Mapping Trump's connections to tech's right-wing brotherhood

President-elect Donald Trump has surrounded himself with a tight-knit group of wealthy tech barons whose ideas will help define his second term in the White House.

Three key allies — members of a group known as “the PayPal Mafia” for their involvement in the money-transfer company two decades ago — seem to be shaping policy and staffing decisions in Trump’s incoming administration, and they are part of an expansive right-wing tech network that will accompany Trump back into power.

The network is highly interconnected, sharing not only a political alliance but also social ties, investment opportunities, anti-regulatory ideas and geographic proximity in Austin, Texas, or Northern California. Some of their friendships and professional connections go back decades, and almost all the members of the network are men.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been called the “shadow president” or “first buddy,” and he wants to take a hatchet to the federal budget at Trump’s request as co-lead of the newly formed “Department of Government Efficiency” with biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

David Sacks, a tech investor and podcaster, will have the role of Trump’s tech “czar,” advising him on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.

Peter Thiel, a longtime Trump supporter, has given the incoming Trump administration a staffing pipeline filled with at least 10 of his former co-workers, employees or investing partners — including Vice President-elect JD Vance.

And dozens of other tech figures are now orbiting in Trump’s gravity, as either informal advisers, government officials-in-waiting or supporters pushing Trump’s agenda from outside Washington. While some converted to his side only recently, many of the tech figures know one another very well.

“They’ve turned profits into power,” said Rob Lalka, author of the book “The Venture Alchemists,” which came out this year and profiled many of the figures who are headed into the administration.

Lalka, a professor at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, said several characteristics define the technologists surrounding Trump, including their wealth and skepticism of institutions and the heavily online personas they’ve created. And he said they have a shared history, with many of them overlapping at Stanford University during and after Thiel’s time there.

“That contrarianism, it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes from real-life experiences they had as college students,” he said.

In other words: A right-wing faction has coalesced within the usually progressive tech industry, and much of it is preparing to make Washington a second home for the next four years.

The Trump transition team describes it as a natural fit.

“President Trump’s agenda includes economic, energy and regulatory policies that will allow the US to reclaim its global dominance of innovation and technology,” Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the transition, said in a statement.

“President Trump is surrounding himself with industry leaders like Elon Musk as he works to restore innovation, reduce regulation, and celebrate free speech in his second term,” he said. 

Musk, Sacks and Thiel didn’t respond to requests for comment on the transition.

Neil Malhotra, a professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said it’s notable that many in the tech industry crowd that’s close to Trump don’t come from the biggest-name tech companies, such as Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft.

“This specific group is unique because it’s coming a lot from venture,” he said, referring to venture capitalists who invest in startups. “Venture is very different from Big Seven incumbent tech. The Big Seven incumbent tech, those people are trying to be very neutral.” The Magnificent 7 collection of tech companies includes Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Tesla.

Venture capitalists often are less interested in corporate initiatives such as diversity programs, he said. Instead, they have a reputation for ruthless competition, focusing in their most extreme moments on growth at all costs and upending the existing order.

“The contrarian culture of Silicon Valley and venture has pushed back against big corporate ideas coming out of the professional managerial class,” he said.

Trump’s second term won’t be the first administration to have strong influence from the modern tech industry. The Obama administration was closely tied to tech, especially to Google and its executives, such as former CEO Eric Schmidt.

But there’s little overlap between the tech figures who advised President Barack Obama and those working now for Trump. And there’s a different dynamic this time around, said Nathan Leamer, a Republican consultant in Washington and CEO of Fixed Gear Strategies.

“Obama was following Big Tech’s lead in 2008, and there was an excitement that the Obama administration’s approach to tech mirrored the blogosphere and early Twitter and how these companies saw themselves as fitting into the world,” he said.

“The difference now is that, with Trump, it’s following the Republican Party’s lead,” he said. “Tech is watching Republican leaders and realizing that they have to get in the game. Otherwise, they’re going to be left out.”

Previously Trump-skeptical tech companies such as Meta, Amazon and OpenAI are each giving at least $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, donations that Trump can use for whatever purpose he wants.

Setting a tone near the top of the new administration will be Vance, who worked for one of Thiel’s venture capital funds, Mithril Capital, after law school and has benefited ever since from the association. Thiel was one of the main backers of Vance’s run for the Senate in Ohio in 2022.

“From the top, you see that connection with Silicon Valley,” Leamer said. (He noted that Trump himself now qualifies as a tech investor, with a majority stake in the parent company of Truth Social, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp.)

