Part of the problem is that for most of Silicon Valley’s existence, its overarching monoculture privileged a certain type of “smart person.” It was the kind of smart person who campaigned for Barack Obama, marched for gay rights, and built a custom prayer stool to complement their priest fetish at the Folsom Street Fair. The subject of ethics was brought up frequently, but almost exclusively in the context of their nonmonogamous relationships. Black Lives Matter signs sprouted from their yards, and if they strayed beyond the strictures of atheism into spirituality, it was of the Eastern variety. Being Muslim was actually kind of cool, because if you were against that, you were probably xenophobic. And Judaism was all right too, because antisemitism was not yet in vogue.
Maybe you know this person, or maybe you are this person, because it’s a personality that, while largely original to the Bay Area, has saturated mainstream consciousness so thoroughly as to become stripped of all its original subversion. Go to most any party of millennials in Los Angeles or New York and you’ll find the same iridescent-sheathed package of psilocybin-studded chocolate being passed around. What was once radical is now mundane: Burning Man is slouching toward Coachella, Richard Dawkins is a farce, and an uneasy realization is dawning that, while we all thought we were locked arm in arm in humanity’s cheerful march toward progress, we were only wandering into swift-approaching regression. Even hard-nosed progressives had begun to sense that something rotten was simmering in the tepid cultural waters. Could it be that what society needed was a return to an ethical framework that had survived throughout millennia?
You don’t need to do much guesswork to see why smart Christians in Silicon Valley are growing more emboldened. After all, there are billionaires among their ranks. One of them is Peter Thiel, who has spoken about his evangelical leanings for more than a decade and who has lately shared his views on his faith with increasing frequency. “I believe in the resurrection of Christ,” he said in a 2020 talk. “The only good role model for us is Christ.” (In watching talk after talk of Thiel speaking about his faith, I found myself genuinely puzzled, not because Thiel lacks conviction but because his thoughts on the subject are so galaxy-brained that it seems like he’s playing a game of 3D chess that the rest of us are only catching up to: “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief, you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.”)
And it’s not only Thiel. Last summer, in an interview with Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk described himself, cautiously, as a “cultural Christian.” “I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise,” he said. To have two of the world’s richest technologists, worth a recently estimated $400 billion (Musk) and $14 billion (Thiel), speak admiringly about biblical teachings challenges the view that Christianity is anti-capitalist or even anti-intellectual. Meanwhile, downstream of Thiel and Musk are people like Tan, who is busy shepherding the Valley’s next cohort of entrepreneurs and who occasionally tweets scripture from his X account.
It’s a shift that follows the postpandemic economic tightening that emboldened some CEOs to publicly embrace right-leaning politics, write corporate statements in support of MEI—or “merit, excellence, and intelligence” as an antidote to DEI—and that earlier this year had Alex Karp, the CEO of the defense intelligence company Palantir, preaching at the AI Expo for National Competitiveness in DC against the “thin, corrosive, cancerous…pagan religion infecting our universities.” (Karp is, of course, referring to woke-ism—which many on the right view as an excessive fixation with political correctness, especially as it relates to identity. In recent years some influential Silicon Valley leaders have compared woke-ism to a religion obsessed with original sin but lacking in redemptive salvation.) This same evolution can be charted in the endorsements of formerly liberal venture capitalists. For instance: Chamath Palihapitiya, who after January 6 called President Donald Trump a “complete piece of shit fucking scumbag” and who, in June, cohosted a glitzy campaign fundraiser on the president’s behalf.
Within this new political climate, Silicon Valley’s ambitions shifted, and along with them, a factory-fresh founder prototype emerged. It used to be that the 20-something whiz kid who coded a viral game and dropped out of Stanford was a venture capitalist darling. “VCs used to throw money at that guy,” said a woman who manages communications at a top-tier venture firm. “Now if someone comes in and says, ‘I love my parents so much, I grew up going to church, and then I joined the Army and that’s what gives me my work ethic,’ VCs will be like, ’Oh my God, that guy. Let’s fund that guy.’ ”
The inception of this platonic ideal could be traced to the publication of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s essay, “It’s Time to Build,” in which he argued that over the last few decades, American innovation has fallen short. Where, he asked, are our supersonic aircraft, monorails, and high-speed trains? Western life, specifically American life, was permeated by a sense of “smug complacency, [a] satisfaction with the status quo,” Andreessen wrote. This was a problem, in his eyes, that ran deeper than politics; our entire civilization had lost its way. It was time to return to the world of our “forefathers and foremothers” who built all the “things we now take for granted,” he continued. “It’s time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.”
Silicon Valley is now cultivating projects that embolden a vision slightly grander than that of subscription software, and these projects will be helmed not by some anemic ayahuasca-drinking softie but by a new kind of entrepreneur, a serious person with a serious vision for the future. The Valley’s most powerful venture capitalists are seeking entrepreneurs with “the fire in the eyes, the ferocity of speech and action that is the physical manifestation of seriousness,” writes Katherine Boyle, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and cofounder of the firm’s American Dynamism practice.
