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.”
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