“F*** These Trump-Loving Techies”: Hollywood Takes on Silicon Valley in an Epic Presidential Brawl

If you were to stick a pin in a timeline at the exact moment Silicon Valley declared war on Hollywood, it would likely land on Aug. 29, 1997. That’s the date Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph got together in Scotts Valley, about an hour south of San Francisco, and started a little DVD delivery company called Netflix.

The rest is history: Within just a couple of decades, all the traditional pillars of the old entertainment order started to crumble. Linear television, cable TV, theatrical box office — nothing was left standing, at least not as tall as it once had. This we all know, all too well.

But here’s what’s new. Very recently, just over the past several weeks, there have been signs that Southern California once again is rising — or trying to, at any rate. This time, though, the civil war with the north isn’t over digital platform windows or online content protection; this time, it’s mogul-to-mogul combat on a much grander battlefield, as both sides — super-rich techno libertarians versus not-quite-as-super-rich old guard Hollywood liberals — clash over what sort of government the country should be electing in November. Today, they’re fighting over nothing less than the presidency of the United States.

As one studio executive succinctly sums up Hollywood’s new battle cry, “Fuck these Trump-loving techies.”

He’s referring, of course, to the slew of Northern California robber barons who’ve recently announced their support of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, including Elon Musk, arguably the richest man in history, with a net worth of $250 billion. Musk had pledged to donate $45 million a month to Trump’s campaign, although he later denied making that pledge, so who knows how much he’ll ultimately pony up (he’s now claiming to be channeling his money into his own pro-Trump political action committee, AmericaPAC). But there’s also Musk’s fellow PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel, who went on to become CEO of tech investment firm Mithril Capital, where, in 2016, he hired a young Yale-educated hillbilly named J.D. Vance, then backed Vance’s 2022 Senate race in Ohio (reportedly spending $15 million on the campaign) and is widely believed to have helped finagle Vance into his current position as Trump’s running mate.

Now there still are plenty of liberals in Silicon Valley, like Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, and former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg. There’s venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, another member of the PayPal mafia, who donated $7 million to the Democratic super PAC Future Forward (and who in July exchanged uncomfortable words with his old pal Thiel over their divergent politics at the Sun Valley CEO conference). Not to mention Hastings, who recently donated $7 million to a pro-Kamala Harris group called the Republican Accountability PAC.

Nevertheless, the number of pro-Trump tech billionaires is nearly as startling as the piles of cash they’ve been raising for his campaign: Supporters like Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin bitcoin magnates who in 2004 sued Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing their idea for Facebook (they were both played by Armie Hammer in David Fincher’s The Social Network); venture capitalist David Sacks (who recently hosted a $300,000-a-head fundraiser for Trump); Valor Equity Partners founder Antonio Gracias (who donated $1 million); Jacob Helberg, an advisor to defense technology firm Palantir ($2 million); tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale ($1 million); Sequoia Capital’s Douglas Leone (another million); Shaun Maguire ($500,000); and tech investor Ben Horowitz (who has announced plans to make a “significant” contribution); among a dozen or so others. (Interestingly, two who seem to be conspicuously neutral this election cycle are Zuckerberg and Open AI founder Sam Altman, although Trump has said that Zuckerberg promised him that he wouldn’t back a Democrat and Altman, who once compared Trump to Hitler, urged Americans to tone down the rhetoric after the July assassination attempt on the former president, promising that the country would be fine no matter who won the election.)

Up until a couple of weeks ago, Hollywood’s own moguls seemed like they might be sitting out the 2024 race. After Joe Biden‘s 90-minute staring contest at the June 27 debate, pretty much everyone in town was shutting their checkbooks or, like Endeavor’s Ari Emanuel, saving their largesse for down-ticket congressional races. But then — just like George Clooney said he should — Biden stepped down, endorsed Harris, and literally overnight Hollywood’s elites were fired up and ready to go. And not just the elites. Within the first 24 hours of Biden’s announcement, Harris took in a record-breaking $100 million in donations from across the country. “The enthusiasm and support for the vice president has been euphoric,” says embattled DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, now co-chair of Harris’ campaign (after a long stint as Biden’s co-chair). “It’s ignited people in a way I’ve never seen before.”

It’s ignited them, all right. Harris, a native Californian who owns a home in Brentwood, already had built a solid network in Los Angeles. Supporters of her 2020 run for president — before she dropped out and joined Biden’s ticket — included Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Ben Affleck, Reese Witherspoon, Reginald and Chrisette Hudlin, Jeff Shell, Donna Langley, Dana Walden, Jessica Alba, Mindy Kaling, Ron Meyer, Jeff Bridges and Shonda Rhimes, to name just a few. “Everybody I’ve encountered has been crazy enthusiastic,” says Jenny Frankfurt, a former literary agent who hosted several Harris 2020 primary fundraisers. “Some are crazy enthusiastic because it’s her, and some are crazy enthusiastic because they want that fresh start that Biden wasn’t giving them.”

And some, frankly, are crazy enthusiastic to stick it to their archrivals in Silicon Valley. “We’ve had a decade in which the Musks and Zuckerbergs and Sam Altmans of the world have been defining our culture, and the world is not better for it,” says one well-known Hollywood executive who’s supporting Harris. “These guys already have too much power as it is. We don’t need them setting policy and running the Oval Office. I think this campaign is a chance to even the scales.”

A top Democratic consultant agrees: “It’s no secret that Hollywood has never been very fond of these guys. Nobody relishes the thought of these people in bed with the Trump administration. There’s a shitload of money here in Hollywood, as well as a lot of disdain for these tech bros, and I think you’ll see people putting up a lot of dough just to teach these dudes they can’t buy an election.”

