Tech's money isn't buying candidates' 2024 love

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.