Silicon Valley’s richest, richest galaxy executives and venture capitalists are all out during the 2024 presidential election and their investments are starting to pay off. According to the Wall Street Journal, more than three people are working as federal agencies overseeing their Silicon Valley boss business or colleagues from Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Palmer Luckey.
According to the WSJ, there are at least 18 federal agencies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, the Department of Labor, the Treasury and the Department of Defense, all hiring at least one person who is linked to one of Trump’s four favorite tech brothers. Musk’s network is the most powerful network, and now connects occupy more than a dozen agents. However, all executives will manage to benefit their employees (corporate and former employees, lawyers, investors and financial advisors) in positions responsible for overseeing, regulating and granting government contracts.
The WSJ found that companies founded, owned or invested by Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and Luckey have withheld about $6 billion worth of federal contracts since Donald Trump took office. While some bidding processes began before Trump’s second term began, the companies are currently putting themselves on more multibillion-dollar contracts and are likely to find themselves in the procurement process.
At that time, these companies won some high-profile wins. Palmer’s Anduril Technologies took over a government contract originally awarded to Microsoft to build mixed reality goggles for the military, which could eventually pay $22 billion. Musk’s SpaceX scored $5.9 billion to launch a space force mission. Thiel’s Palantir is exploited by immigration and customs enforcement to build software for deportation processing.
It’s a solid spending for billionaires who put their money into Trump’s campaign. Musk spent $290 million to bring Trump back to the White House, while Anderson donated at least $2.5 million and Luki donated at least $400,000. Unlike the recent opportunistic ghoul with Trump, Thiel has been a long-time Trump supporter and has donated about $1.5 million to groups linked to Trump, back to the 2016 election.
All of this is beyond the cuts Musk managed to make in all these agencies through the Ministry of Efficiency, which could reduce the boycott these companies will see in the regulatory pushback. It’s hard to say that some of these cuts seem to be at least partially targeted. Musk’s attempt to completely close the door is reportedly investigating the interstellar link contract caused. The Food and Drug Administration staff oversee comments and applications related to Musk’s neural acceptance. Staff from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration were also forced to study the safety of autonomous driving technologies such as Tesla FSD.
Trump has always claimed that his goal is to drain the swamp. Instead, he seemed to have just handed over control of the swamp to the technical giant who would be happy to swim in it.
