President-elect Donald Trump aims to begin his second term in the White House with a right-wing brotherhood by surrounding himself with a close-knit interconnected tech barons to define his second term in office with his key message of Making America Great Again (MAGA).
Three of his 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, allege US media reports.
The tech network is particularly highly interconnected, as they share not only a political alliance including an ultra-right-wing ideology, but also share social ties, investment opportunities, anti-regulatory ideas and they are all in geographic proximity in Austin, Texas, or Northern California. This brotherhood among them dates back to ages especially professional connections. To top it all, they 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, media analysts point out. 
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. 
On Trumps orbit are dozens of other tech figures who are 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,” published this year — it profiled many of the figures picked by Trump to lead his second stint in the White House administration.
Lalka, a professor at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, said several characteristics define the technologists surrounding Trump, including their wealth and scepticism of institutions and the online personas with much heft they’ve created. They all share a history, with many of them being colleagues 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, NBC reported in an analysis of the picks and the people Trump has surrounded himself with for his second term in office. 
The Trump transition team is a natural fit. “President Trump’s agenda includes (revisiting Bidens) 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 quite different from Big Seven incumbent tech. The Big Seven incumbent tech, those people are trying to be very neutral.” The Magnificent seven 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-sceptical 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.
Source: NBC network
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