The Verge Editor-In-Chief Nilay Patel breathes fire on Elon Musk and Donald Trump's Big Tech enablers

The Verge Editor-In-Chief Nilay Patel is one of the most blunt voices in American media.

Which is precisely why I wanted to sit down with him for a discussion on Elon Musk’s transition to “dark MAGA” billionaire and, more broadly, how Donald Trump's victory will impact the technology world. Suffice to say, Patel did not pull any punches.

Below is the Q&A, lightly edited for clarity and style.

What do you make of Elon Musk's alliance with Donald Trump and what worries you the most about him playing such an outsized role in the Trump administration?

America now has an unelected defense contractor sitting in the White House doing ketamine and twiddling the algorithmic knobs of an influential right-wing echo chamber while fulminating against traditional standards-based journalism, threatening to revoke network broadcast licenses, and suing advertisers who don’t want to spend their money on his dwindling user base. What could go wrong?

On top of that, Trump's most likely FCC Chairman is Brendan Carr, who was tasked in the first Trump government to crack down on platform moderation by taking control of Section 230, literally wrote the Project 2025 chapter laying out a plan to do so, and is now begging to punish NBC for having Kamala Harris on “SNL.”

To be as clear as I can be, the second Trump administration with Elon Musk embedded within it represents the most direct and sustained threat to the First Amendment and the freedom of the press any of us will ever experience. If you’re a media executive or editorial leader and you haven’t met with your legal team to understand the current landscape of First Amendment threats, let alone the ones to come, you’re already behind. Get on it.

[Editor’s note: After this Q&A was completed, Trump indeed said he planned to appoint Carr FCC chair.]

In the wake of Trump's victory, other Big Tech leaders (Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, etcetera) posted congratulatory messages on X. It struck me as much different to how Silicon Valley responded to Trump's first election. Why do you think that is?

All of these men are now hopelessly trapped in a problem their own platforms and algorithms created: they have to manipulate Trump’s narcissism to secure tariff exceptions and regulatory largesse, while knowing that the vast majority of their employees and half of their customers will see any engagement as moral bankruptcy. There’s a reason Apple and Google would not confirm the calls Donald Trump claimed Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai made to him before the election — they didn’t want to be associated with him.

Now they have no choice. Tim Cook had been quietly setting the stage to retire — but he’s stuck kissing the ring and hosting fake factory openings for another four years to avoid disastrous tariffs on Apple products. Zuck is spending billions on Nvidia H100s manufactured in Taiwan in order to dominate A.I., but all that money comes from advertising for products made overseas — a double whammy of tariff issues. (And the entire influencer economy is built on Shein sponcon — that’s about to fall off a cliff.) Elon, Marc Andreessen, and J.D. Vance all think that Google should be crushed to bits with antitrust law — Vance has specifically said that he think Lina Khan is doing a good job.

Jeff Bezos? All that money for yachts and rockets comes from Amazon’s huge ecosystem of alphabet soup dropshipping companies. I hope Lauren likes having dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

There also seems to be a trend toward conservatism in Silicon Valley. What is spurring it? Is it the increased regulatory scrutiny Big Tech has faced under the Biden administration? Or is it leaders growing fed-up with woke-ism inside their companies? Or is it something else entirely?

I don’t think there’s a trend towards actual conservatism in the Valley — there’s a trend towards monopoly and corruption, and that’s led a bunch of VCs directly to Trump. Peter Thiel wrote “Competition is for Losers” in The WSJ a decade ago! Here you go, America.

The people who work in the tech industry have always been somewhat libertarian and free-spirited, especially around social issues, it’s a shame there isn’t a modern values-based conservatism that’s built to channel that energy into interesting policy ideas. Instead we have whatever Trumpism is, and a management class that’s trying to guide their giant companies through the wreckage.

From a regulatory standpoint, Big Tech is obviously hoping for some reprieve. Will that happen? And do you suspect such reprieve will come with some strings attached?

They might be hoping for a reprieve but they’re going to get some of the funniest chaos possible. Tech is not a monolith, the interests of these companies are not aligned, and their antagonists are now in power with a set of fundamentally contradictory ideas.

If you’re a reporter, there are going to be a lot of stories in the frenzy of corrupt horsetrading to come: Tim Cook is already asking Trump for help navigating E.U. rules that would open up the App Store — but Elon and Andreessen also want to bypass the App Store so they can sell NFTs on phones without paying fees. How’s Tim going to tiptoe all of that while still getting his tariff exception? That’s not a reprieve at all.

The Verge has been exceptionally clear-eyed about Trump and his MAGA allies. In endorsing Kamala Harris, you wrote that a vote for Trump was "a vote for school shootings and measles." You described Trump as a "dangerous maniac who can barely complete a sentence." Why did you feel it was so important to speak out in such blunt terms? And why don't you think your colleagues in the legacy press have been as direct with their audiences?

It was important because it’s true. More kids are going to get measles because of RFK Jr. More kids are going to get shot because Trump will not regulate guns and his Supreme Court keeps blocking even the most feeble efforts anyway. Trump’s lack of character is obvious, and the would-be oligarchs around him are poised to take advantage of it while baby fascists in ill-fitting suits post “your body my choice” in the Instagram comments of young women. You can look directly at these things and say what they are.

There’s a lot of reasons legacy media isn’t as clear about these things — the undercurrent of vicious internet harassment that comes with it is a pretty effective deterrent that we don’t talk about enough. But mostly I think people who practice traditional journalism have not spent enough time explaining why we should be trusted. If you don’t feel like you have the audience’s trust, you will always hedge, even obvious things. But in a world full of influencers and VCs going direct, the standards and practices of traditional journalism are our competitive differentiators. We are not sitting here with equity in the companies we cover or failing to disclose obvious conflicts of interest.

Our instinct at The Verge has always been to earn our audience’s trust by showing our work. We talk about our background policy and ethics statement and the practice of journalism at every opportunity, to the point where our various investor disclosures have become a long-running joke on our podcasts. It allows us to be clear with our readers, because we’ve been transparent the entire time.

If we don’t use that foundation and say true things when the stakes are high, we fail our community. I don’t intend to do that.

Do you think it is ethical for so many news organizations and journalists to remain on X, given how Musk has transformed it into an outright MAGA megaphone? Why do you think so many insist on staying there?

Why is anyone working for Elon Musk for free? Get off that shit, it’s all fake anyway and he's getting more out of it than you are. Building a real audience is the media skill; figure that out and you’ll have a career. We might even get to have an industry.

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