Silicon Valley and its tech elite have become the center of power in the USA. But what do Elon Musk and Co. plan to do with the state? Stanford professor Adrian Daub did some research – and found the tech billionaires to be astonishingly immature.
WashingtonDC is the capital of the United States. But Silicon Valley has a lot of interference in what happens or doesn’t happen in the USA. Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are increasingly concentrating enormous amounts of wealth, power and influence. But what do these men actually want? And what do you even mean by rule? Adrian Daub, a professor at Stanford, California, investigated these questions. In an interview, the author of the book “What the Valley Calls Ruling” explains what Musk and Co. are after.
t-online: Professor Daub, who actually rules in the United States?
Adrian Daub: Donald Trump may be in the White House, but Silicon Valley actually has the power USA taken over. Corporations like Meta and Palantir, men like Elon Musk have a decisive say in what happens in the country. Above all, they decide what should not happen: this includes the regulation of their corporations and artificial intelligence.
Now, with his fickleness, Trump is certainly not a willing ally.
Trump is unpredictable. The tech billionaires have also made a big mistake in tying themselves to Trump like this: a man who, by the way, is an autocrat and possibly even a fascist. Trump’s approval ratings among Americans are now around 30 percent. Even among Trump’s most loyal supporters – white evangelicals – his policies are losing support.
To person
Adrian Daubborn in Cologne in 1980, teaches comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University in California. The German scholar writes for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, among others, and Daub is also the author of several books. After “What the Valley calls thinking” (2020) was released in March 2026 with “What the Valley calls ruling” his book about the world of Silicon Valley published by Suhrkamp Verlag.
So is an end to the alliance between Trump and Silicon Valley conceivable?
Political alliances are usually temporary alliances – and the alliance between Silicon Valley and Donald Trump is not for eternity either. But if Trump is history at some point, how will those who follow him view his stirrup helpers from Northern California?
Her current book is called “What the Valley Calls Ruling”: How do tech billionaires and tech companies rule?
The situation is paradoxical. Because the powerful men of Silicon Valley don’t actually want to rule us. They’re not interested in that. What they want is control. This is what the Valley calls ruling: it’s about defending privileges and hierarchies – that’s what they’re fixated on. Decisive factors are authority and control, supervision and dominance.
