Silicon Valley's most celebrated trend-spotters: How did they all get the midterm elections so badly wrong?

Five weeks before the midterm elections, a group of Silicon Valley's most prominent AI leaders and investors showed up at the White House, posed for photos with Trump, and voiced their support for his "superintelligence" agenda. Five weeks later, the Democrats won the midterms, and name-checked AI data centers, Elon Musk, and big tech firms as key targets in their victory speeches.

This timeline looks deeply embarrassing. An industry that constantly sells the world on "long-term vision" acted in its latest political judgment like it could only see one episode ahead in a preview clip. Mark Zuckerberg mapped out a 10-year roadmap for Facebook back in 2016, and Google told investors before its IPO that it did not care about short-term performance. Silicon Valley's management mantra goes: "Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it has been." Yet when the midterms rolled around, they all skated straight to Trump.

Original author Aaron Zamost puts it bluntly: Even by today's low standards of corporate governance, this was a stunningly stupid decision. Dozens of polls showed anti-Trump sentiment on the rise, and voters from both parties opposed new AI and data center developments. The tech elite put their long-term corporate interests aside for short-term political gains, and now the new winners are pointing their guns right at their industry.

Even tech companies' own employees are confused. Zamost says staff at OpenAI, Meta and other firms he spoke to noticed that top leadership made almost no public comments after the election. Zuckerberg has not addressed the results internally yet, and an employee at another AI firm said, "Leadership has been pretty much silent on Slack." Staff are worried about anti-data center legislation, and wondering how their bosses will adapt to a Democrat-led Washington. What puzzles them most is how their bosses could have missed what seemed obvious to everyone else.

Zamost's judgment is that this exposes a fundamental reality: Silicon Valley's most high-profile leaders are not all-knowing visionaries. Mastery of social media and AI does not equal mastery of politics, economics, or most things that fall outside the tech bubble. Access to the president, subsidies, and sway over regulatory rules that benefit them — these immediate, instant gratifications are so tempting that they made the tech leaders ignore the most basic political math.

CEOs of traditional large corporations do not operate this way. Heads of firms like JPMorgan Chase and Boeing do not go on podcasts talking about "male energy", or call the president live from the stage at a MAGA-friendly AI summit, dismissing concerns about AI as a "scam" and "nonsense". These traditional firms usually hedge their bets across both parties, because their customers change every four years, but their contracts run for a decade. Big tech tied itself so closely to Trump that core priorities and investments like grid access and data center permitting instantly turned into prime targets for the Democrats.

Tech companies can roll back a feature, or rewrite code. Politics does not have an undo button. Once public perception shifts, it is almost impossible to turn it around with a single corporate "pivot". Palantir CEO Alex Karp is a ready example. He spent an entire year talking about "violence and death against your enemies" and telling investors his firm was "totally anti-woke", only to suddenly declare himself a progressive after the Democrats won the midterms.链接 Who is going to believe that?

A Meta employee who worked closely with Mark Zuckerberg told Zamost: "Mark is a long-term thinker, but he never plans out how to get there. He just throws everything out there, prays, and sees what happens." When asked if employees expect the company to conduct a proper strategic review, the employee said: "Facebook has never really done that.

"Move fast and break things" might work for startups, but it is a terrible approach for building public goodwill. Fiber optic and wireless infrastructure deployments used to stay clear of partisan politics. After Silicon Valley bowed to the Trump administration, it turned AI into a culture war issue. Now, from California to Florida, when voters cast ballots on data center proposals, they are no longer only considering technology and economics — they are also voting along political lines.

Tech leaders missed this whole dynamic, because they were so fixated on the urgency of the AI race that they failed to understand how reputational damage would erode the intangible public goodwill they rely on, and ultimately undermine the physical infrastructure they need to win that AI race. This misjudgment has popped the myth Silicon Valley cherishes most: that its leaders always see the next step ahead.

Aaron Zamost is a tech communications consultant and former Square executive. The original article was published by MIT Technology Review.