Terry Renna/AP Photo
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, May 21, 2023. SpaceX also works with the Pentagon, which uses its Falcon 9 rocket to launch satellites.
Political observers have wondered whether endorsements of the Republican presidential ticket among some Silicon Valley executives were indicative of broader changes in a historically blue area. But a closer look reveals that, no matter the political affiliations of its leaders, the tech industry itself has shifted, toward companies that increasingly make the technology used to bomb and kill.
Several Silicon Valley executives who have taken Donald Trump’s side in the upcoming election—people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Palmer Luckey—have ties to and contracts with the Defense Department.
Companies founded by Thiel, Musk, and Luckey have a history of working with the federal government on a variety of technologies, including surveillance, analysis, and aircraft. Silicon Valley is pushing the use of artificial intelligence (AI), which is part of a perceived arms race with China. AI has also been used by Russia and Ukraine, as well as by Israel in its attacks on Palestine.
“You’ve got at the executive levels of Silicon Valley firms, this kind of growing interconnection and this kind of symbiotic relationship between them on the one hand, and then the high leadership at the Pentagon as well who are very committed to promoting a kind of AI-based military force in the future,” Roberto J. González, a professor of anthropology at San José State University, told the Prospect.
Trump’s vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s rise to power was backed by Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir. Thiel employed Vance at his venture capital firm Mithril Capital and gave $15 million to boost his Senate campaign in 2022. Thiel, who supported Trump in 2016, had cooled on the Republican nominee until Trump selected Vance; now he is sounding more positive.
Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale also donated $1 million to the pro-Trump America PAC in June. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, however, said that he would be voting against Trump.
Thiel’s Palantir was founded in 2003 and received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm. It is not unusual in tech development to find government support at the outset. “If you look historically, Silicon Valley was essentially built with Pentagon funding going back to the 1950s,” González said.
Palantir has worked with the Army since 2008. In May, the military gave the company a $480 million deal for Project Maven, an AI software program that analyzes battlefield information to detect targets. For example, Schuyler Moore, the chief technology officer of U.S. Central Command, told Bloomberg that they had used the technology to help locate strikes in Iraq and Syria.
Trump’s vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s rise to power was backed by Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir.
“Users are going to span everyone from intel analysts and operators in some of the remote island chains across the world to leadership at the Pentagon,” Palantir’s head of defense growth, Shannon Clark, told reporters in May.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has worked with Palantir on data mining that helps the agency arrest migrants and asylum seekers, drawing protests from some of its workers.
Michael Kleinman, the director of Amnesty International’s Silicon Valley Initiative, said in 2020: “Palantir touts its ethical commitments, saying it will never work with regimes that abuse human rights abroad. This is deeply ironic, given the company’s willingness stateside to work directly with ICE, which has used its technology to execute harmful policies that target migrants and asylum-seekers.”
Elon Musk came out in support of Trump recently. Originally, news reports said that he would be donating $45 million a month to America PAC, though Musk denied it.
“What’s been reported in the media is simply not true,” Musk told conservative commentator Jordan Peterson. “I’m not donating $45 million a month to Trump. What I have done is I have created a PAC, or super PAC, whatever you want to call it. I simply call it the America PAC.”
Douglas Leone and Shaun Maguire have donated $1 million and $500,000, respectively, to America PAC. Their VC firm, Sequoia Capital, invests in SpaceX.
Musk’s company SpaceX has a $1.8 billion contract to work with a U.S. intelligence agency on surveillance satellites. This technology allows the military to find potential targets nearly anywhere on Earth. SpaceX also works with the Pentagon, which uses its Falcon 9 rocket to launch satellites into space.
Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey donated to Vance in 2022. He also co-hosted a fundraiser for Trump in June. Anduril is a defense contractor working with the Air Force and General Atomics on “collaborative combat aircraft.”
Luckey, the founder of the virtual reality company Oculus, was fired from Facebook after he backed a political organization in 2016 that circulated anti–Hillary Clinton memes.
In 2011, Luckey wrote to Trump and encouraged him to run for president. He told NPR: “I said, ‘Hey, consider me one of the people who thinks it’s good to have a businessperson in office, somebody who’s familiar with signing both sides of a check.’”
Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf told NPR that AI weapons are “not about taking humans out of the loop. I don’t think that’s the right ethical framework. This is really about how do we make human decision-makers more effective and more accountable to their decisions.”
Several Silicon Valley venture funds have both invested in Anduril and endorsed Trump. Examples include Founders Fund, which was created by Thiel; major VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose leadership Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz came out in support of Trump earlier this month; and Valor Equity Partners, whose founder Antonio Gracias donated $1 million to America PAC.
