Elon Musk Appalls Much of the Tech Industry. They’re Just Afraid to Say So.
A huge swath of Silicon Valley is horrified by what Elon Musk is doing — but they fear speaking out.
By Issie Lapowsky
Mark was poking around in an online forum for tech-company founders recently when he spotted a fawning post about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
As the founder of a tech company himself, Mark is part of a community of startup types in the Bay Area, and considers his politics to be pretty middle-of-the-road. He understands the instinct to want to modernize government. But Musk’s approach at DOGE — which he saw as a slash-and-burn rampage through the federal workforce — seemed, to him, “absurd.”
He typed up a reply saying as much, arguing that DOGE is a front for purging political opponents, and he figured at least some of the other founders on the forum would agree.
Instead, Mark — who we allowed to use a pseudonym to avoid retaliation — was mobbed. “I was just amazed by the amount of virulence that came back to me,” he said.
Then something else happened: Direct messages started pouring in from people thanking him for saying what they were too fearful to say themselves. One even asked to talk by phone, so long as Mark agreed never to mention his name to anyone or even enter their conversation in his Google Calendar.
In both Washington and in California, a narrative has quickly emerged about Musk’s assault on the federal government: This is what happens when you bring the Silicon Valley playbook to D.C. As Musk’s young lackeys rifle through sensitive databases, conk out in makeshift bedrooms set up in government buildings and gut entire agencies, the implication seems to be that this is how it’s done in tech. And there is obviously a very loud corner of the tech sector that agrees.
But in an industry whose workforce overwhelmingly donated to Democrats, in a region whose voters overwhelmingly backed Kamala Harris, there are also a lot of people in tech who view Musk’s handiwork as not just dangerous, but totally antithetical to running a healthy business, let alone the government.
They’re just increasingly terrified to say that out loud.
“Not everyone in tech is supporting Elon Musk,” Mark said. “It’s just that you don’t hear their side because they’re afraid to speak up.”
“I hate being careful like this. I’m not that kind of person,” said one long-time tech communications professional who initially planned to use his name in this article, but was granted anonymity prior to the interview after his company leadership told him they couldn’t risk the exposure. “We provide the livelihood of over 100 people and all their dependents,” he said.
POLITICO Magazine spoke with a cross-section of investors, engineers, startup founders and public relations professionals working in tech, many of whom were granted anonymity to avoid professional or personal backlash. They all described an industry known for outspokenness and self-assurance suddenly gripped with a widespread culture of fear when it comes to criticizing Musk or DOGE.
This chilling effect is, of course, being felt everywhere in the American establishment and beyond, from university campuses to powerful law firms to the halls of Congress. But speaking out can feel particularly dicey in tech now that some of the industry’s most powerful investors and executives — people with the power to determine whose tech startup gets funded or which workers get fired — aren’t just cozying up to the Trump administration; they’re running it.
In a statement to POLITICO Magazine, responding to concerns expressed by tech workers and leaders, White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said, “DOGE is actively pursuing President Trump’s agenda, and while coastal elitists and DC bureaucrats are crying foul, the American people are overwhelmingly supportive.” A representative for DOGE did not respond to a request for comment.
Still, Musk is increasingly seen as a liability for the GOP. A recent Fox News poll found that 58 percent of voters disapprove of DOGE, and Trump is reportedly telling his inner circle that Musk will soon depart Washington. But until that happens — and maybe not even then, considering Musk is likely to remain a force in politics — publicly going against him is a risk.
This reticence among Silicon Valley’s very large liberal contingent is a sharp turn from the way it’s always been. Not long ago, it was Republicans who feared coming out as conservative. When Niki Christoff started working at Google fresh off of a stint on Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, she said she was treated “like a foreign-exchange student.”
“I used to joke that they were like, ‘What do you guys eat for breakfast? Puppies?’” she said of her lefty colleagues. But the cost of being out of lockstep with the prevailing political ideology back then was a social one, Christoff said. Now, tech leaders fear losing their livelihoods or else being publicly harassed by one of the most powerful men in their industry, spurned by his allies, and attacked by his entire online army.
“The terror is real,” said Christoff, who now consults with tech leaders through her crisis communications and political strategy firm, Christoff & Co.
For tech employees, the feeling of being muzzled is particularly stark, given just how much freedom the industry’s wealthy, privileged workforce has previously known. For years, as tech companies declared their commitment to diversity in the workplace, threw their support behind progressive policy issues like immigration reform and LGBTQ+ rights, and claimed to prioritize free speech, tech workers enjoyed wide latitude to speak out about injustices they saw in the world and at work. During the first Trump administration, Google employees walked off the job en masse to protest the administration’s ban on people coming from Muslim-majority countries, emboldened by the fact that both their CEO Sundar Pichai and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin were right there with them.
