Tech Bros Are Getting What They Deserve
California’s tech oligarchs are portraying themselves as victims, as the left clamors to tax their wealth away.
Perhaps they should take some responsibility.
Once widely admired as feisty disrupters, these super-rich moguls now define the establishment in California, a state with more billionaires than any other. And it is an establishment under threat.
The tech oligarchs used to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the state. But now, as they focus on AI as “the next big thing”, big players like Meta and Google have aggressively cut payrolls while announcing big profits.
Overall, the state’s tech workforce, under pressure everywhere, is shrinking faster than anywhere in the country, notes economist Gad Levanon. Since 2022, the state’s share of high-tech jobs has dropped from 19 to 16 percent.
So even as the oligarchs get ever richer, the California public gets the short end of the stick.
Newsom crows about California as “an economic powerhouse,” but residents suffer the country’s highest cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate, the highest functional illiteracy, and the worst housing unaffordability in the continental U.S. The state that has the nation’s most billionaires now ranks as the single worst state in terms of creating jobs that pay above average.
In this environment, people may be less than thrilled to observe the billionaires’ lavish lifestyles — huge yachts, numerous mansions, and private jets — even as they embrace the “green” and progressive views that are de rigeur among their class. But the oligarchs’ most damning error has been to fund the same groups and politicians that now are calling for their collective scalps.
Although the progressive press bleats over the oligarchs’ Trumpian ties, notably those of Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, most of the “tech bros” have backed progressive Democrats for a generation. Look at the donations by Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, and they all tell the same story: donations to progressive Democrats are markedly greater than those to Republicans.
Read the rest of this piece at California Post.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: James Duncan Davidson, under CC BY-NC 3.0 license.
