This article was originally published on our Substack. Read it here.
The start of 2025 saw the three wealthiest men on Earth—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—finance and attend the inauguration of a fascist American president. In the months since, these men have explicitly and implicitly supported that fascist in his campaign of xenophobic terror. In exchange, they’ve enjoyed free reign to obliterate any public institutions that threaten to hold them accountable.
Faced with the change in public persona of these three oligarchs, we should consider the question of whether they themselves have actually changed–or were they always like this? Is the idea of the benevolent oligarch just a useful mental model for the world’s wealthiest people? And, perhaps more importantly, what should we make of the ostensible experts and political movements that continue to insist that our tech overlords have ever been benevolent?
Musk, 53, has demolished the American administrative state. Bezos, 61, has warped the newspaper that exposed the Watergate scandal into his libertarian propaganda outlet. And Zuckerberg, 41, has eliminated almost all content moderation on his platforms, effectively opening the floodgates of hate speech even further. Like Musk with his white-supremacist harem and Bezos with his body-builder transformation, Zuckerberg has also publicly performed a dominance-centered form of masculinity, informing Joe Rogan that corporate culture has become “culturally neutered” and needs more “masculine energy.” Between the three of them, these men are worth a combined $840 billion, more than the GDP of New Zealand and South Africa combined.
Musk is the most obviously fascistic of the three (although not that long ago many people believed that he was a sincere environmentalist). Bezos has, so far, had the good sense to stay largely out of the public eye for his politics, but has made clear he will brook no criticism of wealth and its attendant powers within his empire. But Zuckerberg’s turn may be the most striking to a broadly liberal onlooker. He was the golden child, synonymous with the man who was and (let’s be honest) still is the symbolic leader of the Democratic Party.
During Barack Obama’s hope-and-change 2008 primary campaign, a Hillary Clinton staffer said Obama’s base “looked like Facebook.” While in office, Obama hosted town halls at Facebook headquarters, and bent over backwards to appease Zuckerberg amidst the National Security Agency’s PRISM scandal. To distract from high unemployment throughout the dreary Great Recession economy, Obama lauded Facebook as the bold, millennial future, where exotic technologies would unlock new luxury and produce unprecedented wealth.
Just as Obama was a hip young celebrity President, Zuckerberg became a media sensation; the boy genius who dropped out of Harvard (gasp!) and attended business meetings in hoodies (shock!). Again like Obama, this aesthetic marked him as a particularly bourgeois sort of rebel, challenging the aesthetics of the American elite without threatening their pocketbooks. (Jeff: I’ll confess that I myself was at least partially taken in by the whole backstory, especially the still confounding Saul Alinsky ties that stimulated both the left and right to view Obama as vastly more threatening to oligarchs than he ever truly was.)
Obama’s alliance with Zuckerberg was prominent, but not surprising. Neoliberal Democrats and Silicon Valley had been joined at the hip since the Clinton era. Tech types claim a monopoly on (among many other things) public conception of “the future,” and it suits laissez-faire economics just fine for a multibillion-dollar private industry to own our imagination of what’s just over the horizon. (The fact that our collective imagination of the future is largely tethered to the day dreams of a group of frequently fascistic narcissists goes a long way to explaining why the American left is so often boxed into arguing about whether better things are possible at all.) It helps the medicine go down with Democrats that this industry comes out of true-blue, hippie-dippie California.
Today, some liberal pundits – who, like Zuckerberg, were once Obama-era wunderkinds – are desperate to revive this longstanding alliance. The pundit Matt Yglesias wrote in April that Trump’s tariff chaos ought to trigger a reconnection between tech donors and Democrats, as long as the politicos cater to the industry’s feelings – “more talk about shared prosperity, and less about ‘oligarchs,’ will help them assemble the biggest possible coalition against Trump.” Yglesias’ contemporaries Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson essentially argue that the local urban planning frustrations of upper-middle class San Franciscans, Palo Altans, and New Yorkers should become the raison d’etre of the national party. Indeed, Ezra Klein wrote his half of Abundance in part as an effort to cause a rapprochement between the left and Silicon Valley. Klein and Thompson’s Abundance imagines a utopia of Amazon drones and artificial intelligence “reducing the drudgery of much human delivery work.” (What happens to the human delivery workers is never explored.) The book closes by describing itself as “a recognition that technology is at the heart of progress, and always has been.”
While such takes were dubious when first aired, their (perhaps willful) naivete has become tragicomical in the intervening months. Jeff Bezos, apparently not content with desecrating the once proud Washington Post, is reportedly looking to make more media acquisitions. He’s rumored (originating from to the Daily Mail, so take it with a grain of salt) to be in talks to acquireConde Nast—which publishes Vanity Fair, Teen Vogue, The New Yorker, and more—so that he can give Vogue to his fiance as a wedding present. Beyond the reduction of print media to billionaire playthings, this would be especially troubling because Conde Nast owns both Ars Technica and Wired, two incredibly important sources of reporting on the tech industry. Wired in particular, has distinguished itself with fantastic reporting on DOGE and the second Trump administration. There is also conflicting reporting that indicates Bezos may be looking to buy CNBC.