This year, both men stood dutifully on the dais behind Trump as he was sworn into office.
It’s not just their billionaire bosses who have changed. It’s the tech labor market itself. One reason why tech leaders tolerated dissent during Trump’s first term is because the hiring market was so competitive that companies couldn’t afford to alienate talent. Now, more than half a million estimated tech workers have been laid off since 2022 and good jobs in the industry are getting harder to find.
“There’s a greater personal cost if you sacrifice your position,” said one current Tesla employee.
The employee said he’s gone from being proud of where he works to apologizing for it — but only in private.
“We’re all embarrassed by [Musk] at this point, but it’s just quiet muttering over lunch,” the employee said.
It’s not just that much of the tech world is opposed to Musk’s politics. They’re also appalled by the idea that his approach is being framed as a reflection of how their industry works. Some who have worked for him argue it’s not even a good example of Musk’s own abrasive, but effective, management style, which helped him build more than one multi-billion-dollar company.
There are, of course, aspects of Musk’s DOGE strategy that feel familiar. His doomsday rhetoric, micromanagement, office sleeping arrangements, and firings followed by rehirings are part of a well-documented playbook Musk has deployed at his own companies.
But in other ways, current and former employees say, his approach was different at Tesla. For one thing, said Nathan Murthy, who worked as an engineer at Tesla for nearly seven years, he hired people with expertise.
“Once you trust people and trust they know certain things, they can provide answers for how to build things — or tear things down — in your company that are consistent with the systems you’ve built,” said Murthy, who is now head of engineering at the tech startup Verse. Murthy compared DOGE’s operations to “Chesterton’s Fence,” the philosophical principle that you should never tear down a fence until you know why it was put there in the first place. “They’re doing the opposite of that,” he said.
Firing the experts and giving government neophytes so much power, the people who spoke to POLITICO Magazine said, is leading to sloppy mistakes that would never fly in the business world — even the world of fast-moving, winner-take-all tech startups.
Already, DOGE’s claims about 150-year-olds collecting Social Security benefits collapsed after the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration corrected the record. And the group’s “Wall of Receipts,” which it uses to track spending cuts, has been riddled with errors, including one line item that mistook an $8 million ICE contract for an $8 billion one. During the first month of its existence, each of the biggest cost cuts listed on the site was later revealed to be a mistake.
“If Elizabeth Holmes did that she’d be run out of town,” said one early-stage investor, referring to the Theranos founder who’s now serving an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors. “When you’re dealing with people’s lives and deaths, errors and fraud and deception land you in jail, not in the Oval Office.”
Suddenly gutting an organization on the assumption that it will become more efficient that way is also a “catastrophically risky thing to do” the investor said. “You would only do that if the risk of the company failing was low.”
And though there are some exceptions, he added, “in general, when there’s a strip-down-to-the-bone cost cut, it is not followed by success. It is followed by a slow spiral of deterioration.”
DOGE’s approach is much more of a “private equity play,” said Samuel Hammond, chief economist for the right-leaning tech policy think tank Foundation for American Innovation. “It’s sort of liquidation nation,” he said, referring to the way private equity firms strip companies down for parts. While he said DOGE isn’t “universally praised or condemned” among the conservative technologists he knows, he said more people in those circles are starting to “talk about the DOGE that could have been.”
Even some of the crypto executives Christoff works with, who view Trump as a champion for their industry, are souring on Musk’s approach. “They see this administration as a path to achieve their worldview,” she said, “but that’s really different than them thinking that this is any way to run an operation effectively or efficiently or successfully.”
As a communications professional, though, Christoff isn’t advising her clients to pipe up — nor are they asking her whether they should. But she said she is seeing some cracks begin to form, driven in part by growing frustration with the way DOGE’s mission is running up against tech leaders’ own business interests. Part of what’s driving their code of silence, after all, is pure self-preservation. No cybersecurity company or IT provider wants to be blacklisted from contracts with a current or potential client as gigantic as the federal government.
But that instinct is increasingly at odds with the fact that DOGE is actively cutting contracts. “It’s a 13-figure total addressable market that they’re intentionally making smaller,” she said. “From a pure business perspective, these are all capitalists. It doesn’t make a lot of economic sense.”
The more DOGE’s reductions undercut their own success — and Trump’s — the more those tech leaders might feel encouraged to speak up. “I think that there’s a moment where this could become safer for people to say something,” Christoff said. “But that time is not quite yet.”
