Another time, [Michael Jordan] was approached by U.S. Senate hopeful Harvey Gantt, a black politician who was running against Jesse Helms in North Carolina, Jordan’s home state. Gantt had hoped that Jordan’s name would help him defeat Helms, widely regarded as a virulent racist. But Jordan declined. He wasn’t into politics, he explained, didn’t really know the issues. And, as he later told a friend, “Republicans buy shoes, too.”
There’s a good reason for businesspeople to stay out of politics: they risk pissing off many of their customers. And while the Michael Jordan quote is (sadly) apocryphal, the sentiment it expresses is, seemingly, common sense.
So why is it that so many businesspeople (businessmen, really) think otherwise? The tech sector furnishes the most obvious examples. Liberals seeking alternatives to big tech communication platforms like Whatsapp and Gmail have, in recent years, turned to privacy- and security-focused tools like Signal and Proton Mail. But the CEO of Proton Mail, Andy Yen, recently tweeted that “10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned”. He further claimed, "Trump represents an unprecedented challenge to [Big Tech’s] monopolistic dominance.” Jeff Bezos, as another example, quashed the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, and angry Democrats cancelled an estimated 250,000 subscriptions (10% of all paid subscriptions) in response. Mark Zuckerberg has also embraced Trump since his re-election. He loosened Facebook’s moderation policies, allowing users to say, for example, that gay people are mentally ill. And he took a victory lap on Joe Rogan, where he claimed that he is bringing “masculine energy” back to Facebook and that he supports Trump because “he just wants America to win.” Canada’s largest tech company, Shopify, is led by vocal right wingers, starting with its CEO, Tobias Luetke. Luetke has supported some aspects of Trump’s trade war and chided the Canadian government for not doing more about the fake “fentanyl” trafficking Trump ostensibly cares about.
And let’s not forget about Elon Musk. (But how could we, even if we wanted to?) After his takeover of Twitter, and his welcoming of Nazis onto the platform, advertising revenue plunged, by at least 50%, and many prominent liberals abandoned the platform. The same sort of boycott has now come for Tesla. Sales in European markets have plummeted, and those in the U.S. have also declined, although not as severely. This isn’t even a case of “Republicans buy shoes, too”. Democrats are the primary buyers of electric cars.
And not just electric cars. People like me are the natural audience for a Washington Post subscription (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”, er, “Riveting Storytelling for All of America”). And for an encrypted email provider, and a politics and news microblogging site. So why are all of the people running these companies spitting in my face?
(There is, of course, a long history of right-wing CEOs selling everyday products, amassing vast fortunes, and using them to tilt media and elections in a conservative direction. The Koch Brothers own the company that makes Brawny paper towels and Vanity Fair napkins. The Uhleins profited from shipping and packing supplies. Joseph Coors founded the Heritage Foundation with money he got from selling piss in a can. But, at least to my knowledge, these companies weren’t quite so open about it. Jane Mayer’s history was called Dark Money. Whatever Musk is doing now, it isn’t dark.)
In the libertarian theory of markets, racism is economically irrational for any company that commits it. A new company would, in theory, swoop in and profit by selling to those formerly discriminated against.
(By the way, this isn’t a joke or a caricature. Here’s what libertarianism.org has to say about affirmative action: “Libertarians favor market institutions to eradicate racism and therefore tend to take a critical view of affirmative action when it is initiated by the government. In a system where economic incentives are allowed to work, libertarians believe that racist policies in the private sector will tend to disappear. For instance, refusing to hire blacks or women places the discriminator at a competitive disadvantage in the labor market, denying him a pool of talent to which he might otherwise have access.“)
One would think that the Washington Post, or Tesla, or Proton Mail, or Facebook discriminating against normie Democrats would have the same effect. It might give rise to new competitors and cause existing ones to tack left, trying to pick up the subscribers and buyers that these companies have alienated. And while some of that appears to be happening (e.g., Bluesky), it’s at a fairly small scale. There is no large pro-Democrat print publication, no electric car company for people sick of dork Hitler, no 100M+ user social network that embraces feminine energy.
There are several overlapping explanations, in my view. And that’s largely because, while I’ve tried to lump the various aforementioned examples together, they have important differences as well as similarities.
