Tech billionaires are getting their chance to shape Washington. Here’s what they’ll do with it.

Unlike wealthy power players of another generation, whose ideas and influence were often cloaked and exercised through backroom deals, these tech moguls tend to talk about their policy preferences in public … a lot. “The crypto war, we were on the receiving end for four years and it was incredibly brutal, incredibly destructive; AI, we had meetings in D.C. in May where we talked to them about this and the meetings were absolutely horrifying and we came out basically deciding that we had to endorse Trump.” This first appeared in Digital Future Daily, POLITICO’s afternoon newsletter about how tech and power are shaping our world. Its goal, they say, is to aggressively “liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.” With Musk allies interviewing candidates for positions at departments as disparate as State and Defense, as The New York Times reported on Friday, tech moguls could have allies in place no matter where their increasingly powerful tools overlap with policy. One of the big arguments is emerging around antitrust: Vice President-elect JD Vance, a Peter Thiel protege, has supported the antitrust crusade waged against Big Tech by Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. … That’s the obvious point of tension,” he noted, warning that the Silicon Valley right is placing a major bet on its ability to guide the president-elect in their preferred direction, and that “a trade war is bad for tech, as is a broad crackdown on legal immigration.”