ComputerWeekly

The politicisation of Silicon Valley

An interview with Nick Clegg during the South by SouthWest (SXSW) 2026 show in London for The Rest is Money podcast is illustrative of just how out of touch the tech giants are. Speaking to ITV political editor Robert Peston , the former UK deputy prime minister spoke about the politicisation of Silicon Valley – and the fact that no one else had any experience in politics. Present at the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2025 were Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple boss Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Also present was SpaceX and Tesla boss Elon Musk, who went on to head up the US Department of Government Efficiency, which oversaw the closure of and funding cuts to numerous US government departments and programmes. Looking at the tech sector’s attitude to the new administration, Clegg said: “Rather than shun politics, they have decided to embrace Maga [make America great again] politics for a whole bunch of reasons.” Dell is the most recent company to benefit from its CEO’s open support of the US president. In 2025, after Trump won the US presidential election, Dell CEO Michael Dell tweeted : “Congratulations to President Trump on a successful campaign and election win. We look forward to continued progress and opportunity under his leadership and working together toward a strong and unified future for all.” In May 2026, Dell won a $9.7bn contract with the Pentagon, described by the US Department of War’s chief information officer, Kirsten Davies, as a “second-generation blanket purchase agreement” to streamline and consolidate critical Microsoft software and services across the department, the intelligence community and the US Coast Guard. With Trump’s latest executive order of 2 June, which aims to promote advanced artificial intelligence (AI) in the US, questions are being raised over how much the tech giants supporting the US administration will benefit from their closeness to the president. Political shift in Silicon Valley Clegg joined Meta, the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, in 2018 and left in 2025. “When I arrived in Silicon Valley in the autumn of 2018, it was a completely different time. Silicon Valley was still a bit hippy-dippy, very much left-leaning, for better or for worse. But crucially, social media was a social thing. It was about human beings,” he said. In 2025, rather than shun politics, Clegg said the whole of Silicon Valley decided to embrace Maga politics. He said they did this “for a whole bunch of reasons – some high-minded and some more self-interest”. Speaking about Meta specifically, he said: “Certainly the product in the company I work for has changed utterly from being a sort of human-centric product to one which is now much, much more about content, often synthetic content, being algorithmically recommended to you. To put it mildly, it was not exactly the kind of thing that appealed to me.” Risk of political change Clegg questioned the longevity of the tech giants, given that they have now shifted from being apolitical to being heavily supportive of the Trump administration. “I’m not talking about my old life as a politician because I wasn’t employed at Meta as a politician, but I actually don’t think it’s sensible for business to flip-flop every time the political weather changes in Washington,” he said. Clegg said it was particularly difficult for a social media business like Meta to balance freedom of speech with freedom of expression. “About one half of the US thinks that companies like Meta actively censor and suppress their view of the world, and another half yell at them and say, ‘You’re not censoring enough to keep us safe’,” he said. “There’s a much more polarised debate, and I think if you’re dealing with something as sensitive as speech, and where speech moderation ends and free expression begins, it’s more sensible to refrain from jumping into one political camp or another.” From his experience of working at Meta, Clegg said: “Silicon Valley is always susceptible to ludicrous hyperbole, which, for better or for worse, they then go and act upon. They’re not politicians and, oddly enough, in conversations, I was often the only person who’d ever been elected to anything.” According to Clegg, Silicon Valley considered the Trump victory a paradigm shift. “Everything was different compared to before, and they needed to adjust accordingly.” But the political pendulum will eventually swing the other way and people’s attitudes will change. When asked whether tech bosses were driven purely by money, Clegg said he wasn’t sure it was only about money, adding that they tend to have an undergraduate-level fascination with ancient Rome. “Am I going to be remembered in a thousand years’ time as the person who helped inhabit Mars?” he said, implying that they see themselves as empire-building and want to be recognised for their achievements. “They want to live in a world where great men – and it’s always men – do great things, while the rest of us Lilliputian individuals scurry around in the sort of lower divisions and erect statues, which will last for hundreds of years.” Clegg said this tendency to want to leave a legacy drives their behaviour much more than having an extra few billion dollars compared with a competitor. Read more Silicon Valley stories What happens if Silicon Valley’s AI investment bubble bursts ? US tech giants are burning through unprecedented amounts of capital to develop artificial superintelligence, but authoritarian regimes around the world could keep the pursuit of a techno-utopian future alive when the bubble subsides. Tech bros beware – Erin Brockovich is coming for you: The campaigning heroine of the eponymous movie has AI datacentres in her sights, just as Big Tech spending on memory chips sends PC and mobile prices spiralling up.

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