On Monday, while tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sat on stage for President Donald Trump’s inauguration, dozens of founders were at parties all across DC, trying to get an audience with the new president’s inner circle.
To hear them tell it, it wasn’t all that hard. Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor spent the weekend party hopping, rubbing shoulders with Sean Spicer or conservative podcaster Jordan Peterson. Taylor’s company wants to use nuclear power to generate synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. He even scored three separate invites to Mar-A-Lago in the last month by sending a two-page document on changes he’d like to see to nuclear regulations to anyone he knew with DC connections. “People are like, ‘please tell me, how do we fix this? We need to build things again,’” he said of the administration.
His story was surprisingly common. All throughout America’s capital, founders enjoyed the fruits of their industry’s political jockeying. They watched Snoop Dogg at David Sacks’ Crypto Ball, attended a wee-hours crypto rave sponsored by the Milady NFT group, and dressed up for a “Coronation Ball” hosted by a publishing company associated with Curtis Yarvin, the controversial thought leader cited by both Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.
Tyler Sweatt, CEO of defense tech startup Second Front Systems, said a huge frustration he’s had with the federal government has been bureaucratic opacity. Founders often can’t even figure out who to contact in the government, much less secure a huge contract.
But Sweatt left events like the vice presidential dinner and Trump’s pre-inauguration candlelight dinner feeling like the country might be entering a rare moment where the federal government, big tech and the startup ecosystem are aligned — and where the shroud surrounding the government’s inner workings might be lifted. “Apolitically, that’s pretty freaking interesting for what could we do as a country,” he said.
At a watch party hosted by conservative organization American Moment, the congressional staffers wore suits with red ties and tech workers wore sneakers. Jacob Martin, general partner of crypto fund 2 Punks Capital and co-founder of gaming guild Ready Player DAO kept watching for news that Trump had immediately pardoned Silk Road’s infamous founder Ross Ulbricht, currently serving life in prison. He did not, despite having promised to do so at a Libertarian convention in May.
Martin also lamented missing his chance to buy the Trump meme coin when it launched at Sacks’ Crypto Ball, a time when top crypto donors were away from their computers. Trading on the coin soon soared. “I could have bought. But I didn’t, because it was clearly a scam, right?” Martin laughed. “There were people who made hundreds of millions on it.”
He hopes the Trump administration can make it so “people are able to utilize blockchain technology to make better things, launch tokens when necessary, and not have to worry about jail time.”
Several founders felt Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will open the floodgates for startups to pitch the government on their products in order to fulfill its promise of making the government more efficient. James Layfield, chief sales officer of Samplify.ai, which helps companies identify redundant software, created a website called “DogeProof.com.’ The concept, he said, is to offer up Samplify.ai’s products to government agencies for free, so they can rid themselves of extraneous subscriptions before Musk comes along to slash their costs.
Layfield pitched it to Florida Representative Byron Donalds at an inauguration ball, and said he seemed intrigued. “The whole experience has been incredibly rewarding to just see how open people are to this possibility,” he said.
Meanwhile, Rabi Alam, founder of Counter Health, hopes that DOGE might support his company’s mission to streamline the healthcare system while keeping the quality of care high. First, though, like everyone in the country, he’s got to figure out what exactly DOGE is. Luckily, Alam scored an invite to the Inauguration Ball, where he intended to scout some DOGE employees. “I’d like to get some of what I’ll call finer granularity and more color on what the approach is,” he said.
If this weekend shows anything, it’s that the hardest challenge founders will face, between balls and Mar-A-Lago trips, might just be staying focused on their day job. “There’s people who are trying to be in the right room,” Taylor said. “And there are people trying to get the work done.”
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Half of DOGE’s leadership team has been booted from the organization, reportedly at the behest of the other half.
The world’s richest man doesn’t have time to level his characters but wants people to see him as a ‘living god of video games.’
The billionaire Tesla CEO has a history of racist comments.