Proton Mail, for example, immediately started backtracking after its political statements attracted negative attention. I believe it would genuinely suffer if it were branded a right-wing company. But the same isn’t true of larger tech companies.
One of the guiding principles of tech is that competition is, in fact, bad. (Peter Thiel said so himself: "If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly”.) Companies seek to create monopolies so they don’t have to compete — so that there is no alternative for disaffected consumers. Monopoly creates freedom for its owners and destroys freedom for its customers. The owners now have the “freedom” to support right-wing causes without having to fear the resulting blowback — after all, what’s the left-wing alternative to Shopify, or to Facebook, or to Instagram? And customers, correspondingly, don’t have the freedom to escape. The right-wing conception of “free speech” is that your social betters will tell you what you should believe, and you won’t be able to do anything about it. (This is the right-wing conception of most things. As Jamelle Bouie wrote about Trump and Putin’s “deal” about Ukraine: “[It’s] a government full of sexual abusers taking the position that you can't say no.”) The bet that Zuckerberg, Luetke, and their ilk are making is that there are no real choices in tech capitalism, and that the requirements of scale that inhere to social networks and marketplace platforms will prevent any upstarts from forming. (Or that, with their massive wealth, they'll be able to buy up such upstarts.)
In the case of Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, that explanation doesn’t quite hold. There are alternatives to the Washington Post. (Although, to be fair, none of them besides Wired seem to be tacking leftward to pick up those lost 250,000 subscribers.) Bezos’s calculation is different, and it reflects the complicated web of interests that he (and Elon Musk) have built up. These people aren’t really CEOs or owners of companies. They are like conglomerates unto themselves. In the case of Bezos, he has Amazon, Washington Post, Blue Origin, Altos Labs, and his own venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions. (In the case of Musk, it’s even more complicated.) For Bezos, the Washington Post is a vanity project, not a money-making venture. And because he stands to lose more from Trump’s disfavor than he would gain from hard-hitting journalism, he has made the (rational) calculation to lose print media subscribers but retain the rest of his empire.
It’s Musk’s case that I find the most interesting, though. One thing I’ve written about before is how valuations of many companies are now seemingly divorced from the fundamentals of the company itself. We see this in meme stocks like Gamestop, but also in massive stocks like Tesla. And while we are waiting for the market to come to its senses, it feels as if the stock prices of these companies can defy gravity seemingly forever. It is unclear whether a durable downturn in car sales will even affect Tesla’s valuation. There’s an endless supply of suckers who can be convinced that a self-driving car, or humanoid robot, or advanced AI, is just around the corner. Musk himself has said that “Autonomy will make all of these [profit margin] numbers look silly”. The bet on a multitrillion dollar Tesla is not about it selling cars like a normal car company. It is about it transcending selling normal cars.
Musk has a spider’s web of interconnected companies, and he is not just Tesla or Twitter. He is not really in the business of selling cars to consumers, or X subscriptions to Nazis. Instead, it’s more lucrative for him to extract money from the federal government, use government data and regulatory power to crush his rivals or extract bribes from them, and buy politicians to further tilt the rules in his favor (which would be surprisingly cheap, actually). Musk is an oligarch now, not a purveyor of goods. And oligarchs don’t need to care about “sales” or “market share”. For example, despite the dismal business performance of Twitter since his takeover, its valuation is now, apparently, back to the original $44B he purchased it for. The propaganda platform for the head of state is worth a lot more than the value of the subscriptions and ad impressions it sells.
One last thing: it seems unlikely that all of these tech CEOs will be correct, simultaneously. There seems to be a vagueness or inconsistency about what the end state will be. Zuckerberg imagines, I think, that U.S. elections oscillate between the two parties, and he can simply flip, like a weathervane, alongside. He supported Black Lives Matter in 2020, and now supports MAGA in 2025, and will support something else in 2030. But Elon is gambling on a total victory, a complete takeover of the federal government and its regulatory functions. In that scenario, won’t Zuckerberg and Bezos suffer? The thing about oligarchs is that they don’t grow the pie, they only steal slices from others. So there inherently can’t be too many of them. What is the likelihood that, in post-competitive capitalism, half the people I’ve just written about will also be a loser, just like you and me?
