Polls are polls – since Biden withdrew from the presidential race, they have been generally favorable to Donald Trump. However, there are voters whose political sympathies are being watched with bated breath by, if not the entire world, then at least a large part of the United States. The Broligarchs is, as the Urbandictionary.com slang dictionary explains, a small group of guys (English: bros), which will control the situation regardless of the scenario that comes true. This is the word that sociologist Brooke Harrington used in her text to describe the greatest contemporary American riches, whose fortunes were built mostly in Silicon ValleyAs the researcher notes, in recent years we have been observing a trend: Broligarchs are starting to support Donald Trump. Why is this happening?
“Pro-Trump Turn” Among Broligarchs
It wasn’t always like this, as the biographer claims Elon Musk Walter Isaacson, Tesla CEO, once boasted that he stood in line for 6 hours to shake Barack Obama’s hand. Around 2020, his sympathies began to change, and today he officially supports Donald Trump. And although the $45 million he supposedly offered per month for his campaign turned out to be false information, the owner of X (formerly Twitter) and Tesla promised his vote to the Republican.
Even earlier, eight years ago, he officially and publicly joined the Republican side of power. Peter Thielco-founder of PayPal. At the time, he was an exception among the liberal-minded, progressive leaders of Silicon Valley. Ahead of the latest edition of the US leadership struggle, in which current Vice President Donald Trump will face off Kamala Harrishowever, there are surprising transfers.
Key investor venture capitalMarc Andreessenknown for criticizing Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, recently endorsed him on his podcast. He said Trump’s proposals are better for tech startups. Investors in a similar area David Sackswho supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and, after the 2021 riots, said Trump had “compromised himself,” launched a fundraiser for his campaign in June 2024. He explained his change in political sympathies by saying Trump has better ideas on security, foreign policy, and the economy. He told his Silicon Valley colleagues in a campaign for the former president: “Come on in, the water is warm.”
Maximum power and minimum responsibility for the descendants of the pharaohs
According to Harrington, the change in the hearts of big businessmen can only partly be explained by the fact that business habitually cozies up to power, and the power that polls indicate will probably end up in the hands of Donald Trump. According to the sociologist, the gentlemen of big tech and promising startups really want it to end up there. The reason? Not particularly surprising: greed. Trump promises to cut taxes and ease regulations. From the point of view of investors, the Biden administration has become famous mainly for its serious approach to antitrust regulations, lack of leniency towards frauds carried out using cryptocurrencies and major changes in the operation of the US Internal Revenue Service (Internal Revenue Service; IRS). The government itself boasts about its achievements in this area: the IRS announced that it had recovered $1 billion in back taxes that it had collected from the wealthiest who had been slow to pay them. For Elon Musk and his ilk: a weak election campaign.
According to Harrington, it is the promise that thanks to their capital, unhampered by regulations, they will get maximum power with minimum responsibility (“noblesse without the obligation”), prompts previously progressive investors to build warm relationships with the alleged future administration of Donald Trump. The sociologist admits that, having conducted research on this group for 17 years, during conversations with advisors to the Broligarchs, she has repeatedly heard that their clients believe they are chosen in some special way. For example, they are descendants of pharaohs.
The researcher further writes that this is precisely where the trap that democracy has set for itself lies. Its mechanisms, guaranteeing (more or less successfully) the rule of law and economic stability, support the creation of wealth. On the other hand, they also mean regulations, taxes and free media, which are given the freedom to watch the hands of both the government and business. And the latter does not like taxes, regulations and having someone watch their hands.
Space is not the worst idea
According to Harrington, from a sociological perspective, this is what sets the ultra-rich apart: the belief that they are above the law, and that applying any democratic control mechanisms to them is by definition illegal. As if they kept repeating that bizarre sentence: “do you even know who I am?” The researcher reports that Musk allegedly took offense at Joe Biden for not being invited to the White House’s electric vehicle summit in 2021. In 2014, Tom Perkins compared the media’s criticism of the Silicon Valley rich to… Kristallnacht.
Harrington reminds us that it’s not that big business is inherently anti-democratic. After all, it benefits from the property rights it provides, as well as public roads, police protection, and safe drinking water. Not all investors think supporting Trump is a smart idea, with more than a hundred recently announcing their support for Kamala Harris. But even among those, there are those who frown on the Biden administration’s regulatory agenda.
A major Democratic donor, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, has signed “VCsForKamala,” a motion to oust Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, who is known for enforcing antitrust laws against big tech. Harrington cites another example of the belief in omnipotence: convicted fraud tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried reportedly considered paying Trump $5 billion to drop out of the race.
As the author of the text sums up, the highest form of convincing the broligarchs of their superhumanity is the dream of escaping from this planet full of problems to some other corner of space, which Elon Musk is striving for with the help of the company SpaceX. Ultimately, Harrington states, for the rest of the population this would not be the worst solution.
