Elections

The billionaires hedge their bets

The owners and CEOs of America’s biggest platforms are playing nice with Trump. And it could come back to haunt them

Casey Newton

Oct 28, 2024 — 10 min read

(iStrfry, Marcus / Unsplash)

Two years ago on Sunday, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter. For most other business leaders, what followed would have been a disaster. Users fled and advertisers followed; Musk tried to sue them back onto the platform. A push into subscriptions flopped. The company has now lost 80 percent of its value.

That hasn’t mattered to Musk, though, for two reasons. One is that Musk is the world’s richest man, with a net worth of $270 billion. His paper wealth grew $30 billion on Thursday alone, thanks to a skyrocketing Tesla stock, papering over any Twitter losses over the course of an afternoon.

The second reason is that X, as he renamed the platform, is now less a business than it is a political project. While it has shed tens of millions of users, X continues to be a popular forum for political warfare. And Musk has led the charge, playing a key role in Republican efforts to preemptively delegitimize the election by stoking baseless fears about widespread voter fraud.

Leave your push notifications on and almost no matter what accounts you follow, Musk and his allies will appear, posting dozens of times per day about the election. On Monday he promoted several posts suggesting that YouTube had hidden Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump. (The interview popped up as the first result on YouTube when I searched for it.) He also campaigned with Trump over the weekend in New York City. And, of course, he mounted an effort to give away $1 million a day to registered voters in battleground states who sign a petition affirming their support of the First and Second Amendments.

Philadelphia’s district attorney asked a judge to stop that effort on Monday, calling it an “illegal lottery scheme.” DA Larry Krasner argued that Musk and his America PAC had violated state lottery and consumer protection laws rather than laws against buying votes, though the Department of Justice warned Musk about that, too. In any case, a judge isn’t expected to hear the case until Friday, when most of the voter registration effort will be complete. Musk, for his part, promoted a post on X accusing Krasner of having been bought by George Soros.

Most heads of social platforms have realized only belatedly that they function akin to heads of state: rulers of large populations that require ongoing efforts at diplomacy, whether with their own user bases, rival platforms, or foreign nations. It is a hugely lucrative but also uncomfortable position that brings with it ongoing death threats and other legitimate security risks. A way that many corporate leaders attempt to navigate these risks is by making more friends and fewer enemies.

Musk has no interest in that. He has given himself fully to a far-right belief system that is linked inextricably to his business interests. And he has decided to invest himself deeply in the election of Donald Trump, knowing two things:

If Trump wins, Musk will have a powerful ally in the White House, a likely role in the administration, decreased oversight of his businesses, and richer contracts with the government.
If Harris wins, she won’t retaliate against Musk, and he will still have $270 billion.

In practice, of course, it may not turn out as well for Musk as he hopes. Many Russian oligarchs once believed that they could manage Vladimir Putin, only to find themselves pushed out of an open window when they no longer served a purpose for the autocrat. One wonders whether that might have come up during one of Musk’s many conversations with Putin.

Musk, characteristically, has made an all-in bet on his preferred outcome. But it’s instructive to examine the calculus of the more sober platform leaders.

II.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg all have called Trump in recent weeks in the anticipation of his potential election, according to various reports. None have endorsed him publicly. But none have endorsed another candidate, either.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, drew widespread condemnation for reportedly preventing the Post’s editorial page from endorsing a candidate in this cycle — and waiting until the week before the election to do so.

Some of this is a standard-issue corporate hedging of bets. When you run a global-scale platform, and the US presidential election is a tossup, you have every incentive to ensure that the lines of communication are open, however personally distasteful you may find the nominees.

Some of this is game theory. These CEOs know that Trump would likely punish them for criticizing him publicly; he has spent much of the campaign promising to retaliate against his enemies, and even suggested that Zuckerberg should be put in jail for funding nonpartisan election infrastructure. Harris, on the other hand, will say nothing about the fact that the CEOs did not endorse her. Viewed in this light, a friendly phone call or two to Trump is all upside and no downside.

Finally, some of this — and I really am surprised at how little this gets discussed — is payback to the Biden administration. Biden and Harris have kept tech at arm’s length for their entire administration, and they oversee a Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission that are prosecuting antitrust cases against Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon. In some cases, the government has called for the breakup of various parts of these businesses.

You can understand why Zuckerberg or Pichai aren’t falling all over themselves to get Harris elected, given their experience over the past four years. Trump might indeed worsen the economy in various unpleasant ways, as many economists predict. But it might be worth it to a Google or a Meta if it meant they could keep their monopolies.

III.

This is not, of course, a moral case for business leaders supporting Trump. There is no moral case for business leaders supporting Trump. Trump is an openly corrupt 78-year-old fascist, twice impeached and on 34 felony counts convicted, who attempted to stop the peaceful transfer of power in 2021 and now promises to further undermine the democracy of the United States if he manages to assume power again.

But a democratic emergency like the one we are now living through is not necessarily a business emergency. In the billionaires’ view, it could actually be an opportunity — to bring an end to the antitrust cases, to block further regulation of Big Tech in Congress, and to pursue their dreams of superintelligence in peace.

This is an appealing fantasy. But it is one that rests on the idea that whatever happens, the billionaires and their companies will be protected by the rule of law.

The history of authoritarianism suggests that the billionaires are likely to be disappointed. On Threads, Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last tells the story of Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky became an oil billionaire after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and among other things founded a civil society organization named Open Russia to promote democracy and human rights. Two years after he founded it, Putin had him arrested and charged with fraud. His businesses fell apart, and he was sentenced to nine years in prison. Today he lives in exile in London.

“The entire point of the Khodorkovsky affair was for Putin to show the class of people with enough money and power to threaten him that he could destroy their lives,” Last writes. “They got the message, quickly. And so the oligarch class became his courtiers, rather than potential rivals.”

He goes on:

And that's the take-away from the Washington Post's refusal to endorse Kamala Harris. It's not about the paper or the journalists.

It's about every wealthy executive and business owner in America being shown that if *Jeff Bezos* fears retribution from Trump, they should, too.

What's striking is that Bezos didn't even have to get arrested for the lesson to be taught. Hell, Trump *didn't even have to win*.

It's all "anticipatory obedience," as Timothy Snyder and Ian Bassin would put it.

Today the CEOs and billionaires can comfort themselves with the idea that if Trump wins, they might finally begin to make peace with the US government. The story of Khodorkovsky is a reminder of what that peace could cost: acquiescence, in perpetuity, to whatever the administration demands.

To some Big Tech CEOs, I realize, that might not sound much different than the state of affairs they find today. But should the rule of law disappear, few will be more vulnerable to retaliation than they are. I can understand why they do not wish to publicly resist Trump now. But the result may be that they have to submit to him forever.

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