On Friday, Democratic Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Chris Coons sent a letter to Elon Musk at SpaceX’s headquarters in Starbase, Texas, demanding that he preserve “all documents, communications and electronically stored information” related to Starlink service in Ukraine, where the company restricted service in October and November as Russian air attacks battered Ukrainian civilians.
The letter, which gives Musk until Nov. 30 to confirm in writing that nothing will be deleted, comes from a ranking member who for now can only ask politely. But come January, Shaheen and her fellow Democrats will hold the gavels and the subpoena power that comes with them. The letter serves as a clear warning to the self-described “dark MAGA” billionaire and his peers that the investigations into the tech titans who courted Donald Trump while collecting billions in government contracts are already taking shape.
Musk clearly understood how much was riding on the midterms, pouring nearly half a billion dollars into the election in an effort to preserve Republican control in Washington and in his adopted home state of Texas. On Election Day he urged his followers to “Vote red today!” But just hours later after it became clear the GOP was headed for a historic wipeout, he quietly deleted the tweet.
Other tech leaders, some of whom stood behind Trump at his inauguration and spent the past two years cozying up to him, are suddenly scrambling to make even more conspicuous gestures to the left as they buckle up for a Washington that looks very different from the one they bet on.
Late last month, as it became increasingly clear that Democrats were headed for an electoral tsunami, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announced it was parting ways with Joel Kaplan, the chief global affairs officer who had served as Zuckerberg’s ambassador to Trumpworld and the MAGA Media ecosystem. A longtime Republican operative, Kaplan helped engineer Zuckerberg’s cozy relationship with Trump, appearing on Fox News as he championed the social media giant’s retreat from its content moderation policies and fact-checking.
In similar fashion, Kalshi announced this week that it was cutting ties with Donald Trump Jr., who had served as an “adviser” to the prediction market company. A Kalshi spokesperson attributed the split to a business conflict arising from 1789 Capital, Trump Jr.’s venture firm, investing in rival Polymarket, an explanation that would have been more persuasive had that investment not been made back in August, well before anyone was counting votes.
But perhaps the most egregious attempt at a reinvention came this week from Palantir chief Alex Karp, who managed to describe himself as “progressive” eight times in a single interview with POLITICO Playbook. “I’ve been a Democrat my whole life. I grew up in a far-left environment,” Karp declared. “I know more about being a progressive than almost anybody on the planet, and I absolutely believe Palantir—all of our products are essentially progressive.”
Karp’s sudden public affinity for liberalism came just months after he cheerfully told CNBC this spring that the secretive company’s A.I. technology will reduce the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” in favor of working-class men.
Even Sam Altman, who donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and dined with the transactional president at his Mar-a-Lago club, offered a cryptic gesture to Democrats on election night. "People should always be in control of the future," he wrote on X. "People should not cede control of the future to superintelligence, and that requirement should ultimately constrain AI progress." Altman has been notably silent in the 10 days since.
The sudden rush to signal a change of heart comes after Democrats swept into power on a mandate to root out corruption and rein in largely unregulated technology companies. As Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey put it on election night, “They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing.”
But as tech titans scramble to reposition themselves and put on their blue uniforms, a few well-timed statements and personnel changes won’t erase two years of cozying up to Trump, or the billions in government business that came with it. Silicon Valley has an army of lobbyists in Washington ready to help tell a new story for them. But will anyone actually believe it? The MAGA stink, after all, doesn’t wash off so easily.
