On Inauguration Day, fans of the All-In Podcast gathered in a billiards room in Washington DC to watch Donald Trump’s swearing-in – and a few miles away, the podcast co-host and PayPal Mafia alum David Sacks prepared to ascend to his role as Trump’s AI and crypto czar.
Very popular in Silicon Valley, All-In is fiercely pro-capitalism and enthusiastic about the world of tech start-ups and investments. Last summer, its co-hosts, Sacks and Jason Calacanis in particular, became vocal in their support for Trump and attempted to rally other tech leaders, including their listeners, behind the candidate.
Now, Sacks has a seat at the table in the White House, as do many others in tech, including a former Uber executive, a senior adviser at Palantir, and a PayPal co-founder, who was picked to be ambassador to Denmark (Greenland, a territory Trump wants to seize, is part of Denmark). It’s a watershed moment for relationships between Silicon Valley and Washington and, more broadly, what’s often described as the tech right.
The watch party was lightly attended – aside from the host, just three men who worked in tech and one woman who’d grown up in Silicon Valley showed up – but the atmosphere was friendly and relaxed. They laughed at the spectacle of Trump calling for the Gulf of Mexico to be renamed the Gulf of America (Trump would sign an executive order about this hours later). One man cheered when Trump talked about planting an American flag on Mars, and the camera panned to Elon Musk (hours later, Musk would deny that he had made two Nazi salutes at an inauguration event).
As the speech wound down, one man heard a noise from the street: at least hundreds of people chanting in support of Palestinian liberation were passing by. They watched quietly from the windows for a few moments.
“That’s their right!” the man said as he walked back to the TV. “Freedom of speech!”
Galas, conventions and watch parties
During inauguration weekend, the news was dominated by headlines about the tech elite – Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and others – wining and dining a second Trump administration. Their alignment with Trump seems in part protective, an attempt to avoid being targeted by regulators or prosecutors. (Consider Zuckerberg’s recent pivot to supporting Trump, who had threatened to throw him in prison.)
Outside the billionaire class, a hodgepodge of tech-adjacent people also came to town to celebrate at glamorous galas, conventions and watch parties – some of which I was able to attend.
Compared with the average Trump voter, this crowd tends to be more animated by industry-specific issues than talking points, about, say, illegal immigration. The crypto community rallied behind Trump after his reversal on Bitcoin, shifting from calling it a scam to embracing light regulation. It has some overlap with the libertarian-leaning supporters of Robert F Kennedy Jr, who are similarly skeptical of centralized authority while also more likely to embrace offbeat ideas about health and wellness. Silicon Valley’s power players and venture capitalists have argued that Democrats don’t support the tech industry any more. The defense tech industry thinks Trump’s enthusiastic positions on defense, energy and AI will create a particularly lucrative environment.
Many people in the tech right also resonate with the socially conservative world of the “new right” and its openness toward, to put it mildly, reactionary politics.
Most people I met over inauguration weekend were ecstatic about Trump 2.0. At the very worst, they felt cautious optimism. And they seldom expressed concern about the friendliness between Washington and the richest people and companies on earth, or what that may mean for ordinary Americans.
Quantum fields and interplanetary cash
I arrived at the Maga Maha Crypto Conference on Saturday morning just in time for the second panel of the day: “Sustainable living earth autonomy and regeneration”, which mainly argued that we can manifest better biological outcomes for ourselves. “We have enormous power to genetically create these bodies,” said the opening panelist Ken Close, who was introduced as a doctor and appears to be a member of the “holistic wellbeing” group Healy World.
“Is it how much sleep you get? No. Is it what you have for breakfast? No. It is a frequency, it is an intelligence,” Close said. Specifically, he said, it is “waveforms” in the “quantum field”.
“Figure out what that frequency is, and how you control it as the puppeteer of your body,” he said.
This set the tone for a conference of wildly diverse ideologies. Maha, Kennedy’s tagline “make America healthy again”, is a platform that’s both anti-processed food and anti-vaccine. As it happens, many crypto enthusiasts also supported Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and after he endorsed Trump and set himself up to become the new administration’s health secretary, Kennedy’s fans opted to join the Maga movement.
At another panel, Nick Spanos, a former Ron Paul campaign worker and current Bitcoin advocate, alternated between a grave and somewhat facetious tone. While he said he hoped for decentralized crypto governance under Trump (meaning no Bitcoin strategic reserve and limited regulation of crypto generally), he didn’t believe it would happen. Instead, Spanos imagined a dystopian future. “They’re probably gonna pop out another virus,” he claimed. Presumably due to Musk’s proximity to Trump, he predicted Musk’s Neuralink brain chips would become necessary to making a decent income but would eventually be hacked, turning us into “zombies running around in the woods”.
His co-panelist Andre Soriano, a fashion designer, said that the future of America was “brighter than ever”. “We have Elon Musk, he’s so fascinating,” Soriano said. “We’re all in God’s hands now, and everything is so exciting.”
Next to the stage, there were displays for a new blockchain network called Gajumaru, an “interplanetary cash for the next 5,000 years” that would work both on the moon and Mars. Toward the back, I stood by a table displaying CDs by the Christian singer Stephen W Tenner, including a single called ThanQ for Coming. Shortly before I left, I was handed a rhinestone “MAGAVERSE” pin by a woman named Joanne who passionately explained it was a crypto asset project started by her friend and had recently donated $1m to Trump’s inaugural fund. Some time soon, she said, she hoped to quit her job as a physician’s assistant and work in crypto full-time.