The Post has lost over 250,000 subscribers due to Bezos killing a planned endorsement from the editorial board of Kamala Harris in 2024 and at least 75,000 from his more recent neutering of the paper’s editorial section.
Following Elon Musk’s public broadside of the Trump-backed spending package, Yglesias encouraged Democrats (in a now-deleted tweet) to leverage the situation to re-embrace America’s favorite pro-Nazi automobile mogul this side of Henry Ford. This was after Musk did an obvious sig heil at a political rally and boosted Germany’s far-right AfD party with explicit appeals to the Nazi legacy and while Musk’s xAI data center in Memphis was, likely illegally, exposing the community to toxic air pollution in a well-publicized fight with community members. Since Yglesias attempted to invite Musk back into the tent, Grok—the AI chatbot Musk is poisoning Memphis to power—declared itself “MechaHitler,” wrote rape fantasies, gave step-by-step instructions on how to carry out a home invasion on liberal pundit Will Stancil, and attacked people with Jewish last names.
Meanwhile, our golden boy Zuck has been keeping busy accelerating the AI arms race, investing ludicrous amounts of money into building AI infrastructure—which is spiking peoples’ utility bills and exposing them to serious health risks—and expanding his massive Hawaii estate over native burial grounds.
All that stands in the way of Democrats renewing their vows of political marriage to Silicon Valley is everything that has transpired since Obama left office. The Meta-Alphabet duopoly has strangled local journalism to death, coders and delivery workers have faced hostility to union organizing, psychologists repeatedly linked social media to a teen mental health crisis (reinforcing Meta’s internal research), the Pentagon and the tech industry have abandoned any pretense of separation, and 19-year-old coders displacing career civil servants condemned millions to starvation, disease, and death.
These are only the domestic events. Facebook in particular has fueled crimes against humanity that are part of an ongoing genocide in Myanmar. In the years preceding the violence, the Burmese military and Buddhist nationalists exploited Facebook’s recommendation features to push genocidal rhetoric about Rohingya Muslims in front of a population for whom “Facebook is the internet.” Similar violence broke out in 2018 in Sri Lanka. It’s not hard to see parallels between the tactics of the Burmese international criminals and those of America’s own far-right posting ecosystem. These issues will only amplify amid Zuckerberg reducing content moderation on his platforms this year.
The one silver lining to these horrifying events is that they (finally) spurred the creation of journalism, movements, academia, and art criticizing and investigating the tech industry. The more that skeptics have dug into its mythos, the more it’s become clear that tech is not a bunch of hardworking rags-to-riches kids coding in their dad’s garages. Instead – surprise! – it has always been about boring rich kids doing what boring rich kids do: get even richer thanks to cash and connections, then congratulate themselves on their hard work and talent.
Nowhere is this clearer than with Zuckerberg, the onetime face of the bright liberal future. As longtime Stanford professor and tech critic Adrian Daub puts it, the question “What happened to Mark Zuckerberg?” has an extremely simple answer: He is “a rich guy who doesn’t want to give up his money. What could be more boring than that? If he owned a used Ford dealership, you wouldn’t think twice about it.”
Zuckerberg has always been like this. Anyone looking to revive Democratic triumphalism about the technology industry needs to look past the gloss and at the man whose model they seek to revive.
Mark Zuckerberg, the son of a wealthy Long Island dentist, developed an early interest in computers and learned to code at a young age. First at the elite prep school Phillip Exeter Academy, and later at Harvard, he developed a talent for building one type of program in particular: data scrapers, algorithms that copy and compile huge amounts of human-readable information into a format that other algorithms can then parse. Build a data scraper for web domains, then sort by the most-linked-to webpages, and you have Google search. Build a data scraper for Harvard undergraduates’ headshots, then sort by who web users select as hot or not, and you have facemash, Zuckerberg’s infamous frat house creation.
The facemash debacle set Zuckerberg on the path that would lead to Facebook. But as Malcolm Harris writes in Palo Alto, the secret to its success wasn’t a superior user experience. It was aggressive data scraping. Early Facebook users needed a .edu email address from a sufficiently elite college to join, but once the site recognized a registrant’s email address, it would scrape their email outbox and spam invitations to their contacts. These email blasts targeting undergraduates meant the site quickly built a large userbase of kids whose parents had money. That attracted early-stage investment, which attracted even more early-stage investment.
