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Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter about the collision between Big Tech and Washington (last week of summer edition). If you enjoy this, consider subscribing to get this newsletter weekly and everything The Verge has to offer.
Ever since the US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations had the right to free speech and therefore could make political donations, American billionaires are constantly finding new ways to dump money into politics. Sure, there are technically legal limits to how much they can directly donate to candidates, parties, and causes. But that’s old-fashioned, analog, and 20th-century thinking. Baby stuff. The clever modern billionaire could theoretically bend the law enough to spend unlimited money on winning elections, and, in my humble opinion, the tech billionaires have been truly innovative — possibly too innovative — in this space.
You have your regular tech megadonors who will donate heavily to candidate super PACs, think tanks, and advocacy groups. But for the past several years, a galaxy-brained second tier has emerged — one whose inhabitants try to impress their individual and unique political views. Peter Thiel cultivated political candidates from the ground up and leveraged his money to get the Republican Party to accept them (and now one of them is vice president). Mark Zuckerberg donated $350 million to voter access initiatives in 2020. And most recently, Elon Musk pivoted heavily into the “free speech politics” of the culture war, bought Twitter, and then donated $300 million to Donald Trump’s super PAC and other Republican campaigns — which eventually bought him the power to fire a massive portion of the United States federal government.
Does Trump count as a tech billionaire? As of 2024, I would say yes, if only by definition: his stake in the Trump Media and Technology group, the publicly traded parent company of Truth Social, was worth at least $4 billion when he transferred it into a trust before returning to office. But beyond his net worth, the Trump family has attached their name brand to a growing number of products and companies in the tech space: beyond TMTG, which once promised a streaming service with a library of original content, the Trumps have launched memecoins, stablecoins, and NFTs; created a crypto holdings company; and as of this year, launched Trump Mobile, a phone brand whose purpose in the Trump empire still makes no sense to me. (Below, I talk to The Verge’s intrepid phone reviewer Allison Johnson to make sense of it all.)
Crucially, none of these businesses are actual investment-worthy, money-making entities. The values of the various Trump tokens depend on whatever Trump says that day, and TMTG has never been profitable, recently posting a net loss of $20 million in Q2 of this year. But if you think of them as meme businesses, whose values rise and fall depending on how much their investors are hyped about Trump, then you can see an odd correlation between the financial health of his otherwise worthless tech companies and the political support of his base. As someone in the Trump sphere once told me, the Trump brand makes money so long as the Trump name has power. And the Trump family, among other things, would very much like to keep making money.
But that’s not to say the old ways have died — rather, as the tech people say, they’ve been iterated upon.
The latest political money innovation — or at least one that I haven’t personally seen in this scale — is Leading The Future (LTF), a $100 million political operation meant to identify and promote pro-AI candidates and causes in elections. The “structured ecosystem,” as they described it in a press release announcing LTF’s launch on Monday, is an eye-popping amalgamation of campaign finance vehicles: it’s mashed a super PAC (which can spend infinite money on political messaging) with a 501(c)(4) (a tax-exempt social welfare organization which can spend less than half of their infinite money on political lobbying), with a super PAC that’s only for state elections, and a game plan to get AI-friendly candidates elected to state legislatures and Congress by the 2026 midterm elections.
I’m still trying to untangle this campaign finance structure (watch this space) but the relevant thing to pull out today is who’s funding it. So far, the following people and companies have committed $100 million to the campaign: billionaire megadonors Greg and Anna Brockman, Ron Conway, and Joe Lonsdale; the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz; and the AI company Perplexity. More players (and, likely, more money) are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
It’s no surprise that these occasional rivals have come together: the explosion of proposed AI regulation in all 50 states, to say nothing of how Congress has been awful at writing AI laws, threatens the growth and stability of the industry. But no matter how much one wraps it in language about the future and innovation and whatnot, Leading The Future is, at its core, that most classic of Washington lobbying vehicles: a pro-business, Chamber of Commerce-esque political interest group.
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