Tomorrow Will Be Worse: The Inside Conversation … About Biden’s Outburst, Bezos’ D.C. Future, and the Return of the Kushners

Tomorrow Will Be Worse: The Inside Conversation … About Biden’s Outburst, Bezos’ D.C. Future, and the Return of the Kushners

Julia Ioffe julia@puck.news via m.convertkit.com 

Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse, which looks a little different today. Part of the joy of building this exciting new media company is the opportunity to work with great colleagues, so I decided to team up with Teddy Schleifer, author of The Stratosphere, for a little newsletter fusion. Tomorrow Will Be Worse will be back to its regularly scheduled programming on Thursday. Until then, I hope you enjoy our conversation, below.

You can click here to sign up for Teddy’s biweekly letter from Silicon Valley, or email our reservationist at fritz@puck.news. The link to sign up for TWBW, should you feel inclined to recommend it to friends, is, as always, here.

Zuckerberg, Biden, and the End of an Obama-Era Romance

Julia Ioffe: So Teddy, you’re in San Francisco, where you write about the egos and influence of Silicon Valley, and I’m a Luddite who likes reading books on paper in Washington. Over the weekend, there were a couple tech stories that made me panic just a little. First, there were the dancing robots—including the terrifying police “dog,” the one the N.Y.P.D. had sent into the projects—doing the running man. Then there was the story about the experimental brain implant that can translate thoughts into words, which seems great for helping paralyzed people who can’t speak but also potentially terrifying if, say, the Chinese government used it to thought-police the Uyghurs. Am I needlessly freaking out or do our brightest technological minds often fail to consider how their inventions might be used for ill?

Teddy Schleifer: Fail to consider, or aren’t incentivized to consider? There is little market pressure to reckon with the social consequences of any innovation. Companies are rewarded for growth, which often forces them to deprioritize anything that hinders that until it is too late. That’s why the Bay Area posturing that I find most grating is all the high-minded talk of social conscience. “Impact investing.” “New capitalism.” “Connecting the world.”​​ But all of these businesses primarily care about one thing: maximizing shareholder value. People wonder why Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg refuse to make more sweeping changes at Facebook, but despite careening from scandal to scandal over the last five years, neither Washington nor the stock market has meaningfully chastised the company. Facebook’s market capitalization recently crossed $1 trillion.

Of course, that might be changing. Last week, we saw visible anger out of Joe Biden, who accused Facebook of “killing people” by not doing more to clean up Covid misinformation. I left Washington four years ago, so tell me, Julia, to what extent does Biden’s outburst reflect raw emotion in the Swamp?

Julia: Funny you should ask, because I'll be interviewing the New York Times’ Sheera Frenkel later this week. She’s the author, along with Cecilia Kang, of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. Now that we’ve gotten the plug out of the way, let me answer your question. It seems like Facebook has approximately zero allies left in Washington these days, and even fewer defenders. Conservatives believe they are being censored by the platform, though all signs suggest that it is actually one of the right wing’s biggest amplifiers. Quick example: Here’s today’s story from NPR about how Ben Shapiro, a conservative whom right-wingers love to love and lefties love to hate, is using Facebook to build a media empire. (His stories and shows are consistently some of Facebook’s most highly liked and shared pages.)

Liberals, on the other hand, believe Facebook allowed itself to be weaponized by the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to throw the 2016 election to Donald Trump, with horrific consequences for the country. The charge from the left is that Facebook is destroying democracy, if it hasn’t already. I can’t think of a single person in this town that doesn’t want to see the social media giant suffer.

What’s the view from Silicon Valley? Does the Biden-Facebook spat presage a real turning point in the D.C.-Silicon Valley relationship, with antitrust cheerleaders Lina Khan and Tim Wu taking leading roles at F.T.C. and the White House? Is there any effect on the bicoastal Obama-era revolving door, or is this all high level kayfabe while Jen Psaki pads her resume for a job at Lyft?

Teddy: Maybe they want Facebook to suffer, but I have remained bearish for a few years on the notion that Washington’s relationship with Silicon Valley has fundamentally changed. I spent the last election cycle covering the Democratic primary through the prism of Silicon Valley money, and it was edifying to view candidates’ hypocrisy up close. They’d make fiery denunciations in the morning about how tech executives must be Called to Account, and then they’d fly into SFO in the evening to stroke the egos of those same tech execs in exchange for $2,800 flutes of champagne and crudités. Tackling the tech industry’s lobbying machine requires resolve, and the hollow sanctimony that Democrats would display convinced me that the party doesn’t have either the fortitude or the motivation. I suppose this is the same theme as in my previous answer: People respond to incentives, and money is a great motivator.

Of course, it’s also naive to assert that Biden is in the pocket of Big Tech simply because some tech billionaire writes a six-figure check. And I will say that I think Biden’s appointments have been more hostile to the industry than I expected. Obviously he didn’t blurt out that Facebook was “killing” people by accident. The Journal reported today that frustration over the company’s handling of vaccine misinformation has been building for months. But I would never bet against Washington’s ability to bottle up and suppress even the most genuine, bipartisan desire for change. And that’s because the financial muscle of the industry is fierce.

Julia: You know, I just ran into Tim Wu at Sheera Frenkel’s book party and someone handed him a mug that said “Wu & Khan & Kanter,” the latter referring to Jonathan Kanter, whom Wu and Khan (and other progressives) would like to see installed at the Department of Justice, running the antitrust shop. I think Biden has surprised a lot of progressives at just how sympathetic his administration has been to their priorities, and how this has played out in appointments and policy priorities. It’s not just lip service. I think the appointments of Wu and Khan (and perhaps Kanter) are just more evidence of that.

