August 29, 1997, is probably when Silicon Valley began war on Hollywood, if you were to place a pin in a timeline at that precise moment. On that date, in Scotts Valley, a modest town an hour south of San Francisco, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded Netflix, a tiny DVD delivery service.
The remainder is past events. All of the conventional pillars of the previous entertainment regime began to fall apart in a matter of decades. Nothing remained, at least not as tall as it once did: theater box office, cable TV, linear television. We are all too familiar with this.
Here is what is new, though. There have been indications that Southern California is once again rising, or at least trying to, throughout the last few weeks. The conflict between the super-rich techno-libertarians and the not-so-super-rich old guard Hollywood liberals is about what kind of government the nation should elect in November, but this time the battleground is a much larger one rather than digital platform windows or online content protection. They are currently engaged in combat over the US president, nothing less.
As one studio executive succinctly sums up Hollywood’s new battle cry, “Fuck these Trump-loving techies.”
Naturally, he is alluding to the plethora of wealthy Northern Californians who have declared their support for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Among them is Elon Musk, who has a net worth of $250 billion and is regarded as the richest person in history. Musk promised to give Trump’s campaign $45 million every month, but he later recanted the statement. As a result, it is unclear how much money Musk will actually donate—he now claims to be directing it toward his own pro-Trump political action group, AmericaPAC. However, there is also Musk’s fellow PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who later rose to the position of CEO of tech investment firm Mithril Capital. There, in 2016, Thiel hired J.D. Vance, a young hillbilly with a Yale education, and supported Vance in his Ohio Senate campaign for 2022 (reports indicate that Thiel
Liberals continue to be prevalent in Silicon Valley, including Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, and Sheryl Sandberg, the former COO of Meta. Another PayPal mafia member is venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, who gave $7 million to the Democratic super PAC Future Forward. In July, at the Sun Valley CEO conference, Hoffman and his old friend Thiel got into an awkward argument about their differing political philosophies. Not to mention Hastings, who recently gave $7 million to the Republican Accountability PAC, a nonprofit that supports Kamala Harris.
However, the quantity of tech millionaires who support Trump is almost as astonishing as the vast sums of money they have been generating for his campaign: Among the roughly dozen supporters are the twin bitcoin magnates, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who sued Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 for allegedly stealing their idea for Facebook (they were both portrayed by Armie Hammer in David Fincher’s The Social Network); venture capitalist David Sacks, who recently hosted a $300,000-per-head fundraiser for Trump; Antonio Gracias, the founder of Valor Equity Partners, who donated $1 million; Jacob Helberg, an advisor to defense technology firm Palantir ($2 million); tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale ($1 million); Douglas Leone of Sequoia Capital ($an additional million); Shaun Maguire ($500,000); and tech investor Ben Horowitz, who has announced plans to make a “significant” contribution
Hollywood’s own moguls looked like they might boycott the 2024 contest until a few weeks ago. Following Joe Biden’s ninety-minute staredown during the June 27 debate, almost everyone in the city was closing their wallets or, in the case of Endeavor’s Ari Emanuel, reserving their generosity for lower-ticket congressional contests. But after Biden resigned and supported Harris, as George Clooney had advised, Hollywood’s elites were revved up and eager to go very immediately. not only the privileged. In the first 24 hours following Biden’s revelation, Harris received an unprecedented $100 million in contributions from people all throughout the nation. “The passion and backing for the vice president has been exuberant,” remarks troubled DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is currently serving as co-chair of Harris’
Yes, it has sparked them. Harris, a Brentwood resident and native Californian, already had a strong network in Los Angeles. Before she withdrew and endorsed Biden, a number of celebrities and actors, including Mindy Kaling, Ron Meyer, Jeff Bridges, J.J. Abrams, Reese Witherspoon, Reginald and Chrisette Hudlin, Jeff Shell, Donna Langley, Jessica Alba, and Ron Meyer, supported her 2020 presidential campaign. “Everyone I have met has been quite passionate,” remarks Jenny Frankfurt, a former literary agent who served as the host of multiple key fundraisers for Harris 2020. Some people are ecstatic simply because it is her, and others are ecstatic because they desire the fresh start that Biden denied them.
To be honest, there are others who are really eager to take revenge on their fiercest rivals in Silicon Valley. One well-known Hollywood executive who is backing Harris said, “We have had a decade in which the Musks and Zuckerbergs and Sam Altmans of the world have been defining our culture, and the world is not better for it.” “As it is, these guys have far too much power. They do not need to be in charge of the Oval Office and establishing policy. This effort, in my opinion, offers a chance to balance the odds.
“It is no secret that Hollywood has never been very fond of these people,” says a prominent Democratic consultant. There is hardly one who enjoys the idea of these individuals siding with the Trump administration. Hollywood is full of money and has a strong dislike for these tech bros. I predict that a lot of money will be donated by people to show these guys that they cannot buy an election.
