After an historic election night that saw Democrats take control of both the house and the senate, winning stunning upsets in deep-red states like Texas, Iowa, and Kansas, millions of Americans are celebrating.
Tech bros, on the other hand, aren’t feeling so hot.
Take Jason Calacanis. In 2024, the Twitter-addicted angel investor and podcast host announced he, like Elon Musk and other tech proudly conservative tech figures, had moved to Texas to escape the “woke mind virus” that had infected California. Last night, he couldn’t believe his rootin’ tootin’ traditionally masculine safe haven had betrayed him.
“I never expected Texas to turn blue,” Calacanis wrote on X, adding an exploding-head emoji to emphasize just how shocked he was by the flip. “Ugh I moved here to get away from the left lunacy!”
As for Elon Musk himself, the trillionaire SpaceX chief who spent hundreds of millions of his own dollars to support Republican candidates, made a flaccid, self-deprecating attempt at trolling the timeline by posting, “Guess my election-interfering lasers didn’t work this time!”
Others took a more spaghetti-at-the-wall approach to coping with the results. Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, went the Charlie Kirk angle, tweeting, “Charlie Kirk was assassinated by the left. Yet people still voted for it. Says a lot.”
In the past few years, leaders and boosters of the emerging AI industry have cosied up to President Trump to blow past regulations and popular backlash to build massive AI data centers at breakneck speed. Now that the Democrats are about to be in power, predictions are flying about how AI leaders will pay for their politics.
Nikita Bier, the former head of product at X, even went so far as to compare his own ilk to the Nazis after losing World War II, writing on X, “This is going to be the Nuremberg Trials for AI researchers.”
An old clip of Elon Musk bantering with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson during the 2024 presidential campaign is also resurfacing online. “If we lose, I’m fucked,” Musk said at the time, referring to a dubious joke he had made about the assassination of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. “I’m like, ‘How long do you think my prison sentence is gonna be?’”
If the Democrats make good on their plans to conduct investigations into the corruption within the Trump administration, the DOGE chief might soon find himself asking that question more seriously.
But while Musk might face some consequences (I’ll believe it when I see it), what will become of the larger tech world and its Trumpian sensibilities? If the memes are to be believed, Silicon Valley may embrace all the progressive symbols — blue hair, kente cloths, pride flags — as quickly as they did MAGA’s, as long as it means they can keep piling up money.
