Long rather anchored on the left, Silicon Valley has made a conservative turn since the Biden presidency, and especially the return to power of Donald Trump. An opportunism which has borne fruit, but also constitutes a significant risk for these companies.
In the spring, the American company Palantir published a manifesto on X, presenting its philosophy and its vision of the world. This 22-point ideological manifesto constituted a condensed version of the book The Technological Republic, by its boss Alex Karp, published last year. In particular, we find the idea that Silicon Valley must put itself at the service of the liberal West in a war of civilization against repressive regimes, while the wars of tomorrow will be won thanks to the mastery of new technologies, and in particular AI.
The manifesto, which has attracted both its share of criticism and laudatory comments, constitutes a further step in the way in which American society has taken conservative positions for several years, often in line with the ideology of the Trump 2.0 administration.
Palantir’s right turn
A company whose software for processing masses of data has long been put at the service of the police (the company took off in the early 2000s thanks to a first contract won with the CIA) and the American army, co-founded by the libertarian entrepreneur Peter Thiel, Palantir has never had a very left-wing aura. His boss, Alex Karp, has long been Democratic, having voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and subsequently supporting Joe Biden.
But he has since quickly shifted to the right, taking a public position in favor of reducing immigration, praising the work done by ICE under Trump, donating a million dollars for his inauguration ceremony after his re-election and an additional million to support the election of Republican candidates to the Senate. He also recruited Eliano Younes, the architect of a muscular communication strategy using MAGA codes on social networks, evoking for example the “red pill”, a reference to the film Matrix used by Republican activists to symbolize conversion to conservative ideas.
Several people in the Palantir galaxy have also begun to occupy key roles within the Trump administration. Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir with Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, is today one of the big financiers of the MAGA movement and recently claimed that he had co-founded Palantir to “fight the communists”.
Gregory Barbaccia, another Palantir alumnus, became director of information systems for the federal government in January 2025. Palantir alumni also joined the ranks of Elon Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which Alex Karp publicly praised. Shyam Sankar, the company’s technical director, enlisted as a reservist in the US army and hailed Trump as “a founder capable of leading us into a new golden age”.
The tech turns her cuti
If Palantir is considered the archetype of the tech company close to Donald Trump, it is not the only one to have made a turn to the right since the 2024 campaign, and especially since his re-election. One after another, American technology giants have scuttled their “Diversity and Inclusion” (“DEI”) programs put in place with great fanfare after the protests following the death of George Floyd during the summer of 2020.
Meta led the way in January 2025, sounding the death knell for all of its DEI programs, announcing the elimination of its dedicated team and the redeployment of its chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, to a role focused on accessibility. Google followed a month later, abandoning its hiring goals to diversify its workforce, changing the job title of its diversity manager (to “VP of Google Engagement”), and removing any DEI-related language from its communications. Amazon and Microsoft have also changed their respective policies in this area.
In total, one in five American businesses has eliminated its DEI programs since Trump’s re-election, a particularly marked trend in tech, a sector very exposed to federal contracts, and therefore to presidential decrees aimed at excluding companies with such programs (considered by the president and his allies to be discriminatory) from government tenders.
Big Tech has found other ways to keep up. Mark Zuckerberg, once a critic of Donald Trump, praised the “badass” way in which he got back on his feet after his assassination attempt, called for more “masculine energy” in companies, slashed his fact-checking teams, replaced by a system of community notes inspired by that put in place by Elon Musk on left. Jeff Bezos, for his part, reoriented the editorial line of the Washington Post, which he owns, in a direction aimed at promoting individual freedom and the free market, to the detriment of themes such as social justice and discrimination, an obvious nod to the new administration.
This turnaround is all the more spectacular given that Silicon Valley has long been a bastion for the American left. In 2016, Peter Thiel was one of the very few figures in the industry to support Donald Trump, where the overwhelming majority of his peers (including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg) lined up behind Hillary Clinton.
The other side of the coin
The politicization of tech, especially when aligned with those in power, can naturally bear fruit. Palantir’s stock was one of the best performers in the S&P 500 last year, increasing by 135%. But it also involves significant risks for which Palantir has recently paid the price. The company’s proximity to the Trump government is indeed detrimental to it abroad. In France, French intelligence recently ended its partnership with the American company, which will be replaced by a local actor, ChapsVision. In the United Kingdom, some elected officials are currently agitating to obtain the cancellation of the contract between Palantir and the NHS, the British health system, and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has blocked a £50 million contract with the police.
In the United States, where control of the presidency and the Senate by the Republicans will not be eternal, the association between Palantir and the Trump administration could also harm it and cost it lucrative government contracts, on which (42% of its turnover) the good financial health of the company, once the Democrats return to power. Some figures on the American left, such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have expressed strong criticism of Palantir, and a group called “Purge Palantir”, which intends to expel the company from government contracts, has received the support of around ten elected Democrats. Palantir appears to have anticipated this risk and has, in recent months, recruited several lobbyists close to Democrats, including a former senator, Mark Begich.
Even in the absence of a government backlash, being too associated with the American right causes internal turmoil within Palantir and could handicap it in the race for AI talent in which the best American technology companies are currently engaged, with the most qualified voting more democrat than republican.
Just as companies with a strong left-wing orientation panicked when they felt the wind turn with Trump’s re-election, those who made a sharp shift to the right could in turn find themselves in a difficult position once the political majority and the zeitgeist have changed sides again. Maybe the Friedman doctrine Was she good, after all!