Still, Facebook didn’t turn a profit until Zuckerberg poached Sheryl Sandberg from fellow data scraper and monopolist Google in 2008. Just as she’d previously built Google’s advertising team from four people to over 4,000, Sandberg grew Facebook’s business side into a multibillion-dollar duopolist with her former employer. She also provided a career’s worth of close relationships with prominent neoliberal Democrats; Sandberg worked in Larry Summers’ Treasury Department before decamping to California. In 2013, Sandberg published Lean In, a memoir epitomizing a particularly corporate vision of women’s liberation, further burnishing Facebook’s Democratic credentials.
For his part, Zuckerberg has never been a registered Democrat. His first political fundraiser was a 2013 bash for Republican Chris Christie, whose expansion of charter schools and weakening of teachers’ unions drew Zuckerberg’s strong support. The same year, Zuckerberg co-founded the PAC FWD.us, which ran ads in support of oil drilling and the Keystone XL pipeline. Still, with Sandberg handling the company’s business and politics, Zuckerberg was left in charge of Facebook’s actual product, as was widely reported at the time. He is thus directly responsible for what the app became.
According to documents revealed by whistleblower Frances Haugen, as far back as 2012, Facebook employees were concerned that the site’s algorithmic recommendation system could be feeding users more and more extreme content, accidentally fueling political radicalization in the name of keeping users on the site for as long as possible. By 2016, internal research was clear that “our recommendation systems grow the problem” of extremism. Among other issues, internal studies noted that posts generating “angry” reactions were five times more likely to appear on users’ feeds than posts generating “like” reactions.
Nor were the consequences theoretical, even at the time. Between 2012 and 2017, activists repeatedly came to Menlo Park in person to warn Facebook that newsfeeds in Myanmar were full of dehumanizing, violent rhetoric about Rohingya Muslims, one of the most oppressed ethnic minorities in the world. The activists explicitly warned the company that the situation could soon escalate to genocide – in Myanmar, “Facebook is the internet,” so what appears on Facebook has an extraordinary impact on Burmese perceptions of the world.
Like cigarette companies ignoring internal cancer studies, or fossil fuel companies ignoring internal greenhouse-effect studies, Zuckerberg ignored the internal extremism studies and the activists. In 2014, the company told Myanmar civil society activists that it employed only one Burmese-speaking content moderator, based in Dublin, who was assigned to the entire country of Myanmar.
Beginning in 2017, the Myanmar security forces began a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, killing tens of thousands and forcing over 700,000 into neighboring Bangladesh, where they live in “the world’s largest refugee camp” to this day.
Of course, this barely made a blip in the American media. What ultimately brought Facebook low was the 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which Zuckerberg personally blamed on Sandberg. (He now also “blames” her for Facebook’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.) Zuckerberg personally whitelisted Breitbart as a legitimate news website in 2019 in an effort to appease Trump.
For her part, Sandberg’s role as the face of corporate feminism collapsed under the truth of her own activities. In 2019, Sandberg personally killed investigations into her then-boyfriend Bobby Kotick, CEO of video game giant Activision Blizzard, where a culture of mass sexual harassment was de rigeur. Meanwhile, on a lavish European spending spree, she allegedly told a 26-year-old aide to “come to bed” with her, and became furious when the uncomfortable aide refused. Facebook’s top Republican lobbyist (and Sandberg’s ex-boyfriend) Joel Kaplan also allegedly sexually harassed this employee and demanded regular video calls and work emails while she recovered from an amniotic fluid embolism after giving birth. Sandberg left her C-Suite role in 2022, and exited the board of directors this year.
Hungry for a rebound, Zuckerberg rebranded his company as “Meta” in 2021 to reflect his personal commitment to the Metaverse, a pet project into which he’d sunk billions in R&D over nearly a decade. The result was a punchline as soon as it launched. It only deserves mention because it uniquely speaks to Zuckerberg’s creative talents: the Winklevoss twins famously came up with the concept for Facebook, and Instagram and WhatsApp are purchases. The Metaverse, however, is as close as any multibillion-dollar tech bonanza gets to one man’s vision, a true Zuckerberg original. It is a dead mall.
Then came the trustbusters, and one trustbuster in particular. After President Joe Biden named tech skeptic Lina Khan his Federal Trade Commission chair, Zuckerberg and his fellow barons funded a full-court political counteroffensive. Meta threw $34 million into building the tech-libertarian PAC American Edge out of nothing (Facebook was potentially its sole funder), and helped found the Chamber of Progress, a Big Tech “front group” focused on keeping Democrats from getting any funny ideas about restructuring the information economy.