In truth, not all this hostility is over politics. Some of the resentment has as much to do with ego as ideology. After all, these Silicon Valley tech bros have been running roughshod over Hollywood for years, barging into town with their newfangled subscription services, busting up traditional broadcast and big-screen business models, imposing strange corporate cultures on an industry with its own cherished ideas about workplace etiquette (what was with those cubbyholes at Amazon that top executives got instead of C-suite offices?). Some cinephiles in Hollywood (Christopher Nolan, for one) are still peeved about Project Popcorn, Warner Bros.’ pandemic-era decision to release its entire theatrical slate on the studio’s streaming service, HBO Max, a plan cooked up by former WarnerMedia head Jason Kilar, also known as one of the founders of Hulu.

Still, there clearly are philosophical differences between the two camps. Hollywood may be filled with scoundrels, liars and backstabbers — but at least some of those scoundrels, liars and backstabbers have a social conscience. The town has a long tradition of classical liberalism, going back to the early days of the Civil Rights Movement (before Charlton Heston became a gun nut, he accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. to his 1963 speech at the March on Washington). Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda (and daughter Jane), Gregory Peck, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall — the list of old-time celebrity lefties goes on and on and continues to be replenished with ever-more progressive standard-bearers (Robert De Niro, Alyssa Milano, Larry David, Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal, just to scratch the surface). Despite the fantastical amounts of wealth sloshing around these parts, Beverly Hills and environs has remained one of the most indigo-blue spots anywhere in the country.

Up until recently, Silicon Valley shared many of L.A.’s values. Although it’s always leaned more toward laissez-faire libertarianism when it comes to taxes and regulations, it largely agreed with Hollywood on such cultural issues as gay rights, marijuana legalization and immigration (tech firms depend on foreign workers; the CEOs of Google and Uber are both from immigrant families). But something has clearly shifted in the political winds up north, and it’s not just Musk’s tweet storms decrying “woke-ism,” transgender activism and the “flood of illegals crushing the country.” How else to explain why so many Bay Area billionaires are now throwing their support — and their dollars — behind an adjudicated rapist with 34 felony convictions who orchestrated an insurrection the last time he ran for president?

“What makes me question humankind is the number of tech-bro billionaires who hold their noses and back Trump solely to make more money,” marvels Meridian Pictures CEO Eric Paquette, a longtime Democratic fundraiser in Hollywood. “I don’t get it. You’ve got $10 billion in the bank, and you’re still going to support Trump because he’s going to lower your taxes even more than he already has? There’s no justifying it. It’s a sad commentary on the lengths people go to protect their wealth at the expense of protecting our democracy.”

The fact is, there are reasons besides lower taxes that might explain why so many in Silicon Valley have gone full MAGA — much, much weirder reasons. “It’s not just about the money,” explains Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who testified during the 2018 Senate hearings on online disinformation in the 2016 Trump campaign and who knows the northern culture well. “It’s about ideology. What you’re dealing with here is a cult. These tech billionaires are building a religion. They believe they’re creating something with AI that’s going to be the most powerful thing that’s ever existed — this omniscient, all-knowing God-like entity — and they see themselves as the prophets of that future.”

Believe it or not, it’s gets even creepier. According to Wylie and others — like Émile Torres, a professor at Case Western Reserve who’s written books on the subject — this “religion” includes a whole range of far-out beliefs even beyond those found in sacred writs like “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (in which Mosaic creator Marc Andreessen predicts that “we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights”). Concepts like “transhumanism” (the idea that people should be fused with technology to usher in the next phase of human evolution, presumably a race of brain-chipped borgs plugged into the omniscient ChatGPT hive mind), the rise of “the network state” (an online entity that one day will replace traditional geographical countries) and “radical life extension.” That’s right, these dudes plan on living forever.

“Their idea is to develop advanced technologies to radically reengineer themselves so that there’s no death,” says Torres. “Immortality is a key part of this belief system. In that way, it’s very much like a religion. That’s why some people are calling it the Scientology of Silicon Valley.”

Others in San Francisco are calling it “The Nerd Reich.”

To be clear, there’s no evidence Trump believes any of this stuff, or is even aware of it — although Vance is maybe more of an open question. As a former Thiel protégé, Vance comes from the tech world, and Thiel himself has been an outspoken believer in Silicon Valley’s eugenic TESCREAL screed (an acronym for … oh, never mind). As far as the tech bros are concerned, Trump doesn’t need to be a believer; all he needs to do is take their donations and follow their policy instructions — like shutting down the FDA and other regulators whose outdated restrictions on things like human experimentation are slowing down progress toward a technotopian paradise.

So far, Trump has proved more than eager to play ball. In July, he spoke at a crypto confab in Nashville, promising to make the United States the “crypto capital” of the world. This is the same guy who as president declared bitcoin “not money” and criticized it for being “based on thin air.”

“They see Trump as a useful idiot,” says Wylie. “He’s somebody who’ll do what they want.”

There are many in Hollywood who agree with that assessment, even if they’ve never heard of transhumanism, and it’s one of the things they find so chilling about Silicon Valley. “I think these guys see Trump as an empty vessel,” says the well-known exec who’s supporting Harris. “They see him as a way to pursue their political agenda, which is survival of the fittest, no regulation, burn-the-house-down nihilism that lacks any empathy or nuance.”

Those words may sound vaguely familiar. You’ve heard something like them before, in an old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie about a transhuman killing machine from the future who also didn’t feel “pity or remorse or fear.” Oddly enough, that date mentioned earlier, when Netflix started taking over Hollywood — Aug. 29, 1997 — also happens to be when Skynet achieved self-awareness in The Terminator.

And we know how that turned out.

Lachlan Cartwright, Degen Pener and Scott Feinberg contributed to this report.

This story first appeared in the August 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.