Here Are All the Tech Bros Helping Elon Musk Gut the Government

A small cohort of unelected Silicon Valley investors have been quietly helping Donald Trump and Elon Musk interview personnel for the incoming administration.

Marc Andreessen was among those directly involved in recruiting and interviewing efforts for positions in Trump’s incoming administration, three people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post, under the condition that they remain anonymous. Andreessen hasn’t just been making decisions about tech or economics, two fields which he might have some knowledge of—he’s also been advising on candidates for defense and intelligence posts as well, said one of the people.

The technocrat is one-half of Andreessen-Horowitz, a venture capital firm invested in tech companies, such as Facebook, Coinbase, and Musk’s X. Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced their plans to support Trump in July. At the time, Andreessen claimed that his decision to support Trump did not “have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” meaning immigration or inflation, but was motivated purely by his own personal gain as one of the self-proclaimed “world’s largest crypto investors.”

So, in addition to getting an administration that would alleviate some of the Biden administration’s pressure on cryptocurrency and other technologies (Andreessen said Trump’s victory felt like a “boot off the throat”), he has successfully bought himself a seat at the table.

As an investor in X and a fellow Silicon Valley ghoul, Andreessen has a personal connection to Musk, the unelected and unqualified czar of the Department of Government Efficiency, which seeks to remove unelected and unqualified federal employees. During an interview in a December episode of Bari Weiss’s podcast, Andreessen said that he was an “unpaid volunteer” for DOGE, and said the caliber of people he’d spoken with about government positions was “very high.”

Others technocrats who have been lending a hand with DOGE are Shaun Maguire, general partner of Sequoia Capital; Baris Akis, the founder of Human Capital; and Vinay Hiremath, the founder of Loom, according to The New York Times.

Hiremath described the highly technical process of working with DOGE in a very strange and personal blog post shared on X on January 2.

“Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said ‘yes’. Then he said ‘cool’ and I was in multiple Signal groups,” Hiremath wrote.

“The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast,” he wrote.

He added that while the mission of DOGE was “extremely important,” he chose to leave the project after four weeks to focus on himself. “What is wrong with being insignificant? Why is letting people down so hard? I don’t know. But I’m going to find out,” he mused.

Like Andreessen, it seems that Maguire also paid for his seat at the table. He previously donated at least $500,000 to Trump’s campaign through Musk’s shady America PAC.

Donald Trump’s lobbyist friends are starting a nationwide campaign to convince the public that Republicans’ lopsided 2017 tax cuts—which benefited large corporations and the wealthy—should be renewed.

In a minute-long TV ad, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, described the Trump tax cuts as “a landmark law that gave hardworking Americans much-needed relief.” It then rattled off a list of statistics before blaming Bidenomics for inflation while scary music played.

AFP’s version of events goes against every piece of evidence that emerged after the tax cuts went into effect.

If the law is extended, households in the top 1 percent of income on average will receive tax cuts of more than $60,000, while households in the bottom 60 percent will get only $500, according to the Tax Policy Center.

“Wage growth is tepid … and gross domestic product growth is slowing and projected to revert to its long-term trend or below,” the Center for American Progress wrote in 2019. “Meanwhile, budget deficits are higher due to revenue losses—which have largely been triggered by the massive corporate tax cut at the heart of the TCJA [Trump’s tax cut bill].”

And yet AFP is committing to its own fictional story, even describing its Koch-funded initiative as “grassroots.” But not everyone is buying it.

“Americans for Prosperity is spending $20 million on a new ad campaign that champions the 2017 Trump tax law as a win for working families,” Patriotic Millionaires chair Morris Pearl told Common Dreams. “But don’t be fooled: What this Koch-backed group is really only after is protecting tax cuts for wealthy people like me.”

Some unexpected musicians are slated to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration next week, including some with long histories of beefing with the president-elect.

So far, country singer-songwriter Carrie Underwood and disco group the Village People have agreed to perform at the forty-seventh president’s inaugural ceremony.

“We are announcing today that VILLAGE PEOPLE have accepted an invitation from President Elect Trump’s campaign to participate in inaugural activities, including at least one event with President Elect Trump,” Victor Willis, a founding member of the group, wrote on Facebook, arguing that the event would be an opportunity to bring the country together. “We know this wont make some of you happy to hear, however we believe that music is to be performed without regard to politics.”