Actually, there is more to this animosity than just politics. Ego plays a role in some of the animosity just as much as philosophy. After all, these tech bros from Silicon Valley have been stomping all over Hollywood for years now, bringing their fancy new subscription services to town, upending established broadcast and big-screen business models, and forcing bizarre corporate cultures on a sector that has its own set of deeply held beliefs about proper workplace behavior (whatever happened to the cubbyholes at Amazon that top executives were given instead of C-suite offices?). A few Hollywood film enthusiasts, including Christopher Nolan, remain displeased with Warner Bros.’ pandemic-era decision to stream its whole theatrical slate on HBO Max, the studio’s streaming service. The concept was conceived by former WarnerMedia chief Jason Kilar.
Nonetheless, it is evident that the two sides hold different philosophical views. Even if there are plenty of scoundrels, liars, and backstabbers in Hollywood, at least some of them have a social conscience. The community has a strong history of classical liberalism that dates back to the early years of the Civil Rights Movement (Charlton Heston escorted Martin Luther King Jr. to his 1963 address at the March on Washington before he turned into a gun enthusiast). The list of classic left-leaning celebrities includes Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda (and daughter Jane), Gregory Peck, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and an endless supply of ever-more-progressive standard-bearers (Robert De Niro, Alyssa Milano, Larry David, Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal, to name a few).
Silicon Valley previously adhered to many of the same ideals as Los Angeles. Though its stance on taxes and regulations has always been more laissez-faire libertarianism, it has generally agreed with Hollywood on cultural issues like immigration, legalizing marijuana, and gay rights (tech companies rely on foreign labor; the CEOs of Google and Uber are both from immigrant families). However, there has been a noticeable change in the political climate in the north, and it is not simply because of Musk’s tirades on Twitter about “woke-ism,” transgender activism, and the “river of illegals crushing the country.” Why, then, are so many millionaires in the Bay Area endorsing and funding a convicted rapist with thirty-four felony convictions who masterminded an uprising during his previous presidential campaign?
“What makes me question humankind is the number of tech-bro billionaires who hold their noses and back Trump solely to make more money,” marvels Meridian Pictures CEO Eric Paquette, a longtime Democratic fundraiser in Hollywood. “I don’t get it. You’ve got $10 billion in the bank, and you’re still going to support Trump because he’s going to lower your taxes even more than he already has? There’s no justifying it. It’s a sad commentary on the lengths people go to protect their wealth at the expense of protecting our democracy.”
The fact is, there are reasons besides lower taxes that might explain why so many in Silicon Valley have gone full MAGA — much, much weirder reasons. “It’s not just about the money,” explains Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who testified during the 2018 Senate hearings on online disinformation in the 2016 Trump campaign and who knows the northern culture well. “It’s about ideology. What you’re dealing with here is a cult. These tech billionaires are building a religion. They believe they’re creating something with AI that’s going to be the most powerful thing that’s ever existed — this omniscient, all-knowing God-like entity — and they see themselves as the prophets of that future.”
Unbelievably, it becomes even more eerie. Wylie and others claim that this, including Émile Torres, a Case Western Reserve professor and author of publications on the topic, “religion” includes a whole range of far-out beliefs even beyond those found in sacred writs like “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (in which Mosaic creator Marc Andreessen predicts that “we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights”). Concepts like “transhumanism” (the idea that people should be fused with technology to usher in the next phase of human evolution, presumably a race of brain-chipped borgs plugged into the omniscient ChatGPT hive mind), the rise of “the network state” (an online entity that one day will replace traditional geographical countries) and “radical life extension.” That’s right, these dudes plan on living forever.
“Their idea is to develop advanced technologies to radically reengineer themselves so that there’s no death,” says Torres. “Immortality is a key part of this belief system. In that way, it’s very much like a religion. That’s why some people are calling it the Scientology of Silicon Valley.”
Others in San Francisco are calling it “The Nerd Reich.”
To be clear, there is no proof that Trump is aware of or believes any of these information, though it may be more debatable with Vance. Vance is from the IT industry and was once a protégé of Thiel; Thiel has been a vocal supporter of Silicon Valley’s eugenics TESCREAL (acronym for oh, never mind). In the eyes of the tech community, Trump only needs to accept their donations and implement their policies, which include dismantling the FDA and other agencies whose antiquated prohibitions on things like human experimentation are impeding the development of a technotopian utopia.
So far, Trump has proved more than eager to play ball. In July, he spoke at a crypto confab in Nashville, promising to make the United States the “crypto capital” of the world. This is the same guy who as president declared bitcoin “not money” and criticized it for being “based on thin air.”
“They see Trump as a useful idiot,” says Wylie. “He’s somebody who’ll do what they want.”
Even if they have never heard of transhumanism, many in Hollywood concur with that judgment, citing it as one of the unsettling aspects of Silicon Valley. “I think these guys see Trump as an empty vessel,” says the well-known exec who’s supporting Harris. “They see him as a way to pursue their political agenda, which is survival of the fittest, no regulation, burn-the-house-down nihilism that lacks any empathy or nuance.”
Those could sound a little familiar. They seem familiar to you from an old Arnold Schwarzenegger film about a transhuman killer machine from the future that likewise had no “pity, regret, or fear.” Strangely enough, August 29, 1997, the day Netflix began to take over Hollywood, is also the date when Skynet in The Terminator gained self-awareness.
And we know how that turned out.
Lachlan Cartwright, Degen Pener and Scott Feinberg contributed to this report.
The Hollywood Reporter published this article for the first time on August 7. To subscribe, click this link.
