“From the 17th century through the 1950s and ’60s,” Peter Thiel wrote in his 2012 book with Blake Masters Zero to One, “definite optimists led the Western world. Scientists, engineers, doctors, and businessmen made the world richer, healthier, and more long-lived than previously imaginable.” From the 1970s on, Thiel and others have observed, that vanguard has not been as prominent, and technological advance has slowed amid institutionalization and bureaucratization. Thiel argued that this stagnation owes, in part, to the loss of optimism’s “definite” character—the idea that only concerted human effort in pursuit of concrete plans can make the future better than the present—and its replacement with an “indefinite” variant, whereby progress, buttressed by institutions and bureaucracies, is inevitable.
A little more than a decade on from Thiel’s book, however, torchbearers for the older form of optimism have reclaimed the center of gravity in America. At President-elect Donald Trump’s left and right hands stand definite optimists in the form of entrepreneur-cum-Trump evangelist Elon Musk and venture capitalist-cum-Vice President J. D. Vance. And they are but two of the most visible figures in a loose Silicon Valley cadre poised to enact the sorts of concrete plans, in the private and public sectors, that Thiel champions. As Samuel Hammond notes, Trump has paved a lane for “highly capable founders and entrepreneurs to bypass the legacy system.”
That tech should be swinging rightward politically has understandably caught many Americans by surprise. Through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, tech luminaries were Baby Boomers in the mold of David Brooks’s “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians). Left-liberalism and left-libertarianism were their reigning political philosophies, as exemplified by the countercultural Steve Jobs. Their nemesis was the establishment: William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man,” who dominated corporate life in the early postwar era. While Jobs himself was undoubtedly a definite optimist of the highest order, the Boomer tech bobos created their own establishment—one so self-satisfied that it couldn’t see the negative effects of its egalitarian creed. In politics, where the Atari Democrats were once insurgents, the Clintons eventually became the avatars of stasis.
Following Jobs’s death in 2011, the bobo era drew to a close. Musk, born 16 years after Jobs and untouched by the America of the 1960s, soon assumed tech alpha status. By then, it was no longer the postwar conformists smothering creativity with their pieties but the bobos themselves: they preached the necessity of community input, the fragility of Mother Earth, the evils of American imperialism, and the perennial guilt of white males.
When Trump fatefully descended the escalator in 2015 to announce his presidential run, the tech elite didn’t believe it needed someone like him to smash those pieties. The startup scene was booming; San Francisco hadn’t yet succumbed to urban disorder and decay. Trump’s 2016 campaign was oriented toward, and best received by, working-class whites who never much liked liberalism anyway. Moreover, Trump at that time exuded “indefinite pessimism,” to return to the Thiel matrix. His “American carnage” thesis and promise to “Make America Great Again” highlighted decline without a clear path to renewal.
While the first Trump term struck some definite optimist chords (for example, Space Force), amid the chaos of 2020 few Silicon Valley types supported the president’s re-election. But as the new bobo pieties weighed heavier than ever in 2021 and 2022, in an endless loop of mandatory Zoom meetings, diversity statements, and ESG reporting, a switch flipped. In Signal chats, then in SoMa salons, then on X, a mass of right-leaning support swelled.
David Sacks (another member of the PayPal Mafia) and Chamath Palihapitiya (Facebook’s early growth godfather) held a multimillion-dollar Pacific Heights fundraiser for Trump in June 2024. Marc Andreessen, builder of Netscape and a leading venture capitalist, would turn to Trump soon after. Even GigaNerd Mark Zuckerberg himself suddenly re-coded himself as New Right, showing up to jiu jitsu sessions in Latinate t-shirts.
On July 13, when Trump stood in Butler, Pennsylvania, thrusting his fist skyward after an assassin’s bullet grazed his ear, the dam broke. Minutes later, Musk—arguably the most successful living entrepreneur and inarguably the man pushing the envelope for technological ambition the furthest—posted: “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.” Gradually, then suddenly, backing Trump became high-status.
Detractors might mock Musk’s giddy enthusiasm, cringe at the names he has given his children, and call his sense of humor juvenile, but they cannot deny his achievements. He was on the ground floor of the digital-payments revolution (PayPal), built the world’s top car company (Tesla), launched its biggest-ever rockets (SpaceX), and supplied the critical tech that has enabled Ukraine to fend off Russia (Starlink). By throwing his support behind Trump, Musk gave permission for other high achievers to do the same.
Notably, Musk’s greatest successes have not come in software but in hardware, where the constraints of the institutions and bureaucracies are felt most acutely and the costs the new pieties impose are most tangible. His receptivity to Trump and the New Right can be seen in other founders, like defense-tech startup Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, weather-tech startup Rainmaker Technology’s Augustus Doricko, and space-tech startup Varda’s Delian Asparouhov—all trying to break through similar regulatory barriers.
Two weeks after the Pennsylvania assassination attempt, Trump consolidated his tech gains when he named Thiel protégé Vance as his running mate and consummated what Samuel Hammond has called “an ascendent community of tech iconoclasts.” By October, to be out for Trump in the Bay Area had become remarkably commonplace; when California finished counting ballots, the vibe was corroborated. Trump picked up three percentage points over 2020 across the core tech counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Alameda.
One could argue this rightward surge is pure negative polarization: the Democrats make my life harder, so I’m going to support the Republicans. Matt Yglesias argues that it’s even simpler: rich tech bros want lower taxes. But the evidence suggests there’s something more consequential happening here.
While Trump and the rising crop of Republicans do promise to lower taxes and loosen regulations, they also show more openness to new technology, more appreciation for those who pursue it, and greater tolerance for the risks that doing anything novel entails, because they see that attaining the material benefits of innovation requires taking such risks. It’s no wonder the frontiers of technologies like autonomous driving, supersonic aviation, and rocketry are being chased in the states that bobos have spurned and Republicans have embraced: Arizona, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida. Today’s definite optimists—the new counter-elite—reside squarely on the right.
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