Tech's money isn't buying candidates' 2024 love
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Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios
Presidential politics is serving tech leaders something they're not used to: irrelevance.
- From low-polling tech founder candidates to low-impact mega donors, big tech wallets are finding it hard to make a dent in the 2024 race.
Why it matters: The leading 2024 candidates — President Biden and former President Trump — are the biggest Silicon Valley skeptics in the field.
- TV made Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Digital campaigning helped Barack Obama win the White House. And Donald Trump smartly exploited Twitter messages and Facebook ads.
- But tech's current generative-AI wave is less likely to benefit any single candidate than to become a weapon of choice for foreign adversaries working to undermine American democracy and Americans seeking cheap ways to generate misinformation.
Driving the news: North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who sold his software startup to Microsoft for $1.1 billion in 2001, launched his GOP candidacy Wednesday.
- Burgum leaned into his past "as a CEO, as an entrepreneur," but didn't leverage his time as a Microsoft senior vice president.
- There are now two tech founders in the Republican race — biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is polling at 3.5 %.
Yes, but: While tech fortunes are funding candidates unlikely to make a difference in 2024 — unless one of the front-runners suddenly keels over — the front-runners are laying out agendas hostile to tech-industry interests.
- President Biden is a long-standing skeptic of Facebook and its parent company Meta, telling the New York Times editorial board in 2020: "I've never been a fan of Facebook."
- Republican front-runner Trump is still nursing what he sees as tech-inflicted wounds from 2020, when his persistent lying about the 2020 election's outcome and his actions surrounding the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol led major platforms to ban him — policies they're now unwinding.
- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, polling above 20 percent in the Republican race, on Tuesday signed into state law a "digital bill of rights" that's pitched as a privacy broadside against Big Tech.
Longer-shot candidates are taking dollars from or shots at tech with little impact either way.
- Oracle founder Larry Ellison is the top donor to the campaign of Sen. Tim Scott (R - S.C.). But the $35 million he has committed has so far delivered a 2% poll rating.
- Former Vice President Mike Pence's super PAC released a "freedom agenda" aiming to reform Big Tech to "prevent censorship" and "end digital surveillance without meaningful consent."
Flashback: The 2020 Democratic primary featured two tech founder candidates who flamed out: Michael Bloomberg and Andrew Yang.
Between the lines: Tech minted a lot of billionaires over the past two decades, and their ideological spectrum is no longer limited to the Obama-era stereotype of the Silicon Valley progressive.
- Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, a 2016 Trump supporter, invested more than $30 million in 2022 Republican midterm candidates — but branded the results a "depressing disaster" and may sit out 2024.
- A group of Silicon Valley's loudest founders and investors, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, is throwing their weight behind vaccine denialist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s spoiler candidacy against Biden.
- Elon Musk used his pulling power as Twitter owner to host events on the platform in recent weeks with both DeSantis (his glitch-ridden campaign launch) and Kennedy.
Be smart: Tech companies can have more election impact with their misinformation policies than their founders or investors have with their wallets.
- Right now, they are unwinding the policies and safeguards they put in place for 2020 and after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
- They're making these changes just as the generative AI boom is mass-marketing the ability to produce and share torrents of junk content.
What’s next: Both Biden and First Lady Jill Biden are headed back to the Bay Area to fundraise — starting June 13.
- While Biden is eager to criticize Big Tech, he also took money from 58 tech billionaires or their spouses in the 2020 race.