Leamer said that while some industries rely on Washington-based trade and lobbying organizations to be the faces of their businesses, figures such as Musk, Sacks and Thiel pursue a different model: cutting out the trade groups as middlemen and speaking directly to large audiences through social media and podcasts.

“These are the people behind the microphone,” he said. “It’s fitting that these very famous people are now disintermediating the marketplace.”

Trump’s choices for Cabinet-level nominations are generally people from political backgrounds, including members of Congress, Republican governors and campaign loyalists. But just below that level, tech figures are populating some of the most important positions.

Jacob Helberg, an adviser to the government contractor Palantir Technologies and the husband of another ex-PayPal executive, Keith Rabois, is Trump’s pick for undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment. A tech investor, Trae Stephens, a co-founder of the defense contractor Anduril and a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund, has been under consideration for Defense Department jobs, according to Politico and The Wall Street Journal. Jim O’Neill, former CEO of the Thiel Foundation, is Trump’s choice for the No. 2 job at the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump has named Emil Michael, a former Uber executive, for the Pentagon’s top research job. Vance’s economic adviser Gail Slater, who has worked for Fox Corp., Roku and a now-defunct trade group called the Internet Association, is Trump’s choice to lead antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department.

Announcing his choice of Slater on Truth Social, Trump highlighted the conflicts between large incumbent tech firms and the tech startups that have venture capitalists’ backing:

“Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!”

Trump has also designated appointees friendly to the same tech faction to lead the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But there are hundreds or thousands of potential appointments still to come in the middle levels of the bureaucracy where other tech figures could end up. Vance said in a 2021 podcast interview that if Trump were to win another term, he should replace all federal civil servants with “our people,” meaning conservatives.

Lalka, of Tulane University, said that for all the rhetoric about meritocracy coming from right-leaning tech entrepreneurs and investors, Vance’s vision for the federal workforce is more like the opposite.

“That is literally ‘to the victor go the spoils’ from the 19th century,” he said. “It’s not how you attract top talent.”

Malhotra, of Stanford, said one outstanding question is how many tech figures will take full-time jobs in government rather than part-time ones. Sacks’ White House role, for example, is expected to be part-time only, and Musk’s task of co-leading an efficiency commission also won’t be his day job.

“That’s going to really limit their power,” he said of the part-time roles. “This is a really good way for Trump to marginalize these people and give them the facade that they’re powerful.”

Despite his part-time role, though, Musk has lately left his imprint on the transition by helping block a government funding bill and globe-trotting with Trump to meet foreign leaders.

There’s a long list of actions that Trump’s tech appointees are expected to tackle, including deregulation of the cryptocurrency industry, fewer constraints on artificial intelligence development, easier environmental approval for projects such as Musk’s SpaceX rocket launches, a shakeup in antitrust enforcement, an overhaul of military procurement and, with congressional approval, low tax rates for corporations and wealthy individuals.

Adam Kovacevich, the CEO of Chamber of Progress, a Democratic tech industry organization, said that despite Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in November, he’s trying to see potential upside for tech overall in part because of who’s advising Trump.

“You have to go into the new administration with optimism,” he said.

“A lot of these people who have supported Trump, they’ve supported Democrats in the past, so we’re not necessarily talking about people who are always in the Republican corner,” he said.

Tech figures in that category include Musk, Sacks and investor Marc Andreessen, who recently said he’s spending half his time at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida advising on the transition. Kovacevich said he believes their alliance with Trump is best thought of as a narrow reaction against President Joe Biden, a longtime skeptic of the tech industry, rather than a complete rejection of Democratic politics.

Kovacevich said he thinks Trump won’t be able to follow through on some of his most radical ideas about technology, including forcing social media platforms to further bend their content moderation in favor of conservative users.

“Any efforts there will probably run into a First Amendment buzzsaw,” he said.

One closely watched question: How much money will Trump’s tech allies make during his administration? Musk’s wealth has soared 70% since last month’s election, to about $450 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — fueling progressive theories that he and others in tech are motivated by a desire to increase their net worth.

The stock price of Palantir Technologies, a government contractor, has roughly doubled since the election, and defense tech startup firms such as Anduril have also expressed optimism about increased sales during the new administration.

Leamer, the Republican consultant, said he thinks Trump’s tech allies have a different motivation: to prove that they’re right.

“I think they see it as a chance to put their ideas into practice,” he said. “These individuals have been thinking about these ideas, and they really have an interest in entrepreneurship and the future of the country.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com