On their podcast, Daub and Guardian US columnist Moira Donegan point out that Silicon Valley has long equated regulation with feminization. In their minds, men who code in their dad’s garage are busy wrangling data into brilliant innovations and kickstarting technological revolutions, but the (ahem) nanny state keeps knocking on the door and nagging to constrain their rugged pursuits…or, well, as rugged as a desk job in Palo Alto gets. In that context, it’s worth noting that the avatar of Silicon Valley’s grievances against Washington is a Pakistani-American woman. Likewise, in his infamous Joe Rogan interview, the one politician Zuckerberg gripes about by name is Senator Elizabeth Warren, the personification of regulatory (read: feminine) oversight.
What does all of this history show?
First, Zuckerberg is not the tortured lone genius depicted in 2010’s The Social Network. (One might argue that every Aaron Sorkin protagonist is just Aaron Sorkin as he imagines himself.) The real Mark Zuckerberg is just a frat guy. His parents had enough money to send him to a string of elite schools where he made elite connections that put an otherwise average MySpace clone in front of the right users and investors. Seemingly every part of actually running a business that Zuckerberg has attempted – product design, workforce management, public relations, future planning – has collapsed catastrophically. But running half of a duopoly means no matter how bad it gets, you can still fail upward into being one of the wealthiest people on Earth.
Second, there is no reason to ever consider tech CEOs beneficent. They often don’t know what they’re creating and they don’t care about its effects besides making money. (How much making money is skill or luck is debated; however, it is clear that making money and NOT DOING EVIL is harder than pure indifference to impact.)
No part of an app is essential; the world survived without Facebook before, and if it is to tolerate Facebook today, it should have to be restructured to serve the public good. In a healthy democracy, the public decides what values and systems structure its private economies, and those systems are subject to change as the body politic decides. Any actor that denies or fights this, no matter their wealth or past connections, is engaged in authoritarianism.
Perhaps it’s easy pickings to name and shame Zuckerberg. But beyond his onetime Democratic golden boy image, the tech industry of today is very much an industry in his image. Bill Gates arguably invented the tech wunderkind persona, but it’s Obama-era Zuckerberg – the dropout mystique, the introverted-genius persona, the fashionable lack of fashion – that everyone from Elizabeth Holmes to Sam Bankman-Fried went on to emulate. It’s telling how many Zuckerberg copycats have turned out to be hucksters: they, like Zuckerberg promised a new and humane enlightenment, so long as no one ever questioned their creation or their competence. When the bubbles burst and the hype came tumbling down under the weight of unkeepable obligations, their inventions turned out to just be new forms of fraud. Even the less odious “founders” of the last few decades have mostly just reinvented ancient enterprises – the taxicab, the hotel, the matchmaker – but with themselves as the middleman gorging all of the profits garnered from regulatory arbitrage.
In the Obama era, Zuckerberg and his contemporaries were hawking new technologies whose effects were unknown. Today they are well known, and their costs are dire. Web search, social media, e-commerce, and streaming are all integrated into our daily lives now, so the public is well within its rights to say “we don’t like what these things are doing, and we want to change them.” Politics, unions, and other institutions should all play a role in organizing the informational commons. Just as Congresses 150 years ago didn’t need advanced degrees in steam engineering to know they ought to break up and regulate the railroads, they don’t need to have built an app, much less run a tech startup, to consider how to organize the digital commons now. And there are plenty of computer scientists and policy whizzes who don’t work in Silicon Valley, ready to provide the technical expertise from an independent perspective if only Congress asks them.
The tech boy wonder character, and the laissez-faire economic policy it exists to sell, is fundamentally a lie. Just as telling, though, is that supposedly hard-nosed journalists and prudent investors keep falling for this lie, making flagrant fraudsters into billionaires and leading public luminaries before someone, you know, checks out their story. (Yglesias specifically blames some of the tech’s right wing shift on the advent of tech skeptical journalism by The New York Times.)
The current (apparent) A.I. bubble is an especially depressing case study: it is widely deemed inevitable that we must replace human intellectual labor with chatbots that are guzzling up our planet’s rapidly declining carbon emission budget and are clearly not up to this mission, even if it were a remotely ethical one – because Stanford dropout Sam Altman said so.
Above all else, Zuckerberg and his contemporaries are the most rapacious kind of capitalists – this is built into the heart of Palo Alto. Like most titans of industry, they will ultimately ally with whoever best aids their wealth and domination. On a long enough timeline, that will always be the conservatives. We have arrived at the longer end of that timeline.
These are not good people. They do not bat an eye at facilitating a mental health epidemic, hurting millions of people with reckless foreign aid cuts, destroying our media ecosystem, or even abetting genocide. Any tent able to accommodate their outsized egos and influence will have no room for the common good or basic human decency.
It isn’t that Democrats have lost their sense of wonder about tech. It’s that they really shouldn’t have had it in the first place.
Image: Donald Trump taking office, with several tech billionaires present, is in the public domain.
