Steven Levy writes:

For decades, Mark Lemley’s life as an intellectual property lawyer was orderly enough. He’s a professor at Stanford University and has consulted for Amazon, Google, and Meta. “I always enjoyed that the area I practice in has largely been apolitical,” Lemley tells me. What’s more, his democratic values neatly aligned with those of the companies that hired him.

But in January, Lemley made a radical move. “I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness,” he posted on LinkedIn. “I have fired Meta as a client.”

This is the Silicon Valley of 2025. Zuckerberg, now 41, had turned into a MAGA-friendly mixed martial arts fan who didn’t worry so much about hate speech on his platforms and complained that corporate America wasn’t masculine enough. He stopped fact-checking and started hanging out at Mar-a-Lago. And it wasn’t only Zuckerberg. A whole cohort of billionaires seemed to place their companies’ fortunes over the well-being of society.

When I meet Lemley at his office at Stanford this July, he is looking vacation-ready in a Hawaiian shirt. In the half year since he fired Meta, very few powerful people have followed his lead. Privately, they tell him, you go! Publicly, they’re gone. Lemley has even considered how he might be gone if things get bad for anti-Trumpers. “Everybody I’ve talked to has a potential exit strategy,” he says. “Could I get citizenship here or there?”

It should be the best of times for the tech world, supercharged by a boom in artificial intelligence. But a shadow has fallen over Silicon Valley. The community still overwhelmingly leans left. But with few exceptions, its leaders are responding to Donald Trump by either keeping quiet or actively courting the government. One indelible image of this capture is from Trump’s second inauguration, where a decisive quorum of tech’s elite, after dutifully kicking in million-dollar checks, occupied front-row seats.

“Everyone in the business world fears repercussions, because this administration is vindictive,” says venture capitalist David Hornik, one of the few outspoken voices of resistance. So Silicon Valley’s elite are engaged in a dangerous dance with a capricious administration—or as Michael Moritz, one of the Valley’s iconic VCs, put it to me, “They’re doing their best to avoid being held up in a protection racket.”

Just ask Tim Cook. In May, Apple’s CEO took a pass on an 8,000-mile journey to join a presidential entourage in the Middle East. Trump noticed. In Qatar, the president said he had “a little problem” with Cook and the following day threatened a 25 percent tariff on iPhones.

Not surprisingly, when I offered some of the Valley’s top executives the opportunity to vent this summer, few took the bait. Vacations seemed unusually long. Calendars were so packed that not a single slot was available for the next three weeks, four weeks, six weeks … when did you say your deadline was? One CEO notorious for logorrheic gabbing to reporters told me he was trying to “decompress” on politics. “But any time you want to talk AI or AI agents, please let me know!” he said.

It used to be that when tech’s leaders fell short of their lofty values, employees kept them honest. Google workers famously pressured their executives to fight for diversity and avoid military contracts. Implicit was the threat that the activists could easily find jobs elsewhere.

Then Elon Musk came along and fired 80 percent of X’s employees, and the app didn’t collapse. Across the industry, diversity efforts are down and military contracts are up. In an April 2024 note to Google employees, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees not to “use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.” Free expression is also out of favor inside Meta, where an employee says the environment feels like the ’90s: “When you went to work, you didn’t bring your politics to the office, and you may not like the boss—but you do the job so you get paid,” they tell me. “Good luck finding a company that isn’t like that now.”

What’s happened to Silicon Valley? Why did the Ayn Rand–loving heroes of tech become Donald Trump’s bootlickers? How did one of the supposedly smartest VCs wind up posting a manifesto that declared war on “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” and “social responsibility”? What was the point of Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post for civic benefit, as he claimed, and then right before the 2024 election, killing its Kamala Harris endorsement and changing its opinion section to editorials on “personal liberties and free markets”? And speaking of Cook, how is it that the most effective political tactic for the head of a $3.4 trillion company is to march into the Oval Office and solemnly present to Trump a glass-and-gold tchotchke?

This is Apple! Who knows what Cook—a man who has more in common with Martians than MAGA—was thinking as he stood before Trump and unboxed the most dubious, most obsequious product in the company’s near-half-century. Would Steve Jobs have done that? My guess: He’d have told his team to send over a gold-plated iPod. Collect on Delivery.

Ever since Jobs began selling the first sleek Apple II’s, digital technology has been touted as America’s pride and future. In its own geeky way, tech spoke truth to power. But now, says Stanford professor of social ethics of science and technology Rob Reich, “an extraordinarily tiny number of billionaires who control the information ecosystem have made allyship with the most consequential and fearsome political power in the world. There’s never been a time in history when those things have been combined.” [Continue reading…]