Silicon Valley claims to know the future. So why did it get the midterms so wrong?

Five weeks before the U.S. midterm elections, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, SpaceX's Elon Musk, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman and a crowd of AI executives and venture capitalists gathered at the White House, smiled for photos with President Trump and signed on to his "Super Intelligence" agenda. The votes came in badly for that bet, and the industry now sits squarely in the new victors' crosshairs — which, the column argues, raises real questions about the vision and judgment of leaders whose careers are built on claiming to see the future.

The alignment looks like a misread of the room. The piece points to dozens of polls showing anti-Trump sentiment rising alongside bipartisan rejection of AI projects and data centers, and says the tech elite traded long-term corporate interests for short-term political favor — presidential access, subsidies and a say in their own regulation. For an industry obsessed with pattern recognition, lashing itself to one administration rather than playing both sides is framed as a catastrophic misreading of the political landscape.

Workers noticed the quiet. Tech employees the author spoke with at OpenAI, Meta and other firms reported an absence of leadership commentary after the results: Zuckerberg has yet to address them internally, and an employee at another AI firm said "leadership has been pretty silent on Slack." The shared concerns are concrete — potential anti-data-center legislation, and how bosses will adjust to a Democratic Washington — but the dominant feeling is disbelief that their leaders didn't see what seemed obvious to everyone else.

The column's sharpest point is that going all in may have created an identity leaders cannot pivot out of. Silicon Valley treats "skate to where the puck is going" as a management doctrine and rewards the pivot, yet Palantir chief executive Alex Karp spent a year promising "violence and death to our enemies" and telling investors the company is "completely anti-woke"; few would believe a sudden progressive conversion. Entering one party's cultural and business agenda, the argument goes, breaks the decades-old corporate habit of courting both sides because projects must outlast the administration that approved them.

Underneath is a humbler claim: expertise in social media or artificial intelligence does not translate into expertise in politics or economics. Fortune 500 chief executives at Chase and Boeing don't riff about "masculine energy" on podcasts or phone the president from a MAGA-friendly AI summit to brand AI fears a "hoax" and a "scam" — the learned wisdom of an environment where the customer changes every four years but contracts run for ten.

What to watch next: whether executives who chased presidential access quietly reopen channels with Democrats, whether employee frustration over the post-election silence hardens into organized pressure, and whether the AI and data-center commitments made under Trump survive a hostile Congress. The open question the piece leaves behind is whether Silicon Valley's visionaries can extend their foresight beyond technology — or whether the midterms exposed a ceiling on how much of the future they actually know.