I recognized the logo on Joanne’s pin from the night before. Around the corner from the Crypto Ball, I’d taken a picture of a Cybertruck with an American flag car wrap and giant text reading MAGAVERSE.
Creating a military ‘hellscape’
Crypto isn’t the only sector of the tech industry that’s thinking about how business may change under Trump. On Sunday afternoon, I met up with Neil Keegan, the co-founder and CEO of Marlinspike, an investment firm largely focused on defense tech companies. Keegan had recently co-hosted one of the many business conferences that have taken place at Mar-a-Lago (Trump hasn’t been in attendance). On Sunday, he had just come from a “victory lunch” hosted by Vivek Ramaswamy, alongside 50 or so tech executives and investors whom Keegan called “very thoughtful patriots”. This was a day before Ramaswamy stepped down from his role co-leading Trump’s planned “department of government efficiency” with Musk to run for governor of Ohio.
According to Keegan, a big priority for US defense agencies and contractors, after 20 years of fighting primarily guerilla warfare in the Middle East, will be “rearming and rebuilding” in order to prepare to fight directly with “our peers”,such as China, Iran, Russia and North Korea. Keegan said that autonomous systems would have to supplement US soldiers – “underwater drones, surface drones, aerial drones, hypersonic missiles, everything.
“The strategy is really to create what’s called a hellscape. So a hellscape of drones and missiles, and just everything happening at once to make it super difficult,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to react very quickly, and I think AI is the only way to do it in the future hellscape.”
Hours later, at the Coronation Ball thrown by Passage Press, I ran into a man who’d written a series of essays arguing against the logic of “AI doomerism”, or the belief that an AI superintelligence presents a significant risk to human civilization. We talked for a few minutes about the vibe shift happening in DC, and how strange it is to see open collaboration between Washington and the tech elite. “It’s culturally and politically unprecedented,” he said.
The ball thrown by Passage Press – a controversial rightwing publishing outlet associated with the “new right” and known for platforming writers such as Curtis Yarvin, who describes himself as anti-democracy and pro-monarchy, and Steve Sailer, best known for his racist writings – was billed as “Maga meets the tech right”. I didn’t have a ticket, but I did have a dinner reservation in the venue’s restaurant and was able to walk in with a group of attendees. Waiters wove through the packed ballroom passing out champagne and deviled eggs. In one corner, an enormous St Bernard lounged on the floor near its owner. I saw a man who looked remarkably like Peter Thiel. Eventually, a woman working the event asked to see the check-in stamp on my wrist. I said I didn’t have one and was escorted out.
Afterward, I learned from social media that Passage Press had passed out cards to attendees noting their “historic electoral victory”. “We now have a rare opportunity to reassert our industrial might, our creative dynamism, and reclaim our culture,” the cards read. The event sponsor Remilia, which sells NFTs of anime avatars in streetwear, gave out stickers showing one of its characters in jail, captioned with the slur “Canceled Retard”. At the afterparty, Steve Bannon took control of the DJ booth and played YMCA by the Village People.
At the Crypto Inaugural Ball
Perhaps nothing better represented Trump’s open alliance with the tech right than the Crypto Inaugural Ball on Friday night – a black-tie gala that brought together Silicon Valley hotshots, Maga heavyweights and crypto fanatics. The conference was organized in part by Bitcoin Inc and Stand With Crypto, a political group that supported pro-crypto candidates running in 2024 (many of whom won). Tickets cost $2,500 on the low end, and $100,000 for VIPs; merch areas gave out red “Make Bitcoin great again” hats, and the menu included lobster rolls and McDonald’s.
The vast majority of attendees were men – notably, guests weren’t entitled to a plus-one – who rubbed shoulders with Donald Trump Jr; the House speaker, Mike Johnson; the incoming US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent; and the far-right provocateur Lara Loomer, who spent a strange few weeks last summer traveling on Trump’s jet. All four hosts of the All-In Podcast were in attendance too, bearing gigantic grins in group photos they posted on X.
“The reign of terror against crypto is over,” Sacks said in a jubilant speech, to cheers from the audience. “And the beginning of innovation in America for crypto has just begun.”
But the highlight of the night was arguably a performance by Snoop Dogg – who in 2017 had harshly criticized artists who performed at Trump’s first inauguration – followed by Rick Ross and Soulja Boy. As they performed, Trump made a surprise drop of his own crypto asset called Trump Meme, or $TRUMP. It shot up in value instantly, only to nosedive quickly after. Some people in crypto have since called it an industry “mockery”.
A few days after the Crypto Ball, I talked to a soft-spoken middle-aged man sitting next to me at a restaurant, who said his name was Nate. He’d driven 10 hours from Michigan to see Trump be inaugurated. He wasn’t the type to buy a ticket to a Crypto Ball.
Nate said he was an early investor in Bitcoin and had been living conservatively for many years, holding on to his remaining Bitcoin and living with his mom on a budget of $115 per week. That night, he ordered an expensive charcuterie board and a huge piece of steak.
