miller tracked down Campbell at Pfister's bar and handed him a glossy party invitation emblazoned with a picture of the grinning mastermind. Campbell and I got into an Uber and headed to a rooftop birthday party for Indiana Congressman Jim Banks, where we were stopped by Secret Service agents, with sniffer dogs sniffing each vehicle. The line of cars was backed up when an officer found a bag of white powder in the car ahead of us. (As we waited, we got into an intense discussion about the powder's fate, but we never found out more.)
The party was a boring bunch of mostly suited staff sipping beer, but at 1am we drove to the main attraction: a pink-light-decorated warehouse on the edge of town where Republican megadonors and powerbrokers come to unwind every night. We bumped into Miller again, surrounded by women, and then spent time with 21-year-old CJ Pearson, one of about 70 conservative influencers at the Republican National Convention.
Ironically, given the Trump administration's anti-China stance and attempts to ban TikTok, he is now listed as a candidate on the popular app, along with other young influencers.
“If you really want to win elections, you have to go where the young people are, and they're on TikTok and they're on Instagram,” Pearson said. “I'm no fan of the Chinese Communist Party, but I do support changing the minds of young people in America.”
Throughout the night, Campbell could also be heard offering party-goers some slightly different political advice. Despite thousands of attendees chanting “Drill, drill, drill!” during a daytime speech calling for increased U.S. oil production, she lightly chided conservative Pennsylvania candidates for going after Pittsburgh's past oil and gas donors. She wanted them to embrace technology as a central character in the new Republican Party.
“The only new money I see is people like Elon Musk, right? Or Thiel,” Campbell says. “If you're trying to get oil and gas money from people who were big donors to the Republican Party in the 1980s, those are the wrong types of people, because all the new money is in tech.”
To me, these conversations capture the delicate relationship between Silicon Valley and Trump: an imperfect but beneficial combination that requires both sides to set aside moral doubts.