Lavish parties and moral dilemmas: 4 days with Silicon Valley's MAGA elite at the RNC
It was an eventful week for the Silicon Valley moguls who have vowed to support Donald Trump in his bid to return to the presidency.
Given the collision course of tech and Trump, when Leda Health founder Madison Campbell asked me if I’d care to buy an extra ticket to the Republican National Convention from her, I agreed. During the four days I attended the event in Milwaukee, I saw the Valley’s presence everywhere: Jacob Helberg — venture capitalist Keith Rabois’ husband and former president Donald Trump’s evangelist — watched the Republican National Convention from his own private box that overlooked the floor, donning a red yarmulke with “Trump” stamped on the edge. Investor David Sacks took the stage, orating to the hundreds of delegates decked out in red. Peter Thiel’s protégé and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance sat beaming by Trump’s side.
In the brightly lit hallway, flooded with Texas delegates donned in cowboy hats and jeans, Trump superfans in American-flag suits and the occasional woman in a red ball gown, I found Blake Masters, another Thiel protégé running for office in Arizona. He demurred when I asked if he, Vance and Thiel have a group text chat. But he did smile and say, “Peter is very, very pleased,” referring to Vance’s veep nomination.
All week at the RNC, I saw an event defined by Silicon Valley. But I also saw the tech elite experience flashes of discordance between their dreamed-of outcomes and those of the working-class MAGA supporters overflowing the halls. Take Sacks, who has been critical of unions, speaking at 9 p.m. — only for Sean O'Brien, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in America, to close out the night a few hours later.
On the first day of the convention, I met Campbell at the Pfister Hotel, where Trump was reportedly staying. Secret Service agents lined the doors, and a procession of armored vans continuously pulled up to drop off congressmen. (I passed Alabama senator Katie Boyd Britt as I walked in.) Every night, delegates and lobbyists sipped espresso martinis at the hotel bar and talked shop beneath the oil-painted mural sky.
Campbell, whose company creates at-home evidence-collection kits for rape and sexual assault victims, filled me in on her own political journey. She’s a libertarian (and famously dated infamous former hedge fund libertarian Martin Shkreli) who recently doubled down on her hometown of Pittsburgh. She won the Miss Pittsburgh pageant last year and then began working closely with local conservatives. Recently, she’s opened her mind to a spot in the Trump administration, interviewing to be in Project 2025’s Presidential Personnel Database, an effort by the Heritage Foundation to centralize potential Trump administration personnel.
Campbell, who had been selected last minute as an alternate Pennsylvania delegate, told me she’s not a die-hard Trump supporter. Rather, she thinks he’ll be beneficial for businesses like her own. “Even if I agree with some of the policies of Trump, I don't think I necessarily agree with him as a person. And now it looks like, you know, it’s Trump for president,” she said. “So here we are.”
Tense contradictions
To get to the convention center from the hotel, we passed hordes of cops on boats floating in the Milwaukee River, on bikes in the street, on horses milling around the security perimeter. We weaved around a crowd of protestors waving Palestinian flags.
After we arrived, I pushed through a crowd of reporters to ask Vivek Ramaswamy — former presidential candidate, investor and founder of biotech company Roivant Sciences — what he thought of Silicon Valley’s support for Trump. He noted the announcements of Trump support from Silicon Valley. He said he speaks with Musk “frequently about our shared passions for reviving this country.” (The WSJ reported this week that Musk is donating heavily to the Trump Super PAC, although Musk has publicly disputed the report). He said that other tech elites have expressed to him that they “are gonna come around this year” and predicted “a tidal wave this summer,” he said.
There’s good reason for Ramaswamy’s optimism. While many Trump supporters among the tech elite have always traditionally leaned right, there have been surprise endorsements. For example, Ben Horowitz and his a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen publicly announced this week that they would be supporting Trump, rather than quietly donating.
The GOP hasn’t exactly been subtle about courting Silicon Valley, either. Earlier this month, the party released its platform, highlighting support for crypto development “free from Government Surveillance and Control.” Trump is also scheduled to speak at Nashville’s Bitcoin Conference later this month — prompting investor Mark Cuban to offer a cynical take on why techies are turning to Trump. “It’s a Bitcoin play,” he tweeted, explaining that it’s all about driving Bitcoin prices higher.
