It should have been a perfect day for Silicon Valley’s growing courtship with Washington.
The stock market had just handed a crypto firm a 200% pop. An AI startup was rolling out tools for the national security state. Anduril had locked down $2.5 billion to chase Pentagon contracts.
But none of that made headlines. Instead, the spotlight swung to a digital slap fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, two men who can’t help performing even when the stakes are real.
Beneath the noise, the deals kept closing.
This is the deeper story now: the tech world’s uneasy but accelerating alignment with a MAGA administration that knows how to trade favors.
Elon Musk may have wanted to remake government. Most in tech want something simpler. They want the rules bent to serve their business.
At that, they’re succeeding.
In just one year, the industry has seeded allies across federal agencies. Crypto, AI, defense — each has seen policies shift in its favor. Key appointments, rolled-back regulations, backdoor exemptions. All without the pretense of reform. Just raw transactional politics.
Musk was never good at this game. He tried to charge the hill. The smarter players are moving quietly through the side doors.
It is a strange coalition.
Tech’s ideological veneer — abundance, dynamism, innovation — does not sit easily with MAGA’s fortress instincts. They diverge on immigration, on trade, on education. And yet here they are, shaking hands.
Because the game is simple. Power will give you room to grow, if you first give it loyalty.
This was the deal around crypto. Around AI. Around defense tech. Industry veterans know what’s on offer, and what’s demanded in return: not belief, but allegiance.
That is why you see silence now.
Publicly, Silicon Valley has little to say about the Trump-Musk rupture. No statements, no side-taking. Just an industry-wide pause, as if remembering that in this White House, public disloyalty carries a cost.
Behind closed doors, they are less concerned. The coalition, they know, was never about Musk. He was the accelerant, not the architect.
The relationships that matter — the White House liaisons, the Hill connections, the agency embeds — remain. Business will go on.
But there are cracks.
The first real split came on immigration. H1B visas. Even in the flush of early MAGA-tech courtship, that fight exposed fault lines between nationalism and the global talent that feeds innovation.
Trump sided with Musk then. But it was a tactical win, not a shift in worldview.
New tensions have followed. Student visas. Science grants. Tariffs.
Tariffs have been the sharpest break yet. Silicon Valley runs on a fragile web of global supply chains. Trump’s April tariff hikes — grandly dubbed “Liberation Day” — landed like a blow.
Musk fought back, online and in private. He won a narrow carve-out for semiconductors, but it came too late to preserve his standing. The White House had tired of his insurgent style.
The rest of tech took note. Their response was to step further back from Musk, and further in with the system.
At the Hill and Valley Forum in May — a showcase for tech’s courtship of the military-industrial complex — the U.S. DOGE Service, Musk’s brainchild, was barely mentioned. No one wanted to anchor themselves to a sinking figure.
What mattered was the deals. The access. The future pipeline.
If you listen carefully now, you hear the calculation.
“We thought we were getting so much in return,” one tech executive admitted privately. They tolerated the culture war theatrics to secure policy wins. They still will.
But it’s a precarious balance.
Trump demands loyalty. Tech demands a free hand to operate globally. These needs can be aligned, but only for so long.
For now, the calculation still favors staying close. Publicly silent. Privately engaged.
There is no election yet to force a side. No flashpoint to test the coalition.
And tech leaders know how to play this game. They watched what happened to Musk when he made himself too large. The smarter ones are keeping their heads down.
“It’s better to work within a framework,” one insider said. “Elon was never willing to do that. He’s in his own universe.”
The rest are staying in this one — where the deals get done in the quiet.
History will remember the banner days of this alliance, if it holds.
But it will not be the drama of Trump and Musk that matters. It will be the silent deals. The policy shifts no one tweets about. The slow tilting of government toward corporate will.
And if this coalition breaks — as all such uneasy alliances do — it will not be because someone chose to stand on principle.
It will be because the transaction stopped paying.