Silicon Valley Is Starting to Pick Sides in Musk and Trump’s Breakup

Silicon Valley investors and tech executives who loudly supported both US president Donald Trump and Elon Musk may now be forced to pick sides as the president of the United States and the world’s richest man go through an extremely messy public breakup.

Their high-profile bromance imploded this week when Musk began using his social media platform X to denounce Trump’s signature policy initiative, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which experts say would cut taxes, reduce health care benefits for poor people, and dramatically increase funding for immigration enforcement, while also adding trillions of dollars to the federal deficit.

Musk has called the bill “a disgusting abomination” and claimed Congress is “making America bankrupt.” Trump responded on Thursday by suggesting he might cancel contracts Musk’s companies have with the federal government. During a press conference the same day, Trump floated the idea that Musk was angry about the bill because it also eliminates subsidies for electric vehicles that benefit Tesla.

Trump gave Musk—a private citizen—unprecedented access to the White House and federal government by appointing him to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Their alliance was emblematic of a new era in Washington, where top Silicon Valley figures used their massive online platforms to support a candidate they believed would be good for business.

The feud is putting pressure on some of Musk's closest associates from the tech industry, including Trump’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, and other investors, to choose whether to align themselves with the Tesla CEO or continue supporting the president. So far, some people appear to be trying to walk a fine line between backing Musk while not outwardly criticizing the White House.

“Elon leaves it all on the field, and he puts what he believes in ahead of himself,” Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital who says he donated $300,000 to Trump last year, tweeted on Thursday. “How can you not be inspired by that? (Even if you disagree with him).”

Brad Gerstner, the founder of Altimeter Capital, took a different tack when asked by a Bloomberg reporter at a tech conference on Wednesday night about Musk’s criticism of Trump’s bill. “I’m a big fan of Elon,” Gerstner said, “and I also believe, and have fought for 30 years, over the fact that we need some sort of balanced budget amendment in the country.” He added that it was “unconscionable that we live a higher standard of living today by borrowing on a credit card that’s going to come due” and is hoping the country finds its way to a “four- or five-year plan laid out by this administration.”

In one of a series of rapid-fire posts on social media criticizing Trump and his administration on Thursday, Musk asked his more than 220 million followers whether it was time to “create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle.” In a reply, venture capitalist and Y Combinator president Garry Tan wrote that “kitchen table abundance” rather than “a bunch of grifting BS and virtue signaling and culture wars” should be prioritized. Aaron Levie, CEO of the cloud storage company Box, also voiced his support for Musk’s idea.

Some of Trump’s high-profile backers from Silicon Valley stayed mostly quiet during the Trump-Musk flare-up on Thursday or tried to turn attention to other topics, including Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, two tech industry veterans who are also hosts of the enormously popular All In podcast, which has featured friendly interviews with Trump and some of his cabinet appointees in recent months.

As of Thursday afternoon, Palihapitya was posting on X about crypto, while Sacks shared a recent New York Times op-ed about AI policy. But their fellow podcast hosts, David Friedberg and Jason Calacanis, posted what appeared to be cryptic references to the drama.

“​China just won,” Friedberg wrote on social media. “There are no true friends in politics—only mutual interests,” Calacanis said in a separate message. He followed up with a meme portraying Musk as rapper Kendrick Lamar, who was recently involved in a tense feud with fellow musician Drake.

“Can’t wait to see the All In podcast guys political beliefs disappear overnight,” Dar Sleeper, a former Tesla product manager, quipped on X.

Adam Kovacevich, a former Google executive and the current CEO of the tech industry trade group Chamber of Progress, says he thinks the current Musk-Trump riff doesn’t get at the heart of what most tech business leaders are really concerned about with the current administration.

“I don’t want to overstate the rupture, but the vast majority of people in the tech industry aren’t aligned with anybody right now,” Kovacevich says. “Some might appreciate what Trump has done, calling off SEC lawsuits against crypto and calling off the Biden order on AI, but at the same time there’s still a lot of angst about tariffs. That’s the single biggest issue for tech right now.”

A former Democratic operative who now works at a tech investment firm says that, while the Trump-Musk fight will indeed force some people to choose a side, it won’t be a straightforward decision for many of them. “This isn’t 2012—there are all these different strands making up the Trump alliance now,” says the operative, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized by their employer to speak to the media.

“The basic issue is that Elon was the gateway for people going from the traditionally Democratic tech industry towards Trump and the Republican party. And now the question is, will Elon be the gateway for the tech industry to come back to the left?” the source says.

Two sources who spoke to WIRED say that some investors and technologists might not be quick to embrace Musk because they are disappointed by how he handled DOGE. “A lot of people put tremendous faith in the idea that DOGE could shake up the government,” the former Democratic operative says, but the reality is that Washington is a different world from tech. “It’s the least worst outcome for many, not the best outcome for a few.”

As the sun began to set outside the White House on Thursday, Trump and Musk were still trading barbs—and there’s little sign their battle will end anytime soon. In fact, this may be only the beginning. As right-leaning tech investor Mike Solana put it on X: “And so, as foretold, the great tech right/populist right-wing schism of 2025 begins.”