Teddy: Speaking of An Ugly Truth, I was paging through it this weekend and I found myself marveling at how much life has changed in Washington when it comes to Zuckerberg’s non-Facebook escapades. I’ve written a lot about the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and its ventures into the world of politics, and the book describes a telling anecdote about how Zuckerberg was shocked that he wasn’t being mentioned in the same breath as philanthropists like Bill Gates when C.Z.I. was announced in 2015. “Why don’t people think of me the same way as Bill Gates”?

On one level, C.Z.I. had at that point no real accomplishments under its belt. But, rather ironically, 2015 was also probably the last year that Zuckerberg enjoyed an intact reputation in the social and political sphere. Surely he didn’t anticipate that his troubles at Facebook would sometimes imperil his work at C.Z.I.—especially when it came to politics. Earlier this year, C.Z.I. actually spun out some of its political work into separate organizations, seemingly in part to create some distance between Zuck, his good works, and the political rivals who are eager to turn his name into an epithet. That’s yet another reason why he’s not Bill Gates, whose association with a charitable project was a halo, not a demerit. Well, at least until recently.

Julia: I still can’t get over the fact that Bill and Melinda French Gates had an agreement that, once a year, every year, Bill was allowed to go spend a long weekend on the beach with his ex-girlfriend, the venture capitalist Ann Winblad. But I digress ...

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Inside Bezos’ Kalorama H.Q.

Teddy: Speaking of tech billionaires’ influence in Washington, what about Jeff Bezos? Viewed from the West Coast, it seems like Bezos is unsure whether he wants to play a Katharine Graham or even a Tammy Haddad-like role in official Washington, or whether that’s beneath a man who is flying into space tomorrow. I was struck last week that Bezos donated $200 million to the Smithsonian—the museum’s largest ever donation. The world’s wealthiest man, who had been AWOL from the charity circuit until about three years ago, does not make charitable bequests lightly. Big-ticket philanthropy to museums is one of the surest ways for a donor to ingratiate oneself to any city’s cultural elite (see: Sackler, Richard.) This is of course not his first time cosplaying as a Medici in the nation’s capital (see: Post, Washington.) But at the same time, it seems like the left-brained Amazon founder has underinvested in the category that is politics—I don’t know how much time he actually spends there, and we haven’t heard much about bashes at his Kalorama mansion after the Alfalfa Dinner in 2020. Did our invites get lost in the mail?

Julia: I’ve been wondering about this myself. You're right that the much talked-about mansion—or, rather, compound—in Kalorama finally made its party debut on January 27, 2020, with a guest list reflective of that time in Washington: Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Kellyanne Conway were some of the bold-faced names in attendance. But the event and the house also drew a lot of negative attention from this town’s big-name liberals, calling out Bezos for not paying taxes and throwing this lavish bash just as Whole Foods (owned by Amazon) had slashed health benefits for employees. These were easy points to score as the country was heading into a big election.

Then came the pandemic, which benefited Bezos in many ways. First, no more image-denting superspreader parties; two, lots and lots more money pouring in from people locked in their houses, shopping virtually. Now that D.C. has re-opened, I don’t know if Bezos will have more events at his house, but I’m guessing that he is keeping quiet. He’s already getting shit for his rocket manifest: When an investor gave up his seat on this week’s Blue Origin flight at the last minute, the passenger that Bezos and Co. chose to replace him was a young white man. It’s like being so tone deaf you can’t even hear how tone deaf you are. Who knows, maybe the descent back to earth will make his ears pop with an extra little revelatory glurp.

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Josh vs. Jared Kushner

Julia: Teddy, one last question for you: To what extent is the Kushner brand damaged in Silicon Valley? Jared Kushner was previously known for running the family real-estate business, and his ignominious ownership of The New York Observer, before joining wife Ivanka in the White House. But his younger brother, Josh, was a major name in the venture capital world before being tainted by association. What do you think is the future of the Kushner brotherhood post-Trump?

Teddy: I always found it amusing, over the past five years, listening to Silicon Valley investors strain to make clear which “J. Kushner” they were railing against. For the uninitiated, Joshua Kushner is the mild-mannered, well-liked hand behind Thrive Capital, the New York venture firm that has invested in Instagram, Jet.com, Robinhood, and a dozen other unicorn companies. We don’t need to revisit who Jared is.

But I’m sure Josh, a self-described liberal, is glad that his brother’s time in the White House is done. He was rising through the New York tech scene before his brother sullied the surname. Unfortunately he’s spent the last four years defined in the public imagination by his relationship to his brother—or as Forbes called him, on its cover at the dawn of the Trump administration, “The Other Brother.” I would not like that! There was also, understandably, just a hell of a lot of scrutiny that followed: There was a New York Times piece in early 2019 that flicked at a possible conflict of interest for Josh in Saudi Arabia, given his familial relationship with the Kingdom. Other outlets scrutinized his marriage to model Karlie Kloss, another avowed liberal, for signs of infighting among the Kushner-Trump clan. Page Six still reports on the couple about once a month.

For me, it’s always been Jared who was The Other Brother. And it doesn’t take a genius to predict that he’ll flirt with Silicon Valley, too, after his exit from the White House. He talks occasionally with Peter Thiel, and has been quietly working to reintegrate into polite society, seemingly placing quotes throughout the media about how he and Ivanka were mere staffers, always pushing Trump to be on the right side of history. In the meantime, Jared reportedly just closed on a $24 million waterfront estate outside Miami. His brother’s in Miami came in at only $23.5 million. Other Brother, always.