The platform also supports “AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”
Of course, politicians at the RNC had a more classic down-with-regulation rationale. “Just like with Elon Musk and the rest, [Trump] supports free speech, he supports the free market,” Florida Rep. Cory Mills told me, “not the ideas of having policy drive our private sector.”
Still, Silicon Valley’s embrace of Trump is filled with tense contradictions: Trump’s administration was actually fairly tough on crypto (he even banned Venezuela’s crypto coin), and Trump himself has derided subsidies for electric vehicles. Even Vance’s record is questionable in terms of being pro-tech, and he's campaigned on being anti-Big Tech. "I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job," Vance said in February. Khan’s time at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been marked by aggressive pursuit of antitrust cases blocking acquisitions.
Despite all that, Daniel Castro, vice president at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told me that Biden’s antitrust streak and advocacy for AI regulation has pushed the already-libertarian-leaning parts of Silicon further and further away.
“The Biden administration should be careful not to kind of demonize Silicon Valley,” he said.
It might be too late.
Inside the VIP party
Everywhere Campbell and I went, we could see Silicon Valley in the MAGA-verse. Outside the convention center, we ran into Conor Sweeney, a Snapchat software engineer, wearing a snakeskin belt. We chatted with him shortly after Vance was announced as the vice presidential pick. “Anything with Peter Thiel turns to gold,” he said.
At night, in the Pfister’s mahogany-lined bar, Campbell struck up a conversation with Jeff Miller, a powerful political strategist and close confidant of former House speaker Kevin McCarthy. Campbell gave Miller the pitch for her home rape-kit evidence company, and he steered the conversation to his stance on abortion. (He was opposed to it but did agree that there should be exceptions in the case of “rape, incest, and life of the mother”). That conversation ended with a tantalizing promise to get her passes to the VIP after-party. Later, I noticed that Miller had liked an Instagram photo of Campbell during the swimsuit competition of the Miss Pittsburgh competition.
The next night, Miller sought Campbell out in the Pfister bar and handed her a glossy party invitation, complete with a drawing of a grinning ringleader. Campbell and I took an Uber to a rooftop birthday party for Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, where we were held up by Secret Service agents sending their search dogs to sniff each vehicle. The line of cars was backed up after the officers found a bag of white powder in the car in front of us. (We had a raucous debate over the fate of the powder while we waited but never found out more).
The party was a dull assembly of mostly staffers in suits sipping their beers. But at 1 a.m., we took a car over to the main attraction: a warehouse decked out in pink lights on the outskirts of town, where the big GOP donors and power players went every night to unwind. We ran into Miller again, surrounded by women, and then hung out with CJ Pearson, a 21-year-old conservative influencer, one of about 70 such influencers at the RNC.
Ironically, given the Trump administration’s anti-China stance and his attempt to ban TikTok, he’s now on the popular app as a candidate, as are the young influencers.
“If we're in the business of truly winning elections, then we have to go to where young people are, and young people are on TikTok and young people are on Instagram,” Pearson said. “I'm not a fan of the Chinese Communist Party. But what I am a fan of is changing the hearts and minds of America's young people.”
Throughout the night, I also heard Campbell offering slightly different political advice to fellow partygoers. Despite thousands of attendees yelling, “Drill, baby, drill!” as they watched speakers during the day, a call for increased U.S. oil production, she lightly chastised Pennsylvania conservative candidates for chasing the oil and gas donors of Pittsburgh’s past. She wanted them to embrace tech as the new GOP kingpins.
“The only new money that I can see is like Elon Musk, right? Or you have the Thiel money,” Campbell said. “If you’re looking for oil and gas money from people who used to be big Republican donors in the 1980s, you're looking at the wrong type of people. Because the new money is all in technology.”
To me, these conversations captured the tenuous thread between Silicon Valley and Trump — an imperfect yet lucrative match, one that requires each side to tuck away moral misgivings.