That is in spite of the group’s legal history with the former president. Willis himself issued a cease and desist letter to Trump in 2020 after the Republican presidential candidate refused to stop playing “Macho Man” and the “Y.M.C.A.,” calling Trump’s repeated use of the song a “nuisance.” (Willis later defended Trump’s use of the song, claiming he didn’t “have the heart” to tell Trump to stop dancing to “Y.M.C.A.”)

The Village People were among dozens of artists who sued Trump for playing their music without permission (or compensation) at his campaign rallies. Other offended artists included Sinéad O’Connor, The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, the Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.

Underwood, meanwhile, is expected to sing a rendition of “America the Beautiful” at Trump’s ceremony. The country music star has skirted political labels for years, but in 2017, she took an open jab at Trump during the Country Music Awards, parodying her song “Before He Cheats” to include a controversial line about Trump’s incendiary social media habits.

“And it’s fun to watch, yeah, that’s for sure/’til little Rocket Man starts a nuclear war … and then maybe next time, he’ll think before he tweets,” Underwood sang alongside Brad Paisley.

Still, in an interview with The Guardian in 2019, Underwood attempted to claim that her politics were undefined.

“I feel like more people try to pin me places politically,” she said at the time. “Everybody tries to sum everything up and put a bow on it, like it’s black and white. And it’s not like that.”

Trump struggled to find musicians to perform at his last inauguration, with reports circulating that some of his favorites—Céline Dion, Andrea Bocelli, Garth Brooks, and Sir Elton John—roundly rejected the invites.

Judge Aileen Cannon has slapped down an attempt to block special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case.

That will effectively make Smith’s summation of the failed criminal investigation available to the public. The dissemination of Trump’s classified documents case will be set to a hearing, per Cannon’s Monday memo.

In a filing last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland outlined his intentions to publicize the memo, which constitutes “volume one” of Smith’s report. But Garland never intended to make the so-called second volume on Trump’s classified documents case public, instead planning to hand the report to the chair and ranking member of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

Cannon had initially ordered on January 7 that the Justice Department would not be allowed to release Smith’s final report on his two federal criminal investigations into the president-elect.

Cannon’s ruling stated that Garland, the Department of Justice, Smith, and “all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” could not publish any part of the report until three days after the Eleventh Circuit ruled on the case.

The decision was a score for two of Trump’s co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, who argued that the release of the reports would cause “irreparable prejudice to defendants’ criminal proceedings.”

But the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Cannon’s decision last week, leaving Cannon with little option but to rescind her order.

The first volume of Smith’s report will likely become public after Cannon’s initial temporary injunction expires at midnight—unless the Eleventh Circuit intervenes again.

Smith concluded his investigations shortly after Trump won the November election. He resigned from the Justice Department last week.

This story has been updated.

In the weeks leading up to Mark Zuckerberg’s sweeping changes to Meta’s content moderation policies, the billionaire technocrat had plenty of time to talk to Donald Trump, but apparently no chance to run the decision past his oversight board.

Michael McConnell, a Stanford law professor on Meta’s oversight board, told NPR’s All Things Considered Friday that his advisory group had not even been consulted on the decision to remove content filters for some bigoted and dangerous language targeting women, ethnic and religious minorities, and people who identify as LGBTQ+.

“This actually came as a surprise to us. We did not know that they were going to be revising that standard,” McConnell said.

This is particularly troubling, considering that the oversight board’s primary function is to review cases on appeal from Meta users to see whether the company’s decisions are in line with its values—something that seem to be rapidly changing.

While Zuckerberg may not have floated Meta’s rightward policy shift past those involved in adjudicating those actual policies, he did apparently have plenty of time to talk to Trump.

Senator Markwayne Mullin told right-wing commentator Benny Johnson on an episode of The Benny Show Thursday that Zuckerberg had begun speaking regularly with the president-elect.

“Mark met with President Trump the day before he announced that they were going to change the way they do censorship, essentially,” Mullin said.

“The big announcement that he made the other day, President Trump, and spoke about that, and Mark had been down to see the president several times already,” the Oklahoma Republican added.