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DeSantis’s Donor Disappointment & S.B.F.’s Forever Purgatory

The ’24 kingmakers in Silicon Valley have at last been revealed, and this cycle is full of surprises—think Jan Koum, not Elon Musk. Plus, are Bankman-Fried’s former political allies finally off the hook?

Ron DeSantis’s donor roll has a striking absence of notable Silicon Valley names.
Ron DeSantis’s donor roll has a striking absence of notable Silicon Valley names. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Theodore Schleifer
August 2, 2023

Over the last two years, the dominant theme in Silicon Valley politics has been the backlash to San Francisco-style liberalism. Sure, your median techie still worries about climate change, H-1B visas, and the democratic threat of Trumpism, but we all know that the political culture of tech is not shaped by the median software engineer at Google. Fairly or not, it is leaders like Elon Musk who cast the industry’s image, inveighing against the “wokes,” vaccines, criminals, and the local government officials who won’t let him hang a giant, unsecured ‘X’ from the roof of Twitter HQ.