- Silicon Valley has seen a noticeable shift to the right, with several tech leaders engaging more closely with the current administration, a trend Melinda French Gates views critically, especially when it comes to leaders not living by their stated values.
The shift in Silicon Valley in the lead-up to, and since, the presidential election has been marked. Billionaire tech titans have been in and out of the White House and Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, with many lending their voices to the second Trump administration.
But Melinda French Gates, a veteran of the tech scene since her early days working for Microsoft, is concerned by Silicon Valley’s political shift to the right, particularly when powerful individuals aren’t living by their values.
French Gates’s ex-husband, Bill Gates, sat down with the president after he won the Oval Office and spoke with Trump about his philanthropic efforts.
Since then, Microsoft’s cofounder has been unimpressed by some of the actions taken by the White House, namely through its Department of Government Efficiency, formerly led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
While Musk was a major financial and political partner to the Trump 2.0 team, the ranks of those affiliating themselves with the current administration include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple CEO Tim Cook, all of whom were given prime spots for the president’s January inauguration.
But a wider shift to the right among the tech community has also been observed by people like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who said dinner parties in Silicon Valley are now split across the political spectrum, where previously most leaned left.
Andreessen, who was previously a self-described Democrat “in good standing,” told a podcast earlier this year that there are now two types of dinner parties, one being “the ones where every person there believes every single thing that was in the New York Times that day…and that is what they talk about at the dinner party. And I’m no longer invited to those, nor do I want to go to them.”
French Gates, on the other hand, said now more than ever, people in power should be sticking to their values, having previously told Fortune she intends to set more of an agenda in the U.S.
Speaking on the latest episode of Bloomberg’s The Circuit podcast, the billionaire philanthropist and businesswoman said: “What I have seen in the last six months to a year is, many people who used to say one thing have absolutely shifted over here,” she said—gesturing to the right.
“A democracy is made up by our beliefs and our investments and our values. We, of all times right now, should be living those values out, not pivoting to what some comms person tells us is the right thing to do. That would be ridiculous.”
Like her former husband and cofounder at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, French Gates was critical of the supreme power awarded to Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a special government employee.
While the relationship between Musk and Trump has now cooled off somewhat, French Gates—an advocate for women’s and girls’ rights—added that handing an entrepreneur with private business interests so much power was “unprecedented” and “made no sense” to her.
History books will not be kind
Shifts toward a more right-wing mentality have also been observed across corporate America as DEI initiatives have been scaled back.
Here, French Gates said, history will not be kind to the companies that undid some of their policies fostering diversity, equality, and inclusion.
“You have to look at society,” the philanthropist said. “Who’s in our society right now and does our democracy, do our state legislatures and does our Senate or our Congress look like society? The answer is no.
“The reason you need to have of all society representative in the legislature in any governing body is because they make good policy based on their lived experience.”
Data supports French Gates’s opinion. While the 119th Congress is the most racially and ethnically diverse group in history, it remains far less diverse than the American population as a whole.
In January, Pew Research found 139 of today’s senators and representatives identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian American, or Native American, continuing a trend of Congress becoming more diverse.
However, this figure is still a long way off the social makeup of the voters the legislative body represents.
Pew found that non-Hispanic white people make up a larger share of Congress (74%) than the overall population (58%), indeed the gap is about as wide as it was more than 40 years ago in 1981, when 94% of congressional lawmakers were white, compared with 80% of the U.S. population.