“Anduril has a massive opportunity to create even more impact for the U.S. and its allies, and we grow more confident in its mission with every opportunity to invest,” Gracias said in 2022. “Valor is excited to continue supporting the company operationally and financially as the business grows and scales.”
William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told the Prospect that leaders in Silicon Valley “embrace the idea of building the next generation of weapons that would be cheaper and more nimble, and make the Pentagon be able to keep up with that or exceed China’s capabilities … I feel like they almost have a messianic mission to make the U.S. the dominant part of the world.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection uses Anduril’s sensor towers at the southern border in Texas and California. Their drones can also track vehicles and people. According to NPR, they sell autonomous weapons to about ten different countries, including Ukraine.
“When you’re relying on the private sector to provide the AI expertise that’s going to be used for military applications, how do we know it works as advertised?” González asked. He continued: “If you’re talking about the capability of an AI system to target let’s say a suspected enemy or terrorist, or just a target of some kind or another and you happen to be wrong, hundreds of thousands of lives could be at stake on that technology that failed.”
Some of these Silicon Valley leaders come from a world of grandeur and ambition, such as Musk’s desire to colonize space or Thiel’s quest to live forever. Anduril, Palantir, and Mithril all take their names from The Lord of the Rings. “It just seems like there’s a strange overlap between fantasy and reality … there’s something concerning about it,” Hartung said. “Kind of their sense that reality is just an obstacle, that they can sort of do almost anything. I think when you’re developing weapons … that’s a dangerous move.”
THERE IS ALSO OVERLAP BETWEEN tech/defense leaders who support Trump and those who support Kamala Harris. For example, the founder of SV Angel, a venture capital firm, supports Harris, and SV Angel invested in Anduril. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Thiel both back America’s Frontier Fund, a nonprofit venture fund.
Schmidt has yet to take a stance in the election, but he has supported Democrats for many years, and his role in the federal government sets an example for what this relationship could look like. Schmidt is chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which makes recommendations to the president and Congress on use of new technology for defense.
As Jonathan Guyer reported in the Prospect: “From official positions, [Schmidt] has advocated for the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to adopt more machine-learning technology. Meanwhile, as a venture capitalist, he has invested millions of dollars in more than a half-dozen national-security startups that sell those very technologies back to the government.”
“People like Schmidt have been very influential in helping to craft defense tech policy,” González said.
Schmidt declined to comment on the story.
“There’s been a real shift in the Valley toward supporting Harris in a way that was not happening with Biden.”
LinkedIn co-founder and executive chair Reid Hoffman supported Harris in 2020 and has endorsed her once again. He donated $7 million to FF PAC, or Future Forward, which now supports Harris. Hoffman donated when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, but since Harris announced her run after Biden stepped aside, Hoffman has encouraged friends to donate to Harris and is reportedly accompanying her on a Silicon Valley fundraising blitz.
“Kamala Harris is the right person at the right time,” he posted on X. “Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are promising an agenda that will wreak havoc on the American people. Harris’s background and leadership growing the economy, fighting for bodily autonomy, and protecting our democracy uniquely position her to push back against Trump’s extremism.”
Hoffman is a board member at the Defense Innovation Board, which gives advice to the Pentagon about emerging technologies. He is also on the board of Microsoft, a major defense contractor; he sold LinkedIn to Microsoft in 2016.
In 2020, Microsoft president Brad Smith supported Harris. Microsoft works with the Defense Department on cloud services and AI. Some lawmakers in Congress have expressed concern that the Defense Department would be relying too heavily on one corporation.
Microsoft had no comment.
In 2020, Harris was supported by Amazon general counsel David Zapolsky. Amazon works with the DOD on cloud computing.
Another Harris supporter is Vinod Khosla, whose venture capital firm Khosla Ventures invests in multiple defense contractors. For example, Rocket Lab introduced its own national-security subsidiary in 2022. They are building military satellites for the Space Development Agency as part of a $515 million contract. Khosla Ventures also invests in Varda, which works with the Air Force as part of tests related to hypersonic speeds. Finally, the firm invests in Hermeus, which is working with the Air Force on its unmanned hypersonic aircraft.
“There’s been a real shift in the Valley toward supporting Harris in a way that was not happening with Biden,” Aaron Levie, CEO of the cloud computing firm Box, said in an interview with CNN. “I am pretty optimistic. I believe she has some appreciation for the different dynamics that we deal with in the tech industry, and how important of a role tech is going to play in the future of the economy and the country.” Box works with several agencies within the federal government, including the Pentagon.
To González, these Silicon Valley defense contractors are poised to win regardless of who wins the election.
“In the end,” Gonzalez said, “there’s lots of money to be made, no matter who leads the country. Neither of the two parties, and none of the candidates, are talking about scaling back the Pentagon’s budget.”
