I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong

"For decades, Mark Lemley's life as an intellectual property lawyer was orderly enough. He's a professor at Stanford University and has consulted for Amazon, Google, and Meta. "I always enjoyed that the area I practice in has largely been apolitical," Lemley tells me. What's more, his democratic values neatly aligned with those of the companies that hired him. But in January, Lemley made a radical move. "I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness," he posted on LinkedIn. "I have fired Meta as a client.""

"This is the Silicon Valley of 2025. Zuckerberg, now 41, had turned into a MAGA-friendly mixed martial arts fan who didn't worry so much about hate speech on his platforms and complained that corporate America wasn't masculine enough. He stopped fact-checking and started hanging out at Mar-a-Lago. And it wasn't only Zuckerberg. A whole cohort of billionaires seemed to place their companies' fortunes over the well-being of society."

"When I meet Lemley at his office at Stanford this July, he is looking vacation-ready in a Hawaiian shirt. In the half year since he fired Meta, very few powerful people have followed his lead. Privately, they tell him, you go! Publicly, they're gone. Lemley has even considered how he might be gone if things get bad for anti-Trumpers. "Everybody I've talked to has a potential exit strategy," he says. "Could I get citizenship here or there?""

Tech leaders largely prioritized access to power and corporate fortunes over resisting a MAGA-aligned political turn. Mark Lemley resigned Meta as a client after describing Facebook's shift toward toxic masculinity, reduced fact-checking, and tolerance for extremist content. Many executives responded to the political environment by keeping quiet publicly while privately seeking influence with the government. The tech sector benefits from an AI boom but faces reputational and ethical costs as billionaire owners place company interests above societal well-being. Numerous tech professionals consider exit strategies or relocation, yet few powerful figures have publicly dissociated from those companies.

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