The Mask Is Really Off Now on Tech Billionaire Politics

Yahoo

13-03-2025

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When I was growing up in Seattle in the 1990s, the city was shifting from the home of Nirvana and grunge music into a shinier, techier metropolis. A decade before Silicon Valley entered the general parlance, Seattle natives Bill Gates and Paul Allen were founding Microsoft and ushering in a new era of American innovation—and of the American ultrarich. For most of the period between 1997 and 2017, Gates was the richest man in the world, and Allen also amassed a large fortune. And with this new technological era came a new kind of billionaire: The nerd made good, who generally came along with a kind of bland good-guy libertarianism.
Many of these early tech billionaires, Gates most prominent among them, were avid philanthropists too, giving away enormous sums and starting their own nonprofit entities. But by the time Amazon founder Jeff Bezos surpassed Gates as the world's richest man in the 2010s, the tech billionaire vibes had shifted. Yes, the billionaire philanthropists carried on. But another group—call them the hostile libertarians—were growing in power. And it's those men who now dominate the industry—and who are taking over American government and American media in a spectacular revenge of the nerds.
These men have largely rejected any obligation to public service, choosing to hoard their wealth or spend it on vanity projects rather than use it to aid the far less fortunate. They tend to adhere to a libertarianism that claims to stand for broad personal liberties and expansive rights to free speech. The problem, though, is that they are ultimately thin-skinned and morally immature. When they get into positions of power, their libertarianism morphs from 'Freedom for All' to 'Freedom for Me'—including freedom from criticism or complication. And with Donald Trump in charge, a man for whom 'Freedom for Me but Not for Thee' is practically a lifelong mantra, we're seeing these self-identified libertarians behave unapologetically illiberally.
Take Bezos. His politics have long seemed to be liberal-libertarian: He has donated to support same-sex marriage and lower taxes for the rich, and has given to Democratic politicians as well as Republican ones, along with the libertarian Reason Foundation. When he bought the Washington Post, he pledged to maintain its independence even under pressure. And by most accounts, he did—until Trump's reelection loomed.
In a now-infamous move, he ordered the Post's editorial board to scrap its endorsement of Kamala Harris, declaring that the paper would no longer back any political candidate. It's an order that would be controversial at any point, but coming as it did, 11 days before an election, was a shocking overreach and resulted in a mass exodus of subscribers from the paper. Then, after Trump was elected, Bezos again used his position at the outlet to exert wildly inappropriate editorial control, sending a note to staff that read: 'We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.' Those others? They can be found, he said, on 'the internet.'
One wonders which definition of personal liberties includes refusing to publish views at odds with the paper's tech billionaire founder. Thanks to Bezos' meddling, the Post is hemorrhaging subscribers. Many of its opinion writers have left. One has to imagine that, even though Bezos has not yet exerted control over the Post's reporting, its journalists—who are among the best in the business—are anxious about what is to come and are looking elsewhere. The country may now lose one of its last great national newspapers: an outlet that broke the Watergate story, that provides unparalleled coverage of the nation's capital, and that remains one of the last remaining publications to post correspondents overseas, bringing the rest of the world to American readers.
If Bezos had any decency left, he would sell off the paper—or, better yet, create a trust that would fund it into perpetuity, then make his exit. But he seems more interested in pleasing Trump than in maintaining a newspaper that is foundational to the free press, a pillar of American democracy. This is an entirely self-serving decision. Bezos is transparently attempting to curry favor with Trump because of, one suspects, his interest in securing government contracts and possibly in being spared some pain in the trade war Trump wants to wage. (As Paul Krugman suggested back in November, one purpose of the Trump tariffs may be to allow the president, who can grant tariff exemptions to particular companies, to financially reward loyalists and punish dissenters.) To see his encroachments on the free press spoken of in the language of liberty and freedom is especially cynical.
This through-the-looking-glass definition of liberty is in line with how several other Trump-adjacent tech titans define freedom, which seems to be: Criticism of me trespasses on it; censoring views I disagree with does not.
Elon Musk, for example, is a self-styled 'free speech absolutist.' When he bought Twitter and rebranded it as X, he criticized its content moderation policies and pledged that the site would no longer censor controversial views. 'Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,' Musk said when the acquisition was announced. He was right on both counts: Free speech is essential, and social media platforms, including Twitter, are modern town squares.
His free speech absolutism, though, doesn't seem to have been anywhere near absolute. X complies with most government requests to remove content, and it complies more often than the company did when it was still Twitter. Several journalists who cover Musk saw their accounts suspended after he took over. (Musk claimed, falsely, that those journalists shared 'basically assassination coordinates' of where he was.) He permanently banned the account @ElonJet, which tracked the location of Musk's private plane—information that is publicly available. But blatant white supremacists, Nazis, misogynists, and disinformation purveyors remain, because free speech. If X is a town square, it's a pretty unpleasant one.
Musk has also said that he hopes individuals and organizations that publish media safety standards—and that tell companies which social media platforms are responsible and worthy of advertising on, and which are not—are criminally prosecuted (because, of course, these groups sometimes suggest that a platform home to members of various hate groups is maybe a bad bet for ads). He has asserted that journalists who publish stories he doesn't like or thinks are incorrect should be fired or imprisoned. In this, he mirrors fellow tech billionaire and former PayPal collaborator Peter Thiel, who at once claimed to 'strongly believe in the First Amendment' while secretly bankrolling the case that put Gawker out of business, because he didn't like what it published.
This is, to be fair, a broader right-wing problem. Trump himself was elected by a modern right galvanized by an opposition to 'cancel culture' and embracing the language of free speech, but in truth it seems eager to use claims of censorship primarily to gain power. With Trump in office, speech has been constrained in ways that are best characterized by various ignominious -ists: McCarthyist; fascist; and, with the attacks on education, language purges as a means of eliminating the ideologies behind them, and the elevating of true lie-parroting believers over competent and honest actors, approaching Maoist. The administration has a list of banned words, making verboten everything from diversity to gender. Mahmoud Khalil, a U.S. green-card holder and graduate student at Columbia University, was recently arrested by immigration officials and shuttled off in secret, seemingly for speech this administration has deemed antisemitic and a threat to national security (a designation not made of the various far-right figures in Trump's orbit, including self-identified Christian nationalists, antisemitic conspiracy theorists, and men who throw up the Nazi salute). The arrest seems transparently politically motivated and intended to send a message: Protest, and you pay.
Hypocrisy from the MAGA movement and the Christian right is nothing new. Tech leaders, though, seemed to promise something different. Their money, the implicit argument went, shielded them from the concerns of mere mortals, and certainly of politicians. They could be advocates of ultimate freedom, and they could (literally) afford to be ideologically consistent.
But as we're now seeing, commitment to a particular philosophy was never the real driver of these tech leaders' views; selfishness apparently was.