The unholy alliance between Silicon Valley and the Republican Party is no longer new. Between Elon Musk’s descent upon Washington, the number of Big Tech billionaires flying in to kiss President Donald Trump’s ring, and the expansion of the role of companies like Palantir in the US government, former president Joe Biden’s warning about the impending oligarchy has certainly borne out. All of this raises a question: Six months into Trump’s presidency, just how important are Silicon Valley billionaires to this administration now, anyhow? The answer, sources from Trumpworld tell WIRED, is complicated. The short of it: Yes, Silicon Valley billionaires still matter to the Republican party, though not as much as they did during the homestretch of the 2024 campaign. But now, following Musk’s spectacular flameout, strategists and aides are a little more wary of these billionaires centering themselves ahead of the president and party. A recurring theme of my reporting for WIRED has been the lack of familiarity with these Silicon Valley players within Trumpworld and inside the White House. There has been a consistent willingness among some of Trump’s closest advisers and aides to purposefully avoid even knowing what Musk was up to with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But now, Republicans think they’ve learned how to manage Silicon Valley’s competing interests better, and most importantly know they’re going to need all the Silicon Valley money they can get heading into elections in 2026 and 2028. This includes the cryptocurrency wing of Silicon Valley, which has proven extremely profitable for the Trump family and may well be the glue holding this coalition together. Behind the scenes, adjustments and accommodations are being made to keep it going. “Donor maintenance,” my sources tell me, is the key operating principle. Already, Americans have heard about the likes of Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, Jeff Bezos at Amazon and in his capacity as owner of The Washington Post, Sundar Pichai at Alphabet (the parent company of Google and YouTube), Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi and others bending the knee, ponying up donations, and doing whatever it takes to stay in the good graces of the second Trump administration. Others, like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, got with the program early—the firm​​ “Andreessen-Horowitz has been very aligned with Republicans the last few years,” another one of my sources tells me. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on behalf of Pichai and a Meta spokesperson declined to comment on behalf of Zuckerberg. Representatives for Bezos, Nadella, and Khosrowshahi did not return requests for comment. For several of the well-placed GOP sources I spoke with for this inaugural edition of Inner Loop, there’s more loathing of the disruptor mentality that comes with these new arrivals, and less fear over the downsides of the GOP saddling up with them. “These guys, especially the young disruptors who make a lot of money, they don’t think they have to do what everyone else does,” a GOP strategist who’s been fundraising in Silicon Valley going back to the dotcom boom tells me. “You’ve gotta kinda guide ’em the right way … They won. They have access to the White House. And they feel good about their investment because they won.”