For an industry obsessed with pattern recognition, their decision to lash themselves to President Trump has proved to be a catastrophic misreading of the political landscape. Now, not only have they jeopardized their companies’ fates, but they’ve also raised questions about their vision and judgment.
What were they thinking?
The people who work for them are just as confused as the rest of us. Tech workers I’ve spoken to at OpenAI, Meta, and other firms have noted an absence of commentary from their leaders post-election. Zuckerberg has yet to address the results internally, while an employee at another AI firm said that “leadership has been pretty silent on Slack.” Most employees share concern about potential anti-data-center legislation and are curious how leadership will adjust to a Democratic Washington, DC. But more than anything, they don’t understand how their bosses didn’t see what was so blindingly obvious to everyone else.
In Silicon Valley, the Gretzkyism “skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been” is a management maxim; it preaches anticipation and foresight over reactiveness to the present moment. Tech entrepreneurs love a good “pivot,” and companies that can’t change with the times get disrupted and die.
Which is why I find it so strange that Zuckerberg, OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman, and so many of Silicon Valley’s other prominent AI leaders and venture capitalists have put themselves in a potentially inescapable political bind. In going all in on President Trump’s cultural and business agenda instead of playing both sides of the aisle as corporate America usually does, they’ve built identities they may not be able to pivot out of. Will anyone really believe that Palantir CEO Alex Karp is suddenly progressive after a year of promising “violence and death to our enemies” and telling investors that the company is “completely anti-woke”?
I believe this is less a surprise than a very public exposure of a fundamental reality: that tech’s most visible leaders are not all-knowing visionary masterminds after all. Insights about social media or artificial intelligence do not make Zuckerberg or Altman experts on politics, the economy, or much else outside of technology. The instant gratification of presidential access, subsidies, and a say in their own regulation blinded them to the basics of political math that they clearly did not understand.
There’s a reason the chief executives of Chase, Boeing, and other Fortune 500 staples don’t go on podcasts to talk about “masculine energy,” or call the president from the stage of a MAGA-friendly AI summit to label fears about AI a “hoax” and a “scam.” This is the learned wisdom of decades operating in an environment where the customer changes every four years but contracts run for 10. Most companies play to both sides of the aisle because they know that their business models and multibillion-dollar projects must outlast the current administration. Instead, Big Tech tied itself to Trump and made its most important goals and investments—many related to grid access and data center permits—immediate targets for Democrats.
In tech, you can always sunset a feature or update some code. But in politics, there is no undo button for failures that change public perception. The tech elites’ decision to visibly align their businesses with a temporary movement has left them no credible way to pivot now that the climate has changed. As one Meta employee who has worked closely with Zuckerberg put it, “Mark is a long-term thinker, but he never charts a plan of how to get there. It’s spray and pray and see what happens.” As for whether employees expect the company to do a strategic postmortem? “Facebook has never really done that.”
