Silicon Valley Is Starting to Pick Sides in Musk and Trump’s Breakup | EUROtoday

Some of Trump’s high-profile backers from Silicon Valley stayed principally quiet in the course of the Trump-Musk flare-up on Thursday or tried to show consideration to different matters, together with Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, two tech business veterans who’re additionally hosts of the enormously well-liked All In podcast, which has featured pleasant interviews with Trump and a few of his cupboard appointees in current months.

As of Thursday afternoon, Palihapitya was posting on X about crypto, whereas Sacks shared a current New York Times op-ed about AI coverage. But their fellow podcast hosts, David Friedberg and Jason Calacanis, posted what seemed to be cryptic references to the drama.

“​China just won,” Friedberg wrote on social media. “There are no true friends in politics—only mutual interests,” Calacanis stated in a separate message. He adopted up with a meme portraying Musk as rapper Kendrick Lamar, who was just lately concerned in a tense feud with fellow musician Drake.

“Can’t wait to see the All In podcast guys political beliefs disappear overnight,” Dar Sleeper, a former Tesla product supervisor, quipped on X.

Adam Kovacevich, a former Google government and the present CEO of the tech business commerce group Chamber of Progress, says he thinks the present Musk-Trump riff doesn’t get on the coronary heart of what most tech enterprise leaders are actually involved about with the present administration.

“I don’t want to overstate the rupture, but the vast majority of people in the tech industry aren’t aligned with anybody right now,” Kovacevich says. “Some might appreciate what Trump has done, calling off SEC lawsuits against crypto and calling off the Biden order on AI, but at the same time there’s still a lot of angst about tariffs. That’s the single biggest issue for tech right now.”

A former Democratic operative who now works at a tech funding agency says that, whereas the Trump-Musk struggle will certainly pressure some individuals to decide on a facet, it gained’t be a simple resolution for a lot of of them. “This isn’t 2012—there are all these different strands making up the Trump alliance now,” says the operative, who requested to stay nameless as a result of they weren’t licensed by their employer to talk to the media.

“The basic issue is that Elon was the gateway for people going from the traditionally Democratic tech industry towards Trump and the Republican party. And now the question is, will Elon be the gateway for the tech industry to come back to the left?” the supply says.

Two sources who spoke to WIRED say that some buyers and technologists won’t be fast to embrace Musk as a result of they’re disenchanted by how he dealt with DOGE. “A lot of people put tremendous faith in the idea that DOGE could shake up the government,” the previous Democratic operative says, however the actuality is that Washington is a unique world from tech. “It’s the least worst outcome for many, not the best outcome for a few.”

As the solar started to set outdoors the White House on Thursday, Trump and Musk had been nonetheless buying and selling barbs—and there’s little signal their battle will finish anytime quickly. In truth, this can be solely the start. As right-leaning tech investor Mike Solana put it on X: “And so, as foretold, the great tech right/populist right-wing schism of 2025 begins.”