Then there’s the #taxes, of course.
The billionaires don’t want to pay them, and Trump is amenable to that.
Scott Bessent, nominated for Treasury Secretary, said “the most important economic issue of the day”
was making sure tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy stayed in place.
Bessent is accused of being a tax dodge himself.
Mass privatization could make things even more profitable for the tech industry
But that’s all small potatoes.
The real money is in the #military.
The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen
— also a board member of Meta and major investor in X
— has been recruiting Trump administration staffers and even influencing Defense Department and intelligence agency hiring, The Washington Post reports.
As usual, he’s given the game away by bragging about it on a podcast.
Silicon Valley investors generally have been bullish on defense tech like industry poster children #Anduril and #Palantir.
(a16z is a major Anduril backer, and both companies are founded and owned by some of the Valley’s earliest MAGA faithful.)
They want to shift Pentagon spending away from old-school contractors like Lockheed Martin,
which appears to be so freaked out that when the “Big Tech Alert” X account noted it had unfollowed Musk,
the Lockheed account DM’d to say it was “inadvertent.”
Musk’s #SpaceX has a number of contracts with the US military and intelligence agencies,
including the so-called #Starshield satellites.
He’s used his influence to meddle in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and has even reportedly taken phone calls from Vladimir Putin.
The military’s interest in artificial intelligence has also inspired a new race for everything from
building out data centers to providing cloud computing.
Musk’s #xAI, something of an also-ran next to OpenAI, Meta, and Google, could legitimize itself with DoD contracts.
Is Losing Faith in 
Intelligence Promises
