Elon Musk and Donald Trump may have made up after their insult-slinging on social media, but the trust is surely gone. The marriage of tech right libertarianism and populist nationalism was always unstable, and now we are entering a time when the policy rifts will grow only deeper.
I think of the “tech right” as exemplified by figures such as Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Peter Thiel, and Shaun Maguire. Whatever their differences and disagreements, all of them expressed a preference for Trump as president, doing so out of broadly libertarian motives.
The basic worldview of the tech right is that the future can and will change dramatically, in large part through the advent of technology, and it is futile to hold it off. We thus need leaders who will allow technological progress to proceed, and that means capitalism, open markets, and a legal framework to support innovation. To these individuals, Trump appeared better on that score than Kamala Harris, and to date his policies on artificial-intelligence regulation and crypto regulation have been more pro-progress than what we would probably have gotten from a Harris administration.
While I do not agree with every claim of the tech right—and while I am not a Trump supporter—I am largely on board with this worldview. I know some of these people and have worked together with them in the past.