Social network X is trying to capitalize on the removal of ByteDance apps like TikTok and Lemon8 from U.S. app stores by launching a dedicated vertical video feed.
The company is adding a video tab in the app’s bottom bar for users in the U.S. to let them quickly access video content on the platform.
“An immersive new home for videos is rolling out to users in the US today,” the company said in a post on Sunday.
X users already can scroll through short videos by tapping on a video on the timeline and scrolling up. This new tab for videos is just a dedicated section for these videos. Plus, this is not the first time the company has tried to create a new home for videos.
An app reverse engineer had previously previewed a media tab for videos, but this is the first time X is making an official announcement.
The social network has lately been focusing on video experiences. Last year, it launched a standalone TV app to show videos from different organizations and creators.
With TikTok facing troubles in the U.S., social networks are trying to take advantage of the uncertainty around ByteDance apps in the U.S. Meta announced video editing app called Edits to compete with ByteDance’s CapCut, while X rival Bluesky has launched a custom feed for vertical videos.
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A founding member of the “PayPal Mafia” is the man that Donald Trump has chosen to help America take over Greenland. Ken Howery, who formerly served as the chief financial officer of the online payments app, is also known for his longstanding ties to two other pivotal members of that aforementioned “mafia”: tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Howery, who previously served in the first Trump administration as the U.S. ambassador to Sweden between 2019 and 2021, has been selected as Trump’s new ambassador to Denmark. Trump has stated that he wants to buy Greenland from Denmark, though officials from the Scandinavian country have repeatedly said that the territory is not for sale. Trump, not to be deterred, has insisted that he’s going to make it happen and has even said he wouldn’t rule out the use of military force to seal the deal.
Howery still needs to be confirmed by the Senate for the role. If he is, he will be tasked with trying to maneuver a deal that critics have deemed “insane.” While Trump hasn’t been particularly clear about why he wants Greenland, it’s generally agreed upon that the territory is of significant geostrategic importance. During the Cold War, the U.S. notably attempted to build a network of nuclear missile launch sites in Greenland for use in a “second-strike” capacity against the Soviet Union. The effort was a tightly held secret and, allegedly, the U.S. never even informed the Danish government it was doing this.
Howery’s potential involvement in the new pivotal administration role is just more evidence of the PayPal mafia’s political ascendance under the new Trump administration. Like many of the PayPal crew, Howery and Thiel were college buddies at Stanford. Howery wrote for The Stanford Review, Thiel’s student newspaper, and, together, the two would go on to create Founder’s Fund, the powerful venture capital firm that has backed some of the most successful tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Facebook, SpaceX, and others.
As far as U.S. State Department officials go, Howery seems to enjoy an unusually colorful social life. Indeed, nearly half a dozen times throughout the Times piece, reporters refer to his capacity to “party.” Howery is reportedly known for his extravagant social outings, including a Halloween party at a castle in Transylvania in 2022, where Thiel and other billionaires appeared. A previous Times story from 2022 also notes how Howery “threw himself a birthday party at an imposing 19th-century castle outside Stockholm” in November of 2020.
During the pandemic, Musk spent significant time living out of Howery’s mansion in Houston, and in 2021, he is said to have hosted a party there where guests were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. At that party was Joe Rogan (who platformed Trump during the election and has hosted Musk many times on his podcast), Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, “techno-optimist” doofus Jamie Wheal, and other well-known VIPs, many of whom have ties to the broader techno-libertarian network that circulates around Thiel.
We previously reported that the Network State movement—a weird political movement that wants to build its own privately-owned, cryptocurrency-powered cities—has also expressed interest in purchasing Greenland and using it to trial its techno-colonization efforts. Dryden Brown, the CEO of the Network State-linked Praxis project, has even claimed that acquiring Greenland is part of his movement’s broader “plan.” The Network State movement has received considerable financial support from Thiel, who also financially supported Trump during his first presidential run in 2016.