On a bright winter’s day in January – Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to be exact – the former reality-TV star, convicted felon, sexual predator and multi-billionaire Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States, again. It was an absurd and sinister display of pomp and ceremony.
His third wife, Melania, wore a strategically wide-brimmed hat that rebuffed her husband’s attempt to kiss her on the cheek (genius); and the returning president was flanked on the dais
by the leaders of the world’s most powerful tech companies: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai.
Outgoing US president Joe Biden had warned of an incumbent tech-billionaire oligarchy once the transfer of power was complete, and now that it’s here, it’s even more sinister – and nerdy – than many had anticipated.
Silicon Valley is a tech wonderland of disruption, innovation, profit and speed, but a dystopia when it comes to inclusivity. We know that when women finally break into male-dominated industries such as “Big Tech”, it’s nearly impossible for them to climb the ranks. Studies have found that “like promotes like”, so when a man can’t relate to a woman, she’s not considered for a promotion (only 10.4 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women).
What we’re left with is a gaggle of men wearing zippered hoodies and high-fiving one another in the boardroom. Only now, that boardroom is the White House, and the high-fiving men are some of the most dangerous in the world for women and minority groups.
These “tech bros”, who already wield huge global influence, are now permeating the highest echelons of government, one that has shown itself time and time again to be violently and vehemently anti-women.
Arguments can and have been made that virtually every man who shared the inauguration stage in that moment with Trump is a misogynist. Ten days before the event, “Zuck”, the founder, chairman and CEO of the social media conglomerate Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), stepped off his surfboard and wiped the zinc off his face long enough to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.
During their nearly-three-hour conversation, Zuckerberg declared that corporate culture had become too “feminine”, needed more “masculine energy” and could do well to “celebrate the aggression a bit more”. A few days before these controversial comments, Zuckerberg had essentially changed Meta’s policies to allow hate speech
against women and minorities on his platforms again.
On January 7, he announced that Meta would be doing away with fact-checkers, claiming that they were “biased” – against Trump? Seems likely. “Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” he said. This came just a day after the anniversary of the 2021 US Capitol attack, which was largely fuelled by false claims spread on social media that the US election Biden won was rigged.
In March 2024, both Meta and Google were accused of restricting reproductive health information, with reports the platforms weren’t allowing local abortion providers to advertise, and were deleting posts about abortion and contraception.
But this wasn’t exclusive to the US, where a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body was steamrolled by the Supreme Court in 2022. In Ghana, in West Africa, searches such as “pregnancy options” were reportedly flagged as going against Google’s community guidelines, while Meta was accused of applying US conservative values on posts
in countries with progressive health policies, such as South Africa. Meta later confirmed some account suspensions and the blurring of posts, and then restored some of them in mid-January, according to The New York Times.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Google said the policy covered all telemedicine ads and was not specific to abortion providers. Let’s talk more about Google.
As the world’s number one search engine, it has – according to its own generative and “experimental” AI Overview – nearly 80 per cent of the global desktop search market. The company’s revenue in 2024 was nearly $US340 billion, and it is the world’s second-most valuable brand (behind Apple).
“Google” has become a verb as well as a noun, and has been genericised like Band-Aid. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was on that inauguration stage. Until then, he’d been considered one of the “good” tech elites: in 2017 he fired an employee after they circulated a memo stating that women had biological issues that prevented them from being as successful as men in tech. But then came the restricted ads and now a seat at Trump’s table.
After the US president signed a ridiculous executive order demanding the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the Gulf of America, Pichai confirmed that the body of water would appear as the latter in Google Maps for US users.
If he’s throwing Trump that bone so early on, what’s he expecting in return? Only time will tell.
I asked ChatGPT to write something for me. The AI language-generating chatbot is owned by OpenAI, which Musk co-founded alongside Sam Altman in 2015. Artificial intelligence has been plagued by gender and racial bias from the moment it burst recklessly onto the public domain.
We know now that generative AI leans heavily on the gendered stereotypes that it pulls from the internet (it will make a doctor male and a nurse female, and make both of them white, for example) and so I wanted to see if it also favoured Musk.
When I asked it to write an essay about the dangers of the tech bros in the White House, including how Musk feels about women, it told me that generally, Musk supports and champions women, and that it’s not up to the men leading the tech companies to ensure they’re inclusive; it’s on women to ensure they remain vocal about being left out.
