The New Hydra

On Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, JD Vance, and the "tech right."

gremlin

Back in February, I wrote about the tensions between right-wing populists, who MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon best represents, and the so-called “tech right,” of which Elon Musk is emblematic. On immigration, transhumanism, surveillance, and artificial intelligence, these camps have views that do not just diverge but are irreconcilable.

Bannon, Musk, MAGA

For months, Bannon barked about Musk, vowing to see him extirpated from D.C. by Inauguration Day. When that failed, he launched an ever-intensifying series of rhetorical attacks. Musk largely ignored Bannon, who seems to have less influence with Donald Trump these days, and occasionally returned an insult in kind while the Department of Government Efficiency hummed along, doing anything but making the government more efficient—a point that I’ll return to later. Some sort of fraying between Trump and Musk was inevitable. Not necessarily due to ideology, for Trump has none, but ego and self-interest, as both men have enough of that to power a roundtrip to Mars. It finally happened earlier this month, after Musk initiated an effort to kill Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that culminated with Trump threatening to ax the billionaire’s federal contracts and Musk claiming that Trump is the real reason that the explosive Jeffrey Epstein files will never see the light of day.

Bannon, naturally, slammed Musk for having betrayed the president and declared victory for the populists over the techies. But it’s not that simple, and Bannon, of all people, should know better. To be sure, this ordeal could very well end in a permanent split. Or the two could reconcile. Musk already apologized for some of his barbs, and Trump has reportedly been receptive to that act of contrition. He likes people who bend the knee.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk and Trump mend fences in the end, if only to have another falling out later. But more importantly, I think that, regardless of how this specific relationship goes, the alleged triumph of MAGA populists has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, there are parallels between the new Trump-Musk beef and Bannon’s old beef with the president.

Recall Bannon’s tenure as executive chairman of Breitbart. After leaving his post as White House chief strategist, Bannon used the publication to hound Trump. Indeed, Breitbart’s front-page story once ran with the headline “Amnesty Don.” The strategy was clearly intended to provoke Trump, and the message was received. The following year, Trump bestowed Bannon with the nickname “Sloppy Steve” after he was quoted as saying Ivanka Trump is “as dumb as a brick” and suggesting that certain conduct by Don Jr. was potentially “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” Trump said that when Bannon left the White House, “he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” That is exactly what Trump said about Elon, claiming that he “lost his mind” after he left DOGE.

It’s worth noting that Bannon hasn’t always been subtle about his ongoing disagreements with Trump. As recently as last March, he publicly suggested that Trump’s shifting stance on TikTok was the result of him being bought off by Jeff Yass, a GOP donor with a $33 billion stake in the company.

All of this is to say that Bannon’s own story shows that Musk and Trump could team up once again. Musk would only have to put the ketamine down and kiss the ring a few more times, then it’s water under the bridge.

But that might be missing a more critical point: the technocratic threat is not limited to Musk, who is just one head on this hydra.

On May 30, The New York Times reported that the White House is quietly working with Palantir to construct an AI-powered surveillance state unlike anything we’ve seen before. It will monitor Americans from the cradle to the grave like a digital panopticon. I plan on writing a longer piece about the company later, but all you need to bear in mind right now is that it was co-founded by Alex Karp, a lunatic who regularly talks about killing people and brags about Palantir’s ability to effect political outcomes, and Peter Thiel, the “Don of the PayPal Mafia” and the man who subsidized and created Vice President JD Vance’s political career. I should also add that it recently came to light that in 2015 and 2016, none other than Epstein himself invested $40 million in Valar Ventures, Thiel’s venture capital firm. According to a confidential financial analysis and a statement provided by a Valar spokesman to The Times, that investment is worth nearly $170 million today.

A typically pugilistic Vance was largely mute and timid during the Trump-Musk spat (after hours of silence, he tweeted support for the former but did not attack the latter), and at one point, Musk signaled that he supported impeaching Trump and replacing him with Vance.

Vance is an accelerationist when it comes to AI, absurdly claiming that imposing guardrails would be bad for the workers who stand to be rendered obsolete. He is also considered the successor of Trump, and he is surrounded by people cut from the same cloth as Thiel, such as Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz. In a recent interview, he glibly forecasted that one of the only jobs AI will not be able to replace would be his own: venture capitalist. How convenient.

There’s also David Sacks, another key Vance ally who helped launch a new club in D.C. earlier this year with a $500,000 membership fee. It’s called the Executive Branch, and it will grant the wealthy access to power under the new regime:

Executive Branch was founded by Donald Trump Jr., along with Omeed Malik and Christopher Buskirk of 1789 Capital, the investment firm that made Trump Jr. a partner last year. Other founders include Alex Witkoff and Zach Witkoff, the sons of billionaire real estate developer Steve Witkoff, a longtime friend of the President’s and the current Middle East envoy.

Founding members include White House crypto czar David Sacks, crypto investors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya, the people familiar told CNBC.

In addition to the $500,000 membership fee, the club will charge annual dues, which have yet to be disclosed.

Again, Bannon is right about the threat posed by the tech elite. But he is outgunned by people who now have direct access to the president and his family. Indeed, as Bannon celebrated Musk’s self-inflicted blunder, Vance appeared on the podcast of Theo Von, where he defended his benefactor Thiel’s plans to construct a technological Black Iron Prison, using his typical aw-shucks style to mask a sinister enterprise. According to comedian Tim Dillon, Thiel is playing the long game, courting your favorite “independent” media personalities and podcasters in an effort to astroturf support for the new AI-military-industrial complex.

Short of jettisoning not only Musk but Vance and a whole host of tech bros, the new right is stuck with this problem and, as a result, cannot truly be independent. It can choose to make a symbolic sacrifice out of one man, pouring all its ire into him to soothe itself when the truth of that becomes too harsh to bear, but that does not change the fact that it has made a Faustian bargain and the ink has dried.

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