It was confusing—shocking, even—for me to watch Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai fall in line alongside Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The billionaires looked like they were reenacting “The Bosses of the Senate,” a political cartoon of 1880s industrialists fattened by engorged stomachs of money bags, looking down upon American senators.
The “self-made” leaders of the tech industry are titans that Silicon Valley residents like myself have been conditioned to revere. They are the economic pillars of our region, and their excellence in higher education, entrepreneurship, the breaking of traditions, and the advancement of humanity have contributed to a local culture that inspired me to embrace similar values: lifelong-learning, innovation, bravery, and compassion.
To reconcile Zuckerberg and Pichai’s recent behavior with the famously well-educated and nonconformist Bay Area is a task that I have attempted and failed numerous times recently. The high-profile tech executives supporting far-right stances are without a strong historical president, and it’s not in Silicon Valley’s nature to support a president like Donald Trump. However, they do serve as reminders that our region can and must practice the freethinking culture that we preach.
The clearest difference between Silicon Valley leaders and the average Trump supporter is the education gap.
Except for the outliers, the computer engineers at Google, startup founders creating the next AI company, and legacy tech executives in Mountain View must have at least a college degree to climb the corporate ladder in Silicon Valley. In Palo Alto alone, 82% of adult residents have a college degree, which makes sense. Silicon Valley is overflowing with very well-educated people.
Meanwhile, just 37% of American adults have a college degree. And in 2020, almost all states below the nationwide average education rate voted for Trump. Furthermore, exit polls showed that Trump led among voters without a college degree by 10 percentage points, while Kamala Harris led college graduates by 21 points.
I do not mean to say that the divide in formal education creates any moral hierarchy in America. Rather, obtaining a college education can often open up one’s mind to new perspectives in and outside of the classroom. And while there certainly are well-educated Trump supporters, I believe that this increased education can make it much more difficult to align with President Trump’s values and initiatives.
Another influential factor for Silicon Valley’s liberal leanings is its place within the larger Bay Area tapestry.
While the Valley is a bit more moderate than San Francisco’s progressive and unconventional culture, there are strong similarities across the Bay Area. For example, Silicon Valley companies such as Apple, Visa, Amazon, Pinterest, Roblox, and eBay presented floats at the 2024 SF Pride Parade, the world’s largest LGBTQ+ parade. Though they were absent this past year, Facebook and Google had participated in the celebration for years.
In the 2000s, a grassroots organization of queer Google employees, self-proclaimed “Gayglers,” was founded by former Google engineer Bennet Marks. The Gayglers and their heterosexual colleagues marched at SF Pride and parades across the country. Marks estimated that “in [the] enormous contingent of marchers, about half were straight supporters.”
The connections between social justice and technological progress are undeniable in the Bay Area. Together, they form social progress.
I am proud that companies in our area were doing inclusion work—I know, with varying shades of commitment at first—decades before the BLM movement or Trump’s anti-DEI rhetoric came along. This is because we recognize that there is work to be done: we are not perfectly diverse or equitable yet. Engineers are still predominantly white, male, and straight. But a lot of them have been trying to get it right.
I dug up an old tweet from Zuckerberg about his parade participation alongside 700 Facebook employees in 2013. “I’m proud that our country is moving in the right direction, and I’m happy for so many of my friends and their families. #PrideConnectsUs,” he wrote.
His words were pretty incredible, right? Zuckerberg was one of the first CEOs of a major company in the entire United States to publicly support the LGBTQ+ community. Though we cannot access Zuckerberg’s recently-baffling mind, I doubt that his support for the queer community was just for some personal economic advantage. I think he really believed in the social progress that his place of residence was at the forefront of.
So, Silicon Valley has not always bred Trump supporters like Zuckerberg and Pichai—Zuckerberg himself was, until very recently, opposed to the Trump agenda.
The implications of Silicon Valley’s history are important. The Bay Area is rife with bold and fearless innovators. They rebel against the traditional hierarchy that President Trump seeks to reinforce. And, at the crux of these companies’ past support for inclusivity was a mission for uplifting each other and the world.
Once we recognize our region’s foundational values, the next step is realigning with them. If the leaders of Silicon Valley take a stand for human rights, democracy, and freedom against the leadership in Washington D.C., they will not be blazing a new trail. Instead, they can run down a path that is already neatly paved by the history of their community.