As the owner of X – one of the major social media platforms globally – Musk has been systematically shifting the notions of what is normal and acceptable behaviour. Hours after the inauguration, Musk spoke at a rally where he jumped around and offered not one but two Nazi salutes. (You can’t convince me it was anything else – and he did try.) Not only was his gesture abhorrent and disgusting, it was not surprising.
X has become one of the most prominent platforms for the spreading of right-wing propaganda and mis- and disinformation since Musk paid $US44 billion for the platform, known then as Twitter, in late 2022. Before he bought it, investigations uncovered that it was the source of hate campaigns against Meghan Markle and Amber Heard, in 2021 and 2022, respectively.
Musk didn’t buy the platform to change it. In an article for The Guardian in early January this year, J Oliver Conroy called X “the global right’s supercharged front page”. On the platform, conspiracy theories spread like weeds. Remember Trump’s claims during the election campaign that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had been eating cats and dogs? It led to bomb threats and harassment against Springfield residents.
Musk also loves making his own posts, spreading out-of-context and intentionally misconstrued claims about youth gender transition, government crackdowns on free speech on social media, illegal immigration – the list goes on. The attacks usually affect women, gender-diverse people and other minorities.
In July 2024, during an interview with Jordan Peterson, Musk claimed his 20-year-old daughter, Vivian Wilson, who is trans, was “dead: killed by the woke mind virus”. One of Trump’s first executive orders sought to end gender-affirming medical treatments for people under 19, and only recognise two genders.
Trump appointed Musk as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, a post that requires him to recommend steep cuts to federal spending and regulation. Since then, he hasn’t stepped away from any of his businesses, including X, Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, which of course puts him in the conflict-rife position of being able to target the funding of government agencies that stand in the way of his corporate ventures.
You could say Musk bought his role as “special government employee”, given he put $US277 million towards Trump’s campaign, which made him the largest political donor of the 2024 election cycle. He’s since seen a spike in his wealth, thanks to Wall Street betting his businesses will benefit from his convenient new arrangement.
As for Bezos, well, in 2023, the founder of Amazon was accused by a former employee of allowing a culture of “insidious sexism” at his company. “Jeff Bezos has talked publicly about how he doesn’t believe in work-life balance, he believes in work-life harmony. I’m not totally sure what that means,” said the employee, “but it essentially means you’re never not at work.” This is the type of arrangement that pushes women out of the workplace when they’re required to be the primary carers of their children and ageing parents.
As the owner of The Washington Post (one of the most important news organisations in the US), Bezos shouldn’t be undermining the credibility of journalists and fanning the flames of Trump’s “don’t trust the media” fire, and yet here we are.
In October last year, just days before the election, he penned an op-ed declaring The Post would no longer be endorsing presidential candidates, despite reportedly being about to endorse Kamala Harris. After breaking that 30-year precedent, Bezos then blamed traditional news media for society’s lack of trust in its reporting.
He has drunk Trump and Musk’s “the media is the enemy of the people” Kool-Aid. “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” he wrote. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement.”
The man at the centre of all of this, of course, is Trump. While the tech bros are behaving like “pick- mes”, he’s been off meeting with the CEO of TikTok. Trump was initially all for a TikTok ban, given its mysterious algorithm is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and could put Americans at risk in an information war.
But just 14 hours after the app’s blackout (in which the app displayed a message thanking Trump for saving TikTok) it was back. The stunt was designed to appeal to a certain group of people addicted to the video sharing app, who are grateful to “Daddy Trump” for bringing it back from the dead.
The TikTok algorithm is so mysterious that no-one outside ByteDance, which owns the app, understands it. So how is anyone supposed to monitor its content for credible information, reliable sources and balanced news? The answer is they can’t. I’ve heard anecdotes of young Australian men spouting praise for Trump, only for their mothers to confiscate their phones and see that their algorithms are flooded with far-right pro-Republican content.
Now, these ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley elites, who were not nominated and not elected into power, are walking through the hallowed halls of the White House, where they will influence policy decisions and shape the national dialogue through their news, social media, and internet search platforms.
Of course, we’re used to powerful figures using their wealth and influence to shape politics behind the scenes, but to be so brazen as to stand on the same stage as the US president while he’s being sworn in feels like a kick in the teeth to women, gender-diverse people and minorities. Be alert and alarmed.
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