| | | Opinion
Tech bro takeover: What could possibly go wrong?
March 18, 2025 at 2:53 pm
By
David Horsey
Seattle Times cartoonist
I may be naive, but I think Steve Jobs, one of the two greatest founding fathers of the tech industry, would not be groveling at President Donald Trump’s feet and funding his campaigns the way many of today’s major tech bros are doing. Jobs, the man who built Apple and changed society with the iPhone, was a notoriously tough and temperamental boss, but he had a social conscience and an uncompromising spirit.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Jobs’ rival and the other half of the founding pair, has devoted the recent decades of his life to doing good works around the world and, though he has met with Trump, he has remained independent of the president. This is very much unlike Elon Musk, who has morphed into Trump’s No. 1 hatchet man. Musk was part of the lineup of tech moguls sitting beside the Trump family at the inauguration on Jan. 20 and that image said it all: The members of this second generation of hugely successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are desperate to sell what little soul they have in order to appease Trump and keep themselves free from federal government oversight and regulation.
Having seriously undermined democracy by pummeling traditional media and giving a massive megaphone to extremists and conspiracy theorists via social media, the libertarian tech titans are moving on to empower artificial intelligence with the potential to devastate the workforce, and rejigger human identity and purpose. Add to that the avaricious bros promoting cryptocurrency with its ability to wreak economic havoc and there is all the justification needed for the establishment of regulations to protect the public interest.
But the tech bros will not have it. They see themselves as high IQ visionaries with an inherent right to alter reality for all of humanity without governmental interference — and to make billions of dollars for themselves in the process.
Journalist Kara Swisher, the highly informed observer and caustic critic of the tech industry, describes the attitude quite well in “Burn Book,” her chronicle of the nerdy, entitled personalities who have thrived in this brave new tech world. She begins her book noting the hypocrisy of all the tech leaders who derided Trump as a buffoon yet flocked to Trump Tower to commiserate with him — not this year, but in 2015 even before he moved to the White House the first time.
“This kind of casual hypocrisy became increasingly common over the decades that I covered Silicon Valley’s elite,” Swisher writes. “Over that time, I watched founders transform from young, idealistic strivers in a scrappy upstart industry into leaders of some of America’s largest and most influential businesses. And while there were exceptions, the richer and more powerful they grew, the more compromised they became. …”
Are these the people we want inventing our future with no one keeping watch?
See more of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey
View other syndicated cartoonists at: st.news/cartoons
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David Horsey: is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for The Seattle Times. His latest book is “Unhinged USA.”
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