- Some Silicon Valley elites have been warming up to another Trump administration.
- These power players don't just want less regulation — they're also highly invested in AI.
Immediately after Donald Trump became the first former US president to be convicted of felony crimes on Thursday, a faction of Silicon Valley's elite balked.
"Indeed, great damage was done today to the public's faith in the American legal system," Elon Musk, who has his own legal battles and clashes with governments, wrote on X.
Others newly announced or reiterated their support for Trump.
Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, said on X that he'd donate $300,000 to the Trump campaign.
The venture capitalist David Sacks wrote on X that he'd "take a 'convicted felon' over World War 3 any day," sharing a Politico article about how the Biden administration had pushed US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war further by green-lighting the use of US-made weapons to strike inside Russia. Puck reported that Sacks would be cohosting a fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco next week.
While Musk hasn't formally endorsed Trump, one reason Silicon Valley heavy-hitters could be gravitating toward a convicted former president is a desire to see less regulation on tech development in America.
They also happen to be some of the biggest players in the rapidly accelerating world of artificial intelligence.
For the billionaire Mark Cuban, therein lies a crucial incentive.
Cuban, a vocal opponent of Trump who has expressed his support for Joe Biden, told Business Insider in an email that he viewed the support from Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires for Trump as "self-serving."
"They want as little regulation as possible because there is no way for regulation to work unless they are the ones that write it," Cuban said.
Top of mind for Cuban is regulation around AI and how there appears to be a desire to facilitate where the laws will go around the technology.
"There is a fear that regulation will be written in a way that will diminish their ability to compete globally and against each other," he wrote, explaining his theory on why Silicon Valley billionaires might be backing Trump. "So unless it's very light touch, which is unlikely at this point, the more influence they have over AI regulation the better the opportunity to advantage themselves."
Steering the laws on AI
Musk, Maguire, and Sacks didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from BI, but each has railed against government regulation to varying degrees.
Sacks said on his "All-In" podcast last year that he believed people should be able to further experiment with AI before the government could start imposing restrictions.
"It's still very early to be imposing regulation," Sacks said. "We don't even know what to regulate."
Some investors, such as Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, have embraced a movement known as Effective Accelerationism, or "e/acc," which calls for the development of AI without any guardrails.
Maguire has criticized Democrats for placing regulations on technology, pointing to open-source AI and cryptocurrency.
"The Democrats have been trying to regulate technology — especially open source AI and crypto in ways that incentivize the best builders to build outside of America," he wrote in a post on X that explained his rationale for supporting Trump.
That's not to say every Silicon Valley player who's investing in AI and Trump hopes to see an unrestrained, Wild West of AI development.
Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire investor who's a cohost of the "All-In" podcast with Sacks, has argued that AI will require "an oversight body."
"Our political leaders need to get in front of this sooner rather than later and create some oversight before the eventual/big/avoidable mistakes happen and genies are let out of the bottle," he wrote on X in April last year.
Palihapitiya is set to be cohosting the Trump fundraiser in San Francisco with Sacks.
Musk is also known to have criticized several regulatory bodies, from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
But AI is one area in which Musk has been an open advocate for regulation.
"When you're talking about digital superintelligence, which does pose a risk to the public, then there is a role for government to play to safeguard the interest of the public," he told British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in November.
Still, Musk said in the same conversation that regulation "will be annoying," and with a direct line to Trump, the billionaire could have significant sway over the direction of those laws if Trump were to return to the White House.
A Trump spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment.