Is Silicon Valley still the place of power in American tech? The tide has turned since Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election. His choice to appoint Brendan Carr as head of the powerful FCC, the American telecoms regulator, is an unequivocal sign of this. This Republican who contributed to the writing of a chapter of the controversial “Project 2025” never stops crushing Californian stars.
“Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others are pillars of the censorship cartel,” he declared before his official appointment, aggressively targeting moderation tools that platforms have only slowly accepted in order to limit hateful content and disinformation. Honey to the ears of the president who cannot digest that the social networks of the “Valley” banned him in 2021, after the Capitol riots. In his eyes, Brendan Carr is a “free speech warrior”.
“Woke-tech” versus “bro-tech”
A gap is widening within American tech, until now one of the rare transpartisan subjects in the United States. “On the one hand, what Donald Trump considers to be Californian woke-tech,” explains Gilles Babinet, co-president of the National Digital Council (CNnum). On the other hand, libertarian bro-tech in Texas which is today taking its place. revenge.”
If Donald Trump mistreats Silicon Valley, he has in fact given a leading role to Elon Musk, the new tycoon from the Lone Star State. The latter, however, like the others, started his career under the blue Californian sky and benefited from its generous subsidies. But today he likes to sharply criticize its orientations.
The entrepreneur had already moved Tesla’s headquarters from Palo Alto to Texas in 2021. He has since announced the move of those of SpaceX and X, the former Twitter, justifying his decision by his opposition to a Californian law regarding transgender students. Last week, he also filed a complaint against California, in order to block a text which requires social networks to remove or label deepfakes during election periods.
Elon Musk is not the only tech entrepreneur to turn to the conservative state of Texas, historically known for its oil fields. In 2020, a historic figure in Silicon Valley, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, moved its headquarters there. Dell and Crowdstrike also have theirs there. And Amazon, Apple or AMD, offices. Real estate is, it is true, less expensive there than in the “Valley”.
Texas Silicon Valley
Texas with its “Silicon Hills”, however, is far from having the economic power of Silicon Valley. THE data from specialist Pitchbook on venture capital ecosystems are clear. Between the third quarter of 2018 and the second quarter of 2024, the combined value of transactions, exit and fundraising in San Francisco was twenty-five times higher than in Austin. The Bay City “doesn’t play in the same league as the rest of the world […] Other cities in the United States or abroad have a long way to go before dethroning it,” the authors point out.
Texas also suffered setbacks. The software giant Oracle, welcomed with great fanfare to the region in 2020, has, for example, announced that it is packing its bags, heading to Tennessee. With Elon Musk in Donald Trump’s favor, Texan tech will, however, have a sympathetic ear at the White House. This will be much less the case for the big names in Silicon Valley.
The OpenAI star who, as recently as September, was trying to convince Washington of the usefulness of building cyclopean data centers will navigate a crest line after the departure of Joe Biden. Certainly, its technological superiority in generative AI is the business of the United States. But Elon Musk harbors deep grievances against him. Although he participated in co-founding this entity, he slammed the door in 2018. Since then, he has continued to criticize the changes in governance of OpenAI – which opened a for-profit subsidiary in 2019. And frequently asserts that ChatGPT is politically biased toward Democrats.
Trump and Musk crush Silicon Valley
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI had fun with it onon November 16, comparing the response of his tool and that of Musk’s rival AI (Grok) to the question “Who would be the best president for the United States, Trump or Harris?”. ChatGPT immediately responds that it does not have “personal opinions nor the right to speak out in favor of a candidate” then draws up a summary of the measures proposed by each candidate in different areas (Economy, Health, etc.). Elon Musk’s AI responds without hesitation that “Kamala Harris would make a better president”, listing several arguments in her favor. “Remind me which one of these AIs is supposed to be a propaganda tool for the far left?” jokes Sam Altman.
If Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Elon Musk have never organized their wrestling match, they regularly fight on the Internet. The creator of Facebook had notably suggested that the way in which Musk managed X was not “healthy”. “I’m sure Earthlings really want to live under Zuck’s total control, with no other option,” he said. replied the lattermocking Meta’s plan to launch a competitor to X called Threads. Donald Trump does not have any more tenderness towards Mark Zuckerberg, whom he accused in his book of having “plotted” against his re-election. “We are monitoring him closely and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison,” he threatened. You don’t even have to move to Texas to experience a bad episode of Dallas.
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