Winner Take All

Why the tech bros want authoritarian government.

Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk attend the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Julia Demaree Nikhinson - Pool/Getty Images)

We’re going high-concept today with a discussion that ends at Elon Musk’s attempt to destroy the federal government, but starts with the fundamental aspects of internet technology.

My thesis is that the entire tech sector is based on a novel idea: zero marginal cost. That marginal cost revolution created economic behaviors that were also new. It taught the people who founded tech companies—and more importantly, the investors who funded them—a very particular set of lessons.

And when those people migrated into politics and government, the lessons they’d spent 30 years learning pushed them toward wanting authoritarianism.

We’re going to talk about monopolies and network effects and horizontal progress. We’ll be using the language of economics while trying to understand how it translates into the practice of authoritarianism.

Because the key insight is this: The tech sector operates as a winner-take-all economy. But our political economy is based on perpetual competition.

The tech oligarchs want American politics to stop being competitive and to settle into the type of monopoly control that they created in Silicon Valley.

It’s going to be a journey